sotol - el Venado
Batch: D-AC-01
Release date: February 2025
With this release we’re very pleased to present our very first bottling of what is locally known as, ‘Sotol’.
Sotol is not technically an agave spirit. It’s made from a plant called Dasylirion, which is similar to agave but with some different characteristics - not least that, unlike agave, it can flower more than once in a lifetime.
For a good introduction to the subject of sotol, check out this piece from friends at Mezcalistas.
Around an hour south of Nombre de Dios (Durango’s mezcal hub) sits the community of El Venado. With 5 Vinatas, about the same number of families, and very little else, it’s a tiny place that we’ve found to punch well above its size and notoriety when it comes to tasting the spirits produced there.
Tiny El Venado - great ATV territory
Unbeknown to us, on the day we decided to take a road trip, a large all-terrain vehicle tour had been routed right through the village. For this reason, all the families had set up small tasting and sales tables in front of there vinatas, hoping to sell a few bottles to the passing ATV tour - an extremely convenient situation for us that bypassed the usual knocking on doors and asking around town! Moreover we didn’t notice any of the petrol-heads buying anything, so the families were pleased we were there.
Dasylirion (sotol) is generally considered part of the Asparagacae plant family, which also encompasses agave. But while the stalk of an age flower often looks a lot like its eponymous asparagus, the sotol flower takes on a more bushy appearance.
It’s also known as ‘desert spoon’ due to the shape of the leaves when pulled from the heart of the plant. These ‘spoons’ are often used for decoration at festivals and other events.
Flowering sotol
Bushy sotol flower
Decoration made from ‘desert spoon’
For this batch, once they arrived at the vinata from the wild harvest in the hills around El Venado, the sotol piñas were roasted in this earthen pit with for 3 days with pine wood and volcanic rock.
The roasted agave was then chopped by axe and milled with the wood chipper before being fermented for 3-days in the quintessential Durango style wells. These are a series of relatively small capacity in-earth ‘graves’ lined with wood. The natural insulation of the earth keeps the ferment from dying out in the often cooler northern climate.
Traditional distillation in Durango is in this hybrid alembic-filipino style. It’s got the wooden filipino style top condensing pot that you’ll see in Michoacán to the south, but no condensing lid with water running into it, and no in-still capture system.
Instead the vapour is forced out of the wooden top pot into an attached serpentine coil in a cooling bath… the likes of which you would see with regular alembic distillation. The boiling pot is copper, and everything is double passed.
Given the defining feature of ‘filipino’ style distillation is the in-still capture, lets call this ‘Durango style alembic’
The wooden condensing chambers of these stills are known locally as ‘los viejitos’ (the old men), and they can be seen lazing around in rivers and wells between distillations, where producers store them to keep them from drying out and cracking, extending their working lives into old age.
Gracias Agustín y familia
House tasting notes:
Nose: Dust, straw, hay bales, sawdust.
Palate: Cream soda, goats cheese.
Finish: Kick of sweetness
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