787: Apples and Agave with Diane Flynt, David Suro Piñera, and Gary Paul Nabhan

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If you're a drinker in the U.S., you're probably pretty into grapes and grains.

You know, wine and beer, whiskey, bourbon, gin.

But why don't we drink more cider?

After all, cider was really the drink of the original 13 colonies, and apple farming exists

pretty much at all because of a hundreds-of-year-old's thirst for cider.

And that's nothing compared to the ancient traditions of agave spirits.

You know, tequila, mezcal, and their cousins.

Traditional artistry of Mexican mezcaleros.

You could say that apples and agave should be the heart of drinking in North America.

And they have deep, fascinating histories.

To learn more about these things, we have today restaurateur and agave evangelist David

Suro-Pinera and ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabham, authors of Agave Spirits, the Past, Present,

and Future of Mezcals.

And first, we have my old friend, Diane Flint.

I first met Diane through the Southern Foodways Alliance, and we eventually served on their

board of advisors together.

I remember her leading those meetings, and she's just such an exquisitely thoughtful

leader, and she has this incredible talent for asking, in this very calm way, questions

that just make you clarify your own thoughts.

Well, the irony is that in her career, she's also made cider so award-winning and delicious

that its fans...

Well, let's just say that their enjoyment of her cider was not known to leave people

as sharp as when they started.

But when Diane told me that she was taking her expertise in apples and turning it into

a book on the history and diversity of the nearly extinct apples of the South, I was

immediately fascinated.

That book is called Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived, The Surprising Story of Apples in the South.

And Diane, it is so great to see you.

It's wonderful to be with you, Francis.

It's great to hear your voice.

The same, the same.

And congratulations on the book.

It is really wonderful.

It's so multifaceted.

I love reading it.

And, you know, you know more about apples than probably anyone I've ever met in my entire

life.

You've dedicated so much of your career and your life to apples.

And I've never told you this before, but I'm just like kind of okay with apples.

I can change that.

I believe it.

The way you talk about them, the way you write about them is making me a convert.

So for anyone else out there who is not already a total apple lover, what do you love about

them?

What makes apples so magical and fascinating to you?

Well, so many things.

But first of all, they are the perfect vehicle for conveying flavor.

You know, apples are tart and sweet, but they're primarily sweet.

And as we bite into a ripe apple, those cell walls burst.

And that's, you know, most people like a crisp apple.

And that's what happens.

Those cell walls burst in the flesh of the apple and the juice explodes into our mouth.

And the juice is full of proteins and enzymes and acid and sugar and lots of complex flavor.

And at the same time...

You know, an apple is also full of air.

That's why you can bob for apples.

They're 25% air.

You can bob for apples, you know, in the fall on the side of the road at the Apple Festival.

Yeah, they'll float in the water.

They float in the water.

So when you bite into them, it's like biting into compressed air.

And at the same time you get that juice, you also get an explosion of esters, fruity esters

that go to the back of your mouth where you sense aroma.

So we get this big package of flavor.

And every bite of an apple.

And it's just a perfectly engineered way for mammals to attack sweetness.

And we have for thousands of years.

That's so interesting.

You're the lone holdout.

When I was like, if there's anyone else...

No, there's no one else out there.

I'm the only one who's not.

Well, there's another thing that I think is fascinating about apples that really connected me to the fruit.

And that's the connection of people and apples.

You know, apples reproduce sexually like humans do.

So each seed is the combination of the DNA of two parents.

So every seed inside an apple, those little carpels, those little hard things inside an apple usually contain about two seeds.

And there are five or six carpels.

So every one of those seeds makes a brand new apple.

And that's reproduction.

But to replicate an apple, to make another Gala apple, or to make another Albemarle Pippin, or Parmar apple like I've got in my hand right now,

a human being has to graft that apple from the tissue of the mother tree.

And humans have known how to graft for 2,000 years.

And what that means is that every apple with a name has a human desire behind it.

Oh, I love the way you put that, a human desire, meaning if you just let an apple fall from the tree and that seed goes in the ground, it's what comes up is a different kind of apple.

So the human desire means, oh, no, I like the apple, the fruit from this tree.

I don't want to see what its offspring are going to be like and what ways they'll be different, unlike humans and their children.

Although maybe some of us just want our children to be clones of ourselves and have trouble letting go and all that stuff.

But so if you actually.

If you want another tree that bears the fruit that you just enjoyed, there had to be human intervention.

Yes, that's right.

And someone would make that choice.

So the flavor vehicle of the apple itself caused humans to eat, to seek that fruit for sugar and mammals as well.

But when humans decided they want a particular apple, not just an apple, but a particular apple, that's when grafting came in.

And that's when we see, you know, such interest.

Interesting and complex history behind apples and apples that, you know, that history reflects a region and a culture and as well as individuals.

That's so interesting.

OK, so let's talk about region and culture, because that's a big part of your book.

Your book is in some ways a personal story, but in many ways is a history of southern apples.

And, you know, when we think of apples, we think Washington state, which I just read, produces almost two thirds of all the apples in the entire country on its own.

Michigan and New York come in second place, but a distance tied for second place.

Most people don't think of the South, which is where you're from and where you have grown apples for many years.

But you write that southern apples have been around for a long time and were super important.

So what happened?

Well, southerners loved their apples and used them for many things.

Today we eat fresh apples.

Over 60 percent of the apples we eat are a snack.

But southerners had all kinds of uses for them.

They were apples.

There were specific apples that people chose to replicate just for drying.

You know, I grow an apple called the horse apple.

It's very dense and the flesh dries easily.

There were apples that fell apart to make applesauce and apple butter.

High sugar apples like this Parmar and Hughes crab apple that were for brandy.

And so.

And cider.

And then they were seasonal.

You know, in the South, apples were 12-month fruit.

We have apples we harvest in late May and early June.

You know, Carolina June, July, Sweden, winter, John.

Now, the names tell you the seasons.

And then those late winter apples we'll keep in a root cellar or in a hearth pit or piled under a pile of straw in the middle of a pasture.

Those are all the ways that southerners used to keep apples fresh over the winter.

Some of those apples kept till March and April.

And that's a 12-month apple.

And what happened to apples, you know, fundamentally is we lost those uses.

You know, people moved off the farm.

They didn't dry apples anymore.

They didn't, you know, put up.

They didn't can apples.

Life changed.

There was off-farm migration.

People went to work in cities.

And also agriculture became a business.

So it was not the business of sustaining a farm.

It was the business of selling a commodity.

And that meant that farmers had to consider land use and what is the most profitable way I can use this land.

So apples became segregated to the part of the South where they could most profitably be grown.

And other things couldn't profitably be grown like cotton or corn.

And that was the mountain South.

And that's the short answer of how in just the span of about 50 years, Francis, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s,

the South lost hundreds and hundreds of the nearly 2,000 apple varieties that were originated or widely grown in the South.

Wow.

Actually, including the very first apples in...

Yes.

You know, what would be our country, right?

Like when we were colonizing.

Well, obviously, the indigenous people were here.

But apples were not native to this land.

That's right.

Malus domestica, which is what we think of as the apple, the apple you get in the grocery store, the apple that grows in orchards today.

That apple is not native to North America.

It probably came to North America.

Well, it was certainly planted in an organized orchard.

And the first apples planted in an organized...

Orchard was in the South, in Jamestown in 1615, years before that Massachusetts, that Boston orchard that's touted as the first orchard in America.

But apples, Malus domestica, came to North America in a variety of ways.

Scandinavian cod fishermen left apple seeds on islands in Maine in the 1500s.

The Spanish...

Wow.

The Spanish who came to Florida, Spanish and Portuguese, certainly brought peaches and citrus.

And it's likely they could have brought apples as well.

And apples could have come down from the Seneca in the indigenous tribes in New York, could have come down the trading route of the Appalachians into the southern Appalachians, even before the fur traders, the French and English fur traders brought seeds into the deeper mountains of the South.

Oh, wow.

Okay, so it's not very clear where the apple came from or when it came.

And maybe lots of stories are true, right?

So maybe there's a mix of those heritages and where those apples came from.

But knowing what you said before, if we have apples as a food source in a community, they were put there by people.

Exactly.

They were the objects of a desire, like you said.

And they had a use. They had a specific use.

Diane Flint is the author of Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived, the surprising story of apples in the South.

We'll be back with more from her in a minute.

And then we turn to the grand world of Mezcal.

I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.

Hey, it's Francis.

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The Splendid Table is supported by Food Network Obsessed.

The official podcast of the Food Network, back with a new season.

On every episode, host Jamie Sire sits down with your favorite chefs, food influencers, and Food Network personalities to talk about how they started their food careers, who inspires them, and what it's like to cook on Food Network.

With stellar guests like Eric Ajipong and Rodrigo Ferdinandi, you're sure to find a Food Network story that satisfies you.

You know how much we here at The Splendid Table love Carla Hall, who recently talked with us about finding the origins of food.

She talks about the origins of soul food, where she least expected them.

Well, check out the Food Network Obsessed episode where she talks about what she learned about other cultures cooking in the making of her show, Chasing Flavor.

She goes from Nashville to Italy and Ghana, learning about the origins of her favorite dishes and discovering that it's the story that makes a recipe richer.

If you like to get the stories behind food from some of your favorite voices, listen to Food Network Obsessed wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Eric Ajipong.

I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.

We're talking apples and agave today, the once and maybe future backbone of drinks and spirits in North America.

And we're coming back into a conversation about the beauty of Southern apples with orchardist, cider maker, and author Diane Flint.

You know, I think there is this really interesting way in which your book functions, right?

And you talk about how the history of apples in the South offer us awareness.

You talk about the way of looking at the history of the South, like in a clearer way.

What do you mean by that?

So much of the history of apples is deeply mythologized.

And as I began researching this book, I was fascinated by conflicting stories.

And then as I dug deeper, I was intrigued by missing stories.

And to me, that's where the learning occurs.

And looking at our history today is kind of scratching back the surface stories.

I'm thinking about...

You mean like the Johnny Appleseeds?

The Johnny Appleseeds, yes.

Oh, please, don't write about that every fall.

Or the John Adams drank a tankard of cider for breakfast.

Those are so tired.

And there's so many more interesting and complex stories.

And stories that still have question marks, which to me is intriguing.

There's an apple that was grown commercially.

In North Carolina for a long time, an old Southern apple called the Tony Apple in central North Carolina.

And there are two stories about how the Tony Apple got its name.

One is the mythologized story of the Confederate soldier who was walking home after the war

and picked up an apple on the side of the road and ate it and kept the seeds

and took it to his home in Mount Pleasant, North Carolina.

And it was planted and it grew well and spread.

The other one is...

The other story is that an enslaved man named Tony transplanted a tree on the farm where he was enslaved

and the apple was christened the Tony Apple.

And we don't know which one of those stories are true,

but they certainly represent two paths of the South's history that are worth examining.

Yeah.

Although, you know, botanically, it seems like...

If you just picked up the seed from one, to your point before, they don't grow true to seed.

And the other actually involved the skill and the intelligence of a, you know, a craftsperson, an orchardist,

who actually, like, transplanted and grafted the tree.

So I kind of feel like the science tells me what I need to know in that one.

Well, that brings up another point that fascinates me about apples

and that really drew me deeper into the subject that I thought I knew something about.

And when I began researching...

I realized I knew very little about the history of apples in the South.

And that's this concept of noticing.

You know, farmers, good farmers, gardeners, are good noticers.

You know, they notice when fruit is ripe.

They notice when there's a problem.

They notice when a tree grows a certain way.

They notice when a tree is fruitful or not or when it thrives.

And it's that skill, that intimate skill of noticing,

that's where the choices were made about which apples to grow.

And the people who noticed are the people who actually did the work of gardening,

who were proximate, who were, you know,

what we call dirt under the fingernails farmers.

It was not necessarily the accounts of the farm journals of the aristocrats

and the plantation owners who wrote about fruit.

We have that record and it's valuable.

And it records a history that's...

that's useful to look at and records names and nurseries

and valuable information and valuable history and culture.

But the people who actually were farming

were the ones noticing day to day what fruit grew well

and what should be replicated.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's so much skill and craft.

And, you know, that reminds me of a part in the book

where you talk about how Thomas Jefferson was renowned for,

A, his love of good science,

B, his love of cider and how excellent the cider

that came from his estate, Monticello, was.

But then, you know, like, Thomas Jefferson wasn't out there pressing the apples

and he wasn't making the cider.

It was his enslaved workers who knew that.

And they were the people who really had that skill.

And I want to transition now to talking about cider

because a lot of your experience with apples comes from having opened

the first modern cidery in the South.

Congratulations.

Um,

you have since retired from cider making.

You've had a whole career in cider making.

But getting to that, you know, for a lot of people today,

their only experience with hard cider is probably pretty mass produced.

You know, the sort of afterthought, like one or two selections

in the beer aisle in the store.

Tell us, what to you is really good cider like?

Well, cider can be many things.

Cider can quench your thirst on a hot day.

And it also, you know, it's something you can pound back.

I mean, people talk about a session cider.

That's a lower alcohol cider that you sit around and you drink three or four cans

and you can still walk home.

But to me, at its best, cider should be an interesting beverage.

It should engage you.

And it should have depth of flavor.

And depth of flavor comes from tannin.

And your grocery store,

your apples, your galas and your Cosmic Crisps are delicious to eat.

But they don't have a lot of tannin.

They're not tannin forward fruit.

So good cider to me means at least some percentage of apples that are chosen for cider making

that have a balance of lots of acidity, have tannin, and have complex flavor.

You can make cider from any apple.

All you need is sugar.

And ferment that sugar.

And ferment that sugar into alcohol.

But to get that engaging drink, that drink that makes you want to linger over it rather

than, you know, gulp it down, that makes you want to think about it perhaps a little

bit, you need complex fruit to get the complex flavor.

I think of, you know, three legs to the stool of any beverage, tannin, acid, and sugar.

And I would layer over that complex flavor and aroma.

And to me, that's what makes a good cider.

And when you were making cider, would you?

Would you gravitate towards blends or would you gravitate towards, you know, single varietal

ciders for lack of a better term, if that's not actually the right term?

It is the right term.

And they're great single varietal ciders today.

And I'm excited by what Southern cider makers are doing with single varietals and especially

excited that they're using regional apples that, you know, people in Tennessee are making

cider from limber twig.

People in North Carolina are making cider from limber twig.

People were really excited about making cider from matter-of-skate in Georgia.

They're using Yates, Virginia, Albemarle, Pippin and Hughes crab.

I was a blender and part of that was, was my own aesthetic and my preference.

I always felt like, you know, a blend might be 80 or 90% Hughes crab, but if I add it

just a little bit more of another variety, it seemed to round out the flavor for me.

But part of it is, you know, we started making cider in the early 2000s.

there weren't that many plantings of cider apples.

I was using my own fruit, and I was sourcing older varieties

that were still widely grown in my area, North Carolina and Virginia,

like Winesap and Alamo Pippin, that make a very good cider.

So I didn't have that many choices.

Today, cider makers are being inventive about working with orchardists

to plant some of these old varieties.

And I'm happy to see many southern cideries are planting southern cider apples

because there are so many good southern cider apples

and are making regional styles, including single varietals.

I love hearing that because in the book, you have this wonderful story of,

maybe I didn't feel wonderful at the time, of you meeting with an orchardist,

trying to convince him to grow or sell you a particular type of apple

you wanted to use in your cider.

And you wrote, I had spent 10 years having this conversation

however many hundreds of times with how many hundreds of orchardists and farmers

and not one ever get to get them to grow me the apples I wanted.

But I love hearing of that revival of both the cider making and the apple growing.

And you have this great story of the first day you opened your cider tasting room.

So this is now probably 20 years ago.

And the response that it got, tell us what happened that day.

It was such a surprise, Francis.

I was so primed.

I was so proud of my little cidery.

And we had made a few hundred cases of our first pressing.

And a lot of our own apples were in there.

And some wine saps I'd purchased.

And I was just bursting with stories to tell

about making cider.

And the apples.

I had a big display of apples.

And I opened up the door.

And I couldn't get a word in edgewise.

Everybody who came in wanted to tell me their apple story.

And they all had these heartfelt.

I mean, people would get tears in their eyes talking about the apple tree in my grandma's

backyard.

And she made this special pie.

And I still make it on Thanksgiving.

And the one you've heard so many times that even my husband tells about sitting on.

His grandfather's lap and having him peel a big red apple, probably a wine sap, in one

long peel right there in front of that little boy's eyes and have the wonder of that.

There was one story I have to relate to you that stuck with me.

A middle-aged man came in and told me the story of apples in the South were sometimes

stored in hay ricks.

So you'd pile hay on the ground.

Pile a bunch of apples.

Pile apples on top of them and then cover them with a rick of hay or straw.

And in a mild southern winter and with a long-lasting, really hard apple like a Rawls Janet or a Winter

John or an Albemarle Pippin, those apples would last up until January, February.

He would tell the story that as the youngest grandchild, he was the one who was put down

on his hands and knees and burrowed into that pile, throwing back handfuls of straws and

straws as he burrowed into the middle.

And he said that what stuck with him was the aroma.

As he pulled back and got closer to the middle, the aroma of those ripe apples just overtook

him.

Oh, that must be incredible.

And that takes me back to our early conversation and how apples are such a vehicle for flavor

and aroma and how that is imprinted on people.

Yeah.

And it's wonderful that all these people came to you with these old memories and, again,

to hear that.

And step by step, some of those apples are being revived, as the last word in your title

suggests.

Diane, it has been really wonderful to talk with you.

Thanks so much for coming.

It's been a treat, Francis.

Thank you.

Diane Flint is the author of Wild, Tamed, Lost, Revived, the surprising story of apples

in the South.

And hey, as we head into apple season, put them to work with our collection of apple

recipes.

You can find them at splendidtable.org.

Now, I have to let you know that I don't actually drink, but I have had the chance

to taste some mezcals and quality tequilas with friends who are real aficionados.

And my reaction has always pretty much been the same.

It's like me going, whoa.

Like sometimes they're like smoked flowers.

Sometimes they're super savory.

The range and the power of the flavors are wild.

But even with that.

I had no idea how diverse the flavors of agave spirits are and the biodiversity that they

embody until I started reading the new book, Agave Spirits, the Past, Present, and Future

of Mezcals by ethnobotanist and longtime local food and seed saving pioneer, Gary Paul Navan

and restaurateur and spirits producer, David Zuro Pinera.

Hey, David and Gary.

It's so great to have you.

Hello.

How you doing?

Thank you for having us.

Wonderful.

I'm so grateful to be with you.

So congratulations on the book.

It's such a deep work.

But I have to say, the first thing I thought of when I was reading it was this totally

off the wall quote, one of the funniest quotes I've ever read.

It's from someone named Mitch Radcliffe.

And it goes, a computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention in

human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila.

So that.

It's always hilarious to me.

But, you know, I guess underneath that joke is the implication that tequila is there really

for getting you really drunk, really cheap, right?

But you're right that agave spirits, like a tequila and mezcal and others, are really

beautiful.

So, David, you know, you've had a restaurant for decades called Tequila's.

It's beautiful, has white tablecloths.

Like, in your experience, are customers surprised when they come in and they expect it to be

a place to go get bombed?

Well, yes, especially back in 1980s when, you know, many people, most of the people,

especially in the northeast of the United States, were not familiar with a lot of the

cultural aspects of, you know, culinary adventures or spirits from Mexico.

So, yes, it was a shock for a lot of people.

So what has that been like to educate your clientele?

You know, I.

I saw that as an opportunity in, you know, instead of a lot of my colleagues from the

restaurant industry in Philadelphia, they were strongly suggesting that I should change

the name of the restaurant.

That was just not a right idea.

So instead of changing the name, I saw it as an opportunity to help people to change

the misconceptions around agave spirits and also food from Mexico.

You know, so.

That was a very tough decision, but I guess 38 years later, it's still working.

And we're very happy to keep that name and to continue to helping people to approach

to agave spirits in the right way.

Yeah.

So obviously you've written this book, Agave Spirits, both of you.

Tell us about some of these spirits that you're passionate about, the really good ones.

What are they like?

Well, you know, the good stuff is like any beautiful spirit.

But I developed through the years a great respect from, you know, the people behind

these spirits, the the ecosystems where the raw material comes from.

That that's something that really is something that I dedicate a lot of my time and a lot

of my research and understand the complexity, human complexity and the symbiosis between

plants and humans.

And Gary, how did you get interested in the subject?

Well, my grandfather and uncles were Lebanese bootleggers of Arak, the wonderful Anisette

drink from the Middle East and Greece and Turkey.

And I grew up thinking that bootlegging was a wonderful adventure.

And so when I began to go to Mexico when I was 18 or 19, I began to seek out bootleggers

just to learn how they do things.

And I started to learn how they do things.

And I started to learn how they do things in relation to what my uncles and grandfather

had done.

I think the wonderful thing is that agave spirits are not just one entity, but this

whole rainbow of flavors and fragrances with each craftsman in each region, taking his

artisanal skills and making something bloom out of the desert in a beautiful and fragrant

and flavorful way.

Mm hmm.

So tell us about.

Some of these spirits are the ones that you really love.

Well, I love the ones that are place based in different parts of Mexico that may only

have a production area of 200 miles by 300 miles.

And those include spirits such as Bacanora in the north of Mexico, just across the line

from Arizona, where I live to Raya.

I see a wonderful spirit, actually two kinds of Raya.

I see a that occur in the state where David grew up, Jalisco, and they sort of get overshadowed

by the blue desert of tequila in Jalisco.

But back in the hills, there are wonderful spirits still being made.

And at one time, there were more than 50 different place based names for spirits from Chihuahua

all the way down to Chiapas.

Oh, wow.

Where Comité.

Co occurs.

So Mescal is not just one thing.

But when you say these are place based, tell me more about what that means.

I mean, I think we have a framework for thinking of that in terms of wine, right, in terms

of grapes, the varietals matter.

But, you know, people talk about this idea of terroir.

Tell us how that sort of works in these spirits and how different are they?

Yeah, well, you know, in just in the case of tequila.

This is how incredible these spirits are.

In the case of tequila, we are allowed to use only one varietal of agave, the agave tequilana Weber.

In the case of mezcals, it's endless.

There's hundreds of different varietals of agaves allowed to produce mezcals.

So when we talk about the terroir of these spirits, it's endless.

In tequila, we have two main varieties.

We have two main regions within the state of Jalisco, the highlands and the lowlands.

And the flavor profiles from the highlands in an area that is about 7,500 feet above sea level.

We have a cool, dry weather that obviously has an impact on the metabolism of the agaves.

Typically, agaves from that area have the tendency to give us more sugar content.

Therefore, flavors are affected by that.

The yield that we obtain from those agaves from that region.

In the lowlands region, it's a volcano surrounded by this very prolific area that has lots of agave, tequilana Weber.

But it's all this minerality, all these dry, peppery profiles that distinct this area from the highlands region.

I like to celebrate the diversity of the flavor profiles that we obtain on these spirits.

And when you go to the terroir.

The territory of Mezcal is endless.

There's so many microclimates.

You have agaves to grow from 8,000 feet above sea level to sea level.

Just imagine.

And hundreds of varietals.

Wow.

We'll be back with more from Gary Nabhan and David Soto-Pinera, authors of Agave Spirits.

The past, present, and future of Mezcals.

I'm Francis Lam, and this is The Splendid Table from APM.

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I'm Francis Lam, and this is the show for curious cooks and eaters.

We're talking about the beauty of agave spirits with Gary Paul Nabham and David Ciro Pinera, authors of Agave Spirits.

Let's get back into it.

As a newbie to this, what is the difference between tequila and mezcal?

Is it purely like the area in which it's produced?

Well, it is a denomination of origin.

We are, you know, protecting the specific areas.

And, you know, I think it's interesting to bring to the attention of the listeners that these two denominations of origin

are the largest denominations of origin in the world.

There is no other denomination of origin in alcohol beverages to embrace and protect such a large extension of land.

So one of the main difference, yes, it is the geographical areas.

But also it's regulations of how to produce.

And one that is very important is what I mentioned.

In tequila, you are only allowed to use one varietal.

In mezcal, everything basically grows under the protected area of the denomination of origin of mezcal.

Okay.

That's interesting.

And so then the flavors will obviously be very different because you're using different material.

But is there a difference in the processing?

Is there a difference in the fermentation?

Is there a difference in the making and distillation?

I think one of the main differences is that tequila used to be just one of the expression of mezcal.

But tequila, one of the main difference, I will say, is also process.

Tequila, since the early 1900s, it went more into efficiency, into large markets and produced mass production.

In mezcal, we still have so many producers that are attached to the ancestors.

And so it's really a matter of the industrial methods of production, the traditional process that is being encouraged from generations and generations.

One part of this story that I love is that agave spirits are probably more dependent on the diversity of microbes, beneficial microbes in the soil and in the fermentation vat than any other spirit in the world.

There might be 30 yeast and 50 different.

There might be 30 bacteria in the fermentation vat of mezcals in Durango.

And they may share only five of those yeast and 10 of those bacteria with the mezcals in Oaxaca.

So rather than thinking that the mezcal is just the values that emerge out of the plant during fermentation and distillation, it's really this community of organisms that.

That is different in each particular place in Mexico.

And each of those yeast pulls out a different flavor in the fermentation process and brings it to our lips.

So it's this wonderful symbiosis that we're celebrating in most other spirits, vodka or gin or whiskey.

You might be only using one or two yeast.

In mezcals, you might be involving 30 in a community that is having its own celebration in the fermentation vat.

Yeah, the microbes are really partying in there.

But tell me this.

So how would you describe when you're talking about the flavor and the taste?

You know, grab from the shelf of your mind two of your favorite mezcals that are both, you know, made with these original methods, but have super different flavors to you.

How different are they?

Describe them to us.

One contrast that I love is that another beverage in Mexico, a probiotic fermented beverage, pulque, is used with agave salmiana, a giant plant that twice as big as any of us in height and hundreds of pounds heavier than each of us.

And there's a distinctive flavor.

Principle in those that one particular yeast pulls out that you can taste in the fermented beverage.

But even when you distill it, that's a characteristic flavor.

So there's carryover from the fermented beverages that are still sold throughout Mexico to the distilled ones and their flavor profile.

And it means that each of the 50 some agaves has distinctive flavor principles in it.

And then they're enhanced by the yeast and the soils and the artisanry of the producers.

And so that's a huge contrast to the Bacanora that are in the desert just south of where I live on the Arizona-Sonora border.

There's fewer yeast and bacteria, but there's this very sharp, bright, smoky flavor in the Bacanoras that hit your tongue.

And you're not going to taste it.

As soon as you bring the jicara or shot glass up to your lips.

So huge contrasts just within a matter of a few miles sometimes with different species.

Yeah, that's amazing.

That smokiness sometimes in Mezcal is so beautiful and intense, smokier than the smokiest scotch.

And then there are ones that you described to me previously as being almost like kimchi-like or cheese-like.

And it's just that diversity of flavor.

How do you serve these spirits when you have them?

Do you mix them?

Do you sip them straight?

Do you put them on ice?

Do you put water in it?

How do you like to serve them?

That's another part of the generosity, organoleptically speaking, of these spirits.

They are very approachable if you just serve them straight, neat.

But also due to the robust profile.

The complexity that they have.

They are also an excellent tool for a good bartender to develop incredible cocktails.

And also they are very good to blend with other spirits.

And I see more and more across the United States and Europe.

Bartenders incorporate agave spirits into their cocktail programs.

I don't think I've been in the last 10 years in a good bar.

That it doesn't have at least a couple of cocktails with agave spirits.

Yeah.

Typically, when we're talking about, again, these traditional methods or these traditional spirits,

the agave is grown quite differently than how we would imagine most farms.

If you ask me, picture a farm in your mind.

There are basically two images.

One is maybe a small family farm, garden plots, lots of different vegetables.

And the other is corn.

Corn grows as far as the eye can see.

You know, like a big, huge, kind of industrial type of farm.

But these are grown with a different system, right, called agroforestry.

Tell us about agroforestry and how it works.

Gary?

Yes.

Think of agroforestry as a kind of wonderful stew out on the landscape rather than in a bowl.

Of all different kinds of vegetables.

In an agroforestry system, like the Milpa ones in Mexico,

you have rows of corn and beans and squashes and vegetables

in between rows of agaves and prickly pears and trees.

And the trees are there not only for their fruits or nuts,

but also for the firewood that's needed in the distillery that gives,

you know, a smoky flavor to some of those mezcals.

So you're having multiple stories, a high tree canopy with some agaves on the edge of it,

where a terrace slope may have 20 or 30 terraces from the top of a hill down to the base.

And different kinds of chilies and oreganos and spice crops grow under those trees.

And on the skirts of the agaves.

And it's really like a potpourri of useful plants,

each which benefits the other by providing it with nitrogen or with organic matter

or with other ways of obtaining moisture from the soil.

Their roots are interconnected.

And the farmers that manage those have to be very skilled in understanding the needs

and the...

the values, the harvest time of all those different crops that go into it.

And many of those spices are now used in curados or infusions

that heighten and enrich the flavors of many mezcals.

Yeah, I mean, that's such an interesting system.

And it seems so holistic, right?

It's not just, hey, let's we have this important cash crop.

Let's just grow it over and over and over again.

I think keeping that biodiversity,

that diversity in that area, in the soil, in the land,

it's got to just be healthier for everything.

My only experience with anything even approaching that is

I got to spend some time on a cacao farm.

And I was amazed.

I'd never seen people growing cacao, you know,

which are the pods that we make chocolate out of.

And the farmers were, you know, it wasn't rows and rows of cacao trees.

It was like going into a forest and saying, you know, this is a tree and that tree.

And they knew all of the trees.

They knew the individualities.

They knew the individual plants.

And this is where we grow the chilies for our family.

And this is, you know, it was just it was almost just taking a walk with them.

But to them, it was a farm.

It's just so unlike the kind of like farm that appears in my mind.

So, David, once the, you know, the agaves are harvested from this beautiful, rich soil,

this rich land, how is it processed?

Well, to obtain that raw material to produce these amazing spirits,

it takes years and a lot of wisdom from farmers.

In the case of tequila, this is, as I mentioned before,

to have just one varietal of agave create these monocultives

that it is in today's tequila industry is a real challenge.

And also the plants, they're not being reproduced in the proper way for many generations.

So, you know, to obtain this raw material,

it takes a lot of care from farmers and from responsible producers.

And I would say that you have to be as respectful as you can be as a producer of tequila or mezcal

to take those years of lots of love and labor from Mother Nature

into a process to respect every step of the process.

And, you know, the process is very straightforward.

You're going to hydrolyze the plants.

You're going to cook them to convert the starches.

You're going to put the starches of the agave into fermentable sugars.

Then you're going to extract the sugars.

You're going to ferment the sugars, create alcohol,

and then distill these sugars from the agave.

And it's a multiple process to do that.

There is an old traditional method to do every step of this conversion

from starches into liquid art.

And it depends.

How much?

How much do the producers know about this complex raw material?

But it's about 50, 60 different variables that you can obtain from the process

of making one of these incredible spirits.

And these agaves, they take, you know, a minimum of four years to reach maturity

and up to 35 years to reach maturity.

So it's just all these.

Just imagine in grapes.

We have vintages that, you know, put attention on the elements of the summer,

the spring of a particular year.

Just imagine what can happen in a raw material that is exposed to up to 35 summers,

35 winters.

It's just fascinating.

And that's why I think the producers and consumers,

this is very important, to evaluate and to respect all what is there,

for us to taste and to enjoy from these noble spirits.

Yeah, I love that.

Let me ask you one question, because one of the things that I think is so interesting

about mezcals that I have tasted in the past is this distinctive smokiness.

How does that smokiness get in there?

Well, you know, this is another difference between tequila and mezcal.

And that's because that smokiness, that pittiness came from a part of the process,

the very start.

At the start of the process, to make the conversion from starches into fermentable sugars,

we have to cook.

We have to hydrolyze the plants.

So the traditional ancestral methods of making that conversion is some underground pits

that use wood and lava rock and the agaves.

They're going to be slowly cooked underground.

And that process is going to generate...

Like pit roasted.

Yeah.

They've roasted.

Oh, cool.

The combination of the wood fire and the lava rocks and being covered for up to five days

is going to get that pittiness, that smokiness.

Most of the tequilas, I would say 99% of the tequilas nowadays, they are steam cooked agaves.

So you don't have that burning, that wood element, that pittiness.

But also,

the intensity on the pittiness and the smokiness is going to be affected by the process.

How you're going to ferment and how you're going to distill.

Some of the mezcales, they have the tendency to be more smoky.

Our mezcales, they are distilled in copper.

This is something very interesting.

Copper respects all these elements of aromas and flavors that go through the distillation in copper.

Right.

They have the tendency to be less smoky, less pittiness on those mezcales.

So, you know, the intensity, the levels of smokiness also depends on the hand of the

maker and the traditional process behind each mezcal.

Yeah.

It's a lot to think about in a glass.

Thank you so much for this, David and Gary.

This is great.

Thank you.

Gary Paul Mappan and David Ciro Pinera

are the authors of Agave Spirits,

the past, present, and future of mezcals.

And that is our show for the week.

Hope you enjoyed it.

Talk to you next week.

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And The Splendid Table was created

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It's made every week for you by Jennifer Lubke,

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