Del Maguey: 30 years of sharing mezcal with the world

Del Maguey Single Village Mezcal is celebrating 30 years since it decided the world needed to drink mezcal. Not a poor imitation. The real thing. 

In 1995, showcasing proper mezcal and the maestros who make it was a simple but revolutionary idea. At the time, most people thought it was something you dared your mates to shoot, complete with a worm and a grimace.

Fast-forward three decades, and mezcal is recognised as a category globally. Del Maguey expressions are served in the best bars, bottles heavy with award medals.

I’ve just returned from Oaxaca myself, awestruck and armed with an even deeper appreciation of mezcal, mole*, and why the founders of Del Maguey were so compelled to showcase the artistry of the spirit and the Indigenous people who make it. 

This is the story of how Del Maguey spent three decades sharing mezcal with the world.

The spirit of Oaxaca that Ron Cooper fell for

Before mezcal had brand ambassadors or fancy cocktails, it had Ron Cooper. A speed-racing visual artist with seven world records, a thirst for adventure, and, crucially, enough ‘fuck you money’ to chase magic when he saw it.

The spark came in 1971. He’d piled into a VW microbus with mates, surfboards, and a plan to see if the Pan-American Highway actually existed. Four months later, after weaving through back roads, riverbeds and the wilds of Mexico, he’d reached Panama… but found something much more important along the way.

Mezcal. A drink not found on menus. It was reserved for the sacred and the social, weddings and funerals. It wasn’t shot or stirred, it was sipped. And it wasn’t sold to tourists either. 

Cooper only got close to it by getting close to the people, artists like him. Through the weavers and makers, he learned not just to drink mezcal, but to understand it. To witness the way it was made: maguey, slow-roasted in underground pits, crushed by stone, fermented in the open air, and distilled drop by drop. Every bit of it pulsing with place.

That’s when the seed of a new mission was planted.

Cooper’s mini mezcal quest

It was years later, in the mid-90s, success burning a hole in his pocket, that Cooper decided to eschew a trip to Japan and head back to Oaxaca.

Once again, he disappeared into the backcountry in search of palenques. He would see a still or field of maguey plants, knock on the door, and ask if he could try their wares. Perhaps even buy some to take with him.

Cooper ended up with 28 different distillates. When border control got twitchy about him driving back with a truckload of the stuff, he refused to dump a drop. So, he did what any rational person would do: start a company.

He believed in the spirit he had curated that much. But Cooper wasn’t a trained spirits geek. He didn’t chase tasting notes. He tasted like an artist. Colour, texture, emotion. Cooper wasn’t running the numbers and seeing dollar signs. In fact, very few people at the time would have backed this as a sane business proposal.

But he saw mezcal with a sense of purity, as a ritual and cultural inheritance passed through generations. That’s what he felt needed protecting – and sharing. In 1995, Del Maguey Single Village Mezcal was born.

The pilgrimage

Steve Olson was one of the first people Cooper shared his mezcal with. Already an expert in distillation and flavour, Olson was floored. “I’ve worked all over the world,” he said. “But I’d never seen anything like this. I needed to meet these people. I needed to see it for myself. And when I did, the mission changed.” 

He and friend Jimmy Yeager were heading to Oaxaca on what began as a fact-finding mission, but evolved into more of a pilgrimage. He knew his life had changed forever in the home of the now sadly late Espiridion Morales Luis and his family, who have been making mezcal since the 1950s and went on to produce Santo Domingo Albarradas for Del Maguey. 

What they were bottling was a world away from the only mezcal you could find outside Mexico back then. It came in a bottle the colour of old hay, with a worm bobbing around like some kind of novelty punishment. It was mass-produced, industrially made, and about as close to traditional mezcal as spray cheese is to Stilton. People barely understood Tequila as an artisanal product then, never mind mezcal, which was treated like liquid moonshine and loaded with tall tales about blindness and regret. 

That’s where Del Maguey comes in. The brand was built not to claim or own mezcal, but to elevate the people who’d been making it for generations. Each expression is named after the village it came from. No blending, no tampering, no shortcuts. And while mezcal’s gone global – and Del Maguey with it – the mission hasn’t changed. Every bottle represents a real place, a real process, and a real person. It’s about families, not factories. 

The Pernod connection

In the early days, Del Maguey shipped just two mezcals: San Luis del Río and Chichicapa. By 2006, only six producers had exported mezcal from Mexico. One was Del Maguey. The rest were either helping friends, working through importers, or navigating how to survive.

The real shift came in 2010, with the launch of VIDA, Del Maguey’s bartender-friendly mezcal that delivered authenticity without compromise. The growth was immediate. You could trace it. Nine producers in 2010. Twelve by 2012. Today? There are over 3,000 mezcals. What was once a fringe category is now on the world stage.

With scaling comes challenges, however, and the founders acknowledged they needed help to carry on their work. They spent 17 years operating as their own importer, with a brief stint alongside Sazerac, and had been courted by every big player under the maguey sun. But Cooper wasn’t interested in just a pay cheque. For years, he’d resisted. Olson recalls: “For 25 years I kept telling Ron – don’t sell, don’t take the money. Every peso we made, we poured back into the villages. Infrastructure, sustainability, and dignity for our producers. That came first. Always.”

Then came a meeting in Paris. In 2016, Cooper and his team flew to The Peninsula Hotel to meet with the CEO of Pernod Ricard, Alexandre Ricard, and something clicked. The promise was to scale the vision without compromising the values. Del Maguey started a fire. But as Olson puts it, “We also opened the door to a culture. And with that comes responsibility – all of us have an obligation now.”

The “Green Wall”

Now, Del Maguey’s portfolio consists of over 20 unique single-village expressions, each one made by Zapotec and Mixtec families in rural Mexico. At the heart of the range are beloved expressions like Del Maguey VIDA Clásico and VIDA Puebla, alongside cult favourites such as Chichicapa, Tobalá, and Tepextate.

It’s a living, breathing map of Oaxaca and Puebla, born in smoke, moulded in clay, built across ten villages and twelve different maguey varietals. Each captures the full, wild, contradictory spectrum of what mezcal is. From delicate florals to deep smoke, citrus zip to earthy funk.

Olson called it “The Green Wall” in Oaxaca, pointing to a shimmering mosaic of mezcal displayed in the remarkable Quinta Real. This 16th-century convent turned 4-star hotel was filled with journalists, bartenders, ambassadors, and a host of others that day, who all seemed to take the opportunity to appreciate a collection built village by village, plant by plant, as seriously as Olson did all those years ago. It does feel like a pilgrimage. 

The single village approach means variety, authenticity, exploration. Where the plant is grown, where the mezcal is made, nuances in processes… they all matter. The bottom line comes down to the hand of the person making it. The mezcalero is reflected in every bottle. Olson likens it to Grand Cru Burgundy. They’re all unmistakably Del Maguey, but like tasting different vintages of La Tâche, there are shifts that speak to time, place, and people. 

The magic of Maguey

I’m told if you point at any of the more than 50 individual species of maguey used in mezcal production, Olson can tell you everything about it. I believe that. He’s incredibly passionate about every rosette of its mighty, often misunderstood leaves.

He explains that the maguey doesn’t ask for much: a bit of sun, shallow roots, no nutrients, no pampering. Almost like the more it struggles, the better the flavour. That resilience has been revered by indigenous communities for millennia. Maguey has been medicine, food, fibre, shelter, and fuel. Roofs, shoes, sugar, and ceremony – all from the same plant.

You understand the more you speak to locals and the more you learn that harvesting it too young to chase profit, it’s not just careless, it’s akin to cultural vandalism. And for anyone still stuck thinking these traditions are “primitive”, here’s a reality check: over 8,000 years ago, the same people cultivating maguey realised they needed a companion crop – and invented corn.

Not discovered. Invented. Cultivated and domesticated from wild teosinte. Scientists still call it one of humanity’s greatest feats of genetic engineering. It shouldn’t come as a surprise. These civilisations mapped the stars, created complex calendars, and tracked the planets without so much as a telescope lens. 

The Del Maguey process: from palenque to palenque

The families Del Maguey work with represent these cultures today, maintaining the old ways of doing things. The harvesting is still done by hand. Coas, knives, machetes, whatever works best. Zapotec and Mixtec farmers walk the fields, picking only the maguey that is ready. It can take more than 25 years for that. They select all they need for a single roast – no more, no less. Every cut separates the piña, or heart, of the maguey, which contains the fermentable sugars necessary to create alcohol.

Mezcaleros turn this crop into mezcal using less recipe-based distillation and more deep intuition and understanding passed down over generations. Olson recalls asking how a mezcalero knew when fermentation was completed. He was told simply: “father to son”. Although Olson also wryly remarks at one point that it’s the women who do everything. Sounds familiar… 

Making a batch of mezcal for Del Maguey takes roughly six to eight weeks. Given you can crank out the same using industrial diffusers in under six hours, you can see why many brands have gone that route. But Olson warns us that if we can’t taste the difference, we’re in the wrong profession.

He also says doesn’t want us to get him started on the new rules. Why let politics sullen the celebrations? Simply put, he’s unimpressed. If it were up to him, there would be a “tradicional” category, one that honours the way indigenous people have always made mezcal and doesn’t cater for bureaucracy. 

That means no steel autoclaves, no enzyme boosters, no diffusers. If it takes longer, costs more, and bleeds from the still? So be it. 

How Del Maguey mezcal is made

Here’s a quick overview of some guiding processes and principles that connect the various villages where mezcal is made for Del Maguey. But understand that within each palenque, there’s a world of nuance that would take 20 articles to do justice. 

Roasting
After harvesting, the maguey piñas and their fibres (bagasse) are cooked in an earth oven, essentially an underground pit over fire-heated rocks. The fire doesn’t touch the plant – this isn’t barbecue, and mezcal isn’t smoked. Instead, the maguey is slow-roasted over days with the heat coming from the glowing coals beneath. That’s where you get caramelisation, and with it, complexity. The difference between Tequila and mezcal? “Boiled potatoes versus roasted potatoes,” says Olson. 

Milling
Once roasted, the maguey is crushed – sometimes using a molino (not a tahona – this is mezcal, not Tequila). At Santa Catarina Minas, home to producers Florencio Carlos Sarmiento, Florencio Carlos Vasquez, Luis Carlos Vasquez, and Luis Carlos Martinez, espadín maguey is still chopped up piece by piece and thrown into a pit to be crushed by hand. With bats. I was at Santa Catarina Minas. I held those bats. And I couldn’t imagine doing it for an hour. But the job can take days.

Pre-fermentation
It’s gruelling work, but essential. Because this is where pre-fermentation begins. The exposed bagasse interacts with enzymes and wild yeast before any water is added. By the time it enters the fermenter, it’s already alive. Olson puts it plainly: “If you don’t think that changes the flavour, you’re not paying attention. Remove the fibre, and you flatten the soul of the spirit.”

Fermentation
Del Maguey mezcals ferment naturally, with ambient yeast, spring water, and patience. No lab-grown cultures or additives. It can take 8 to 30 days, depending on the weather, the variety of maguey, and the palenquero’s touch. According to Olson, 70–85% of the flavour comes from fermentation alone.

Distillation
Then it’s onto copper or clay pots perched over makeshift heat sources. These aren’t big. They’re inefficient. They leak. They’re inconsistent. But they create some of the most expressive spirits on Earth. Every batch is distilled twice; the first run draws out the raw spirit (ordinario), and the second pass (rectificación) is a refining process. A way of tuning texture, adjusting alcohol, and finessing flavour. Del Maguey rarely adjusts the ABV when bottling, and if it does, it’s with the maker’s input. No house style forced on it. 

At Santa Catarina Minas, we witnessed 80-litre clay pots on top of cast-iron oil drums working their magic. When I first saw them, I honestly felt starstruck. This is a pilgrimage. Then I tasted spirit, raw and warm, straight from the still. That is a religious experience. 

Creating a legacy beyond a brand

Because the work is labour-intensive, prone to more mishaps than an industrialised process, and undertaken at a rate the families wouldn’t typically need to work at (the global demand for Del Maguey is slightly bigger than your average Oaxacan wedding party), Del Maguey pays more than the going rate. Olson insists on the families being paid like artists, not agricultural labourers. So Pernod Ricard now holds the highest payroll of palenqueros in Mexico. 

His reverence for them is palpable. He says they’ve shown what it means to lead with kindness, with community, and with long-term vision. A presentation he leads at Quinta Real is filled slide-to-slide with pictures of them. A party in Oaxaca is thrown in their honour. These are very real relationships beyond business. They’re not simply farmers or producers or part of the chain. The families are partners. And since Del Maguey began, not one partner has left.

The strength of these relationships compels you to appreciate just how important it is to collaborate to build a sustainable future. Take maguey. It’s not what it used to be. The more it’s farmed, the harder it becomes to grow. So when Del Maguey can make its yield more efficient, in one palenquero going from requiring 11 kilos of maguey per litre down to nine, the accountants get excited. But crucially, fewer plants harvested means fewer hectares stripped. Same flavour, less impact is the goal.

Del Maguey even handed over an entire field to a pioneering maguey botanist, who developed a biodiverse reproduction programme for espadín. The result was several million plant pups distributed free to farmers across Oaxaca. No strings attached. The establishment of a wild maguey nursery, home to nearly 40 species, helps too. Some of the plants they work with already, others are being studied for the future – what thrives in the soil, what supports biodiversity, what can be propagated responsibly.

Taking responsibility

But sustainability isn’t only botanical. It’s social. Economic. Cultural. 

That’s why each family signed 10-year protection contracts. Not to lock them in, but to guarantee income, autonomy, and long-term partnership. It’s why Del Maguey focuses beyond the current generation of producers, to their kids and the wider community. The brand created a mobile digital library with over 50,000 books. When Olson visits, he brings laptops, tablets, phones – reconditioned and loaded with access. Villagers can check out books digitally, just like a public library.

The return on his investment is letters from local schoolchildren. Projects about love. Essays on the shared humanity of teenagers in rural Oaxaca. The kind of feedback that doesn’t fit neatly into a spreadsheet but says everything about the impact. Because that’s what opening a door means: taking responsibility for what’s on the other side.

Del Maguey has sparked a movement. One that remains intimately tied to Oaxaca, even when Jalisco’s decisions (and industrial-scale Tequila production) make life complicated for everyone else in the maguey spirits category.

Every copita that Olson raises comes with the toast Stigibeu! Pronounced “stee-gee-BAY-oo”, the Zapotec toast that doesn’t mean to your health, because they don’t think of “you”. It’s a toast to health, generally. You, your friends, family, the whole planet. That’s a perspective and language that needs to last. 

Del Maguey: 30 years of sharing mezcal with the world

What Del Maguey has created is an apparatus to help it do just that. The founders have gotten more than enough in return. When Ron Cooper wandered into villages where no outsider had any business being, barefoot on the dusty roads of Oaxaca, he wasn’t just looking for spirit. He was looking for meaning. And he found it in clay stills.

Olson didn’t know how his life changed back in ’95; he just knew it had. Now? He’s sure. He concluded his presentation with this sign off: “If you think you can’t make a difference? After 30 years, I think we’ve proven you can make a difference”. 

As for the next 30 years of Del Maguey? Still all about the people, the palenques, and the proper way to make mezcal: slowly, soulfully, and with zero shortcuts.

Curating the art of mezcal

Because this was never about creating a product. It was about curating artistry. “We don’t make mezcal,” Olson insists. “They make mezcal. We just help share it with the world.” You could call Del Maguey a gallery, and mezcal its exhibition. The palenques are the studios. Each bottle is a brushstroke from a different village, with its own terroir, tools, and timing. 

It is hard to comprehend how much mezcal wasn’t known beyond Mexico when Del Maguey started. Of course, to the locals, it was. They didn’t need it to mean anything to anyone else. But you can only keep a secret this good for so long.

Del Maguey didn’t invent mezcal. It didn’t fix it. It didn’t need to. What it has done, over thirty years later, is prove something big: that sharing a beautiful thing, done properly, can change everything.

 

*We’ve included a quick glossary to support readers encountering Indigenous and mezcal-specific terminology.

Glossary

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