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MEZCAL
Oaxaca's Worms leave Mexican officials squirming
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Worms are a delicacy in the southern state of Oaxaca. An expensive delicacy, at that.
They're blended into salsa. They're rolled into tacos. They're even mixed with chilies and ground into salt.
But the Mexican government is drawing the line at continuing to allow squirming red worms to be dropped into the smoky-flavored liquor called mezcal.
Once a backyard brew of dubious origin, mezcal's claim to fame is the cactus worm in the bottom of the bottle.
Now that mezcal has become a government-certified alcoholic beverage with strict standards about what goes into the liquor, distillers have been forced to clean up their act.
Mexican regulatory officials believe that when the worms are tossed into the alcohol, their little bodies release fat. So the worms have been banned when the certification law went into effect earlier this year.
Oaxaca's mezcal producers, who pickle the worms before putting them into bottles, are trying to wiggle out of the problem. As part of their campaign to get the regulation changed, they've submitted scientific studies showing that worms don't diminish the quality of the drink.
"If there is no worm, there will be no sales," said Graciela Angeles, whose family owns Mezcal Real Minero, which ferments mezcal in old-fashioned clay jugs. "It's our culture. It's part of the identity of Oaxacan mezcal."
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The tiny mezcal industry has been trying for 20 years to win government certification. But producers never imagined the worm would be stripped from mezcal, which is distilled from the hearts of cactus-like plants known as agave.
Instead, the goal was to set a legal standard for the amount of agave a beverage must have to be labeled mezcal. With those standards in place, mezcal producers believed consumer confidence would rise and they could export more of their product.
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"The image has been that mezcal is rot-gut," said Douglas French, a New York native who has been producing the liquor in Oaxaca for 10 years. "Now there's an institution to protect the name. For us, this law is like the birth of the industry."
Under the new law, mezcal can contain no less than 80 percent agave, making it purer -- and arguably more potent -- than tequila. Although tequila is also made from agave, it can legally be diluted up to 49 percent with sugars and water.
"We want people to see mezcal as a high-quality product," said Jacob Lopez, director of the quality-control arm of the federal government known as the Mexican Regulatory Commission for the Quality of Mezcal. "We want buyers in other countries to know they are getting 100 percent mezcal."
But many of the wholesale buyers who come to Oaxaca in search of the perfect mezcal say it's not the agave that attracts foreign customers. What they want, the buyers say, is a worm in their bottle.
In the United States, consumers see worm-spiced mezcal as a novelty item. In Australia, wormy mezcal appeals to rugged, Crocodile Dundee-type drinkers. In Japan, buyers want several worms because drinkers there consider them aphrodisiacs.
Without the worm, Oaxaca's producers fear mezcal will be seen as just one more bottle of booze.
"The only reason mezcal has a presence anywhere in the world is because of the worm," French said. "For the few marketers who have gone out to the world with mezcal, the worm was their key."
Because Oaxaca is one of Mexico's poorest states, and because it produces 60 percent of Mexico's mezcal, it has a huge stake in mezcal's success abroad.
Mezcal producers hope the demand for agave will rise as consumers around the world are captivated by the drink they loftily describe as "Oaxaca's cognac."
The priciest mezcal, smooth, amber-colored and aged in oak barrels, sells for more than $60 a bottle. At the lower end of the spectrum is the clear, throat-burning mezcal that usually has a worm. That product is labeled "joven," or "young."
The fermentation of agave juice dates to pre-Columbian times. When the Spanish conquerors arrived 400 years ago, they taught distillation techniques to Mexico's Indian people.
The worms, which live in agave plants, have also been part of the diet of Oaxaca's indigenous people for hundreds of years. But no one knows when -- or why -- mezcal producers started dropping worms into their liquor.
"Somebody probably just said, 'Let's throw a worm in the bottle,' " said Eric Hernandez, owner of Mezcal Mistico, whose family has been producing mezcal for four generations.
Although less than half the mezcal produced in Oaxaca has a worm in the bottle, producers insist the "young" mezcal isn't the same without one.
"The worm gives mezcal its aroma, its flavor," said Artemio Mendez, executive director of a company that produces mezcal under the brand name La Reliquia. "We have to have mezcal with worms."
At the Mezcal Beneva bottling plant in Santiago Matatlan, 16-year-old Sabina Romero drops worms into bottles of mezcal rattling down the assembly line. Her small, deft hands move quickly, plunking worms into the liquid just in time for export for New Year's Eve parties in the United States.
For five years, the company has shipped its Monte Alban mezcal to Chicago-based Barton Brands, a U.S. liquor importer.
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The worm has been such a successful marketing technique that Monte Alban is now the best-selling mezcal in America, said Jason Dyke, a Barton Brand manager.
Pedro Mateo, a 53-year-old Zapotec Indian who founded Mezcal Beneva, understands the importance of the worm. He's been around the world six times pushing his mezcal, and the results have made Mezcal Beneva the largest producer in Oaxaca.
Mateo comes from a family of mezcal producers in Santiago Matatlan, a town that calls itself the world capital of mezcal. "We have been doing this from generation to generation," he said.
That's why Mateo named his 14-year-old company Beneva, a Zapotec word that means "old."
Mateo's workers produce mezcal just the way his ancestors did. They bury tons of agave in oven pits and roast it for days, until the agave softens and the juice inside flows sticky and sweet. Then they crush the roasted agave under a mule-drawn mill stone. The mash is fermented in barrels. Once fermented, the juice is distilled.
Because mezcal production is still a rustic process carried out by artisans -- unlike tequila production, which is mass-produced in factories -- the quality of the product is unpredictable, said a U.S. buyer.
"When we purchase Jose Cuervo (tequila), it will always taste the same," the buyer said. "With mezcal, it's never the same product as a year ago. It tastes different."
Mateo is concerned about satisfying customers in the U.S. market. He plans to open a high-tech production and bottling plant in the outskirts of Oaxaca's capital and hired 200 workers.
Ruben Flores, production manager at Mateo's plant in Santiago Matatlan, stepped into a room where 2 1/2 million worms are warehoused and lifted a pickled worm with the tips of his fingers.
"This little worm is giving us jobs," he said.
Douglas French envisions a different future for mezcal, a future that doesn't depend on a worm. He sees the mezcal of the future as a complex, layered alcoholic beverage with flavors as varied as the 18 kinds of agave that are grown in this arid, mountainous state.
"Mezcal is like wine grapes. You have all of these different varieties of agave and every one of them has a different flavor," said French, who produces a triple-distilled mezcal under the label Scorpion Mezcal in Oaxaca's capital.
French has sprouted 100,000 agave plants through seed germination in an effort to improve the varieties and get better yields.
Although tequila dwarfs mezcal production, with 53 million gallons a year compared to mezcal's 2.6 million gallons, French calls tequila "a simplistic product."
Tequila is made with only one plant -- the blue agave.
"They did us the favor of opening up the market," he said. "Now we can go in with the good stuff."
French is aging his "good stuff" in French oak barrels for seven years. Then he's bottling his "reserve" and shipping it to the United States where it will sell next Christmas for as much as $220.
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Based on an article by S. Lynne Walker COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
Copyright Copley Press Inc. 2005
All rights Reserved.
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