The Historic Mezcal Harvesting Technique Disappearing in the Modern Era
Once a decentralized spirit produced for Mexican farming families and their communities, mezcal has become an international darling. Drinkers around the world have embraced its intriguing range of flavors both neat and in cocktails, and that interest isn’t going away anytime soon. Where about 1 million liters of mezcal were produced in 2011 — mostly in Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca — over 12 million liters were produced in 2024.
That’s not just an infusion of interest, it’s an infusion of capitalism that might just risk changing mezcal forever. And that formed the main focus of “Mezcal’s Untold Past, Soaring Present, and Fragile Future,” a three-part series that recently aired on VinePair’s “Cocktail College” podcast. We’ll zoom in on just a single aspect of that discussion here — a fading technique among Oaxacan mezcaleros that the meteoric growth of mezcal has not only left behind, but erased to the point that Google can barely find it: tumbado.
Though variations exist, tumbado (meaning “lying down”) generally refers to a specific method of harvesting a maguey, the Oaxacan term for an agave plant. The field workers will sever magueys from their roots and wedge a piece of wood or stone between them, so that they can’t reattach themselves. Then they’ll leave the magueys to sit for a month or more before the next steps in harvesting and production.
The belief was that the severed maguey plant will begin withdrawing succulent sugars from places like its leaves and send them back into the maguey’s core, or piña. These piñas are what mezcaleros eventually crush, ferment, and distill into mezcal, so by concentrating fermentable sugars there, tumbado is designed to enhance the resulting flavor.
Tumbado was never a universal practice. Some experienced mezcaleros have never heard of it, while others simply don’t care for it. But hardly anyone practices tumbado anymore, and the reason for that has nothing to do with respectful discourse among colleagues. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.
Credit: Leckerstudio – stock.adobe.com
Practicing tumbado doesn’t fit into the ever more competitive mezcal marketplace. Tumbado originated in a world that mezcal doesn’t inhabit anymore. One of the mezcaleros VinePair interviewed for the podcast series was Francisco Garcia Leon. He said that when he first began producing mezcal in the 1970s, tumbado was the custom around his home near Miahuatlan, Oaxaca. Of course, back then mezcal was cheap and, all too often, a suppressed pariah in Mexico’s alcohol landscape.
As Garcia Leon recalled, field workers would cut magueys for tumbado as standard practice, even stacking them along the side of the road for eventual transport. Nowadays, though, that would be a foolish idea.
As Ivan Vazquez, an L.A.-based restaurateur and founder of Madre restaurant and mezcaleria, put it in the series, “agave is money now.” A fully mature maguey can easily be worth hundreds of pesos. Would you leave your bicycle unlocked for a month and expect it to still be there when you came back? Digging up ripe maguey plants (no small feat, considering mature magueys can weigh up to 200 pounds) and then leaving it lying in a field for so long works about just as well these days. Less-than-reputable characters are likely to swipe the magueys either to sell or for their own stills.
“If we go and lay it down on the road now,” Garcia Leon told us (originally in Spanish, which we translated), “then in eight, 10, 15 days we would come back and the maguey would be gone.”
Transporting magueys with their massive plumes of (often very sharp) leaves isn’t feasible. Francisco and his neighbors now need to cut and shave their magueys right away so they can transport them.
“That’s the problem now,” he said, standing in his palenque (mezcal distillery). “That’s why the agave that’s getting harvested, we put it on the truck right away and get it home. Here it’s secure. But there in the fields? No.”
As a result, increased demand for mezcal has driven tumbado all but extinct. Knowledge isn’t guaranteed forever, and just because something’s hard to Google doesn’t mean it was never there. Similarly, mezcal’s ever-tightening embrace with global markets and capitalism doesn’t just mean constructive innovations and greater access. There is a cost beyond the price tag, and what gets left by the wayside may not always be things we wanted to lose.
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