OAXACA

Under the fierce Mexican sun at Dainzu, a pair of mezcaleros are hacking away at the hearts of agave plants with sharpened axes. Shorn of their thick, spiky leaves, the hearts — which can weigh up to 100 kilograms each — look like huge green pineapples, hence the term piña. Once they’re chopped up, the piñas will be pit-roasted over lava rocks and wood charcoal for five days before being mashed in a stone mill and then stewed in giant barrels on their weeks-long journey toward fermentation.

Fortunately, I don’t have to wait that long to sample Dainzu’s finest mezcal, the smoky cousin of tequila. At a little bar counter next to the vats, Leoncio Santiago Hernandez, the owner of this palenque (distillery), hands me a drinking gourd filled with clear liquid. “Hecho con maguey tepeztate,” he proudly declares — “Made with agave tepeztate” — referring to one of the rarer of the three dozen or so agave varieties used to distil mezcal. (Tequila, by contrast, is made exclusively from blue agave).

The flavor is distinctly aromatic and herbaceous — leagues away from the more common versions I’ve tried back in the United States. Hernandez says tepeztate only grows wild in the hills of the surrounding Sierra Madres, and that it can take