In a world increasingly dominated by the industrial, where flavor and experience are filtered through marketing, efficiency, and the relentless pursuit of profit, it becomes urgent to pause and ask: What are we eating? What are we drinking? And, perhaps most importantly, what are we being made to believe is good?
Food and drink are not mere biological needs. They are the center of our memories, our cultures, and our very sense of self. Strip away our income, our degrees, and the trappings of modern life, and we remain living beings whose most fundamental act is to eat and drink. What we consume defines, in profound ways, our human essence.
Historically, the most treasured foods and drinks, what we call “delicacies,” have never been mere commodities. They are acquired tastes, socially constructed and symbolically charged. It’s no coincidence that spices were once worth their weight in gold. Who wouldn’t want to taste something so unique, so extraordinary, that it was once reserved only for kings and the elite?
History repeatedly shows that the introduction of a new food can transform entire communities. When an ingredient appears for the first time, especially one associated with nourishment, comfort, or status, it often acquires an almost mythical value. People are willing to exchange labor, objects, or even autonomy for access to it, revealing how deeply food shapes not only our bodies, but also our social structures and desires.
And so arises a crucial question: Who decides what is “the best”? Who dictates what should be considered “unique” or “superior”?
When it comes to the products now celebrated as “the best in the world,” those decisions are rarely made by those who cultivate the raw materials or understand the craft behind them. They’re made by people disconnected from the origin. I once spoke with some coffee buyers who travel the world in search of exceptional beans. Once collected, those samples are sent to a big city, where a so-called expert taster decides which coffee is “the best.” I asked whether those experts had ever visited a coffee farm, cared for a plant, or taken part in a harvest. The answer came quickly: no. Most of them had never set foot on a farm, never dirtied their shoes.
In the world of agave spirits, specifically within producing communities where mezcal is still made in traditional ways, things operate very differently. Here, “traditional” does not refer to nostalgia, but to a set of practices rooted in place: agave grown and harvested from the surrounding landscape, cooked in earthen pits, crushed mechanically, by tahona or by hand, and most importantly, fermented outdoors in open-air vessels through spontaneous, wild fermentation, without the manipulation or selection of commercial yeast strains. This stage, more than any other, anchors mezcal to its environment, allowing local microorganisms and climate to shape the spirit in ways that cannot be standardized or replicated.
Within these contexts, what defines a great mezcal in these communities is not dictated by sommeliers, distant markets, or social media trends. It is defined by the palenqueros and palenqueras themselves, the men and women who live in direct, daily contact with the land and the agave. They understand the process from the root because it is part of their culture, their memory, and their lives. They have repeated the process across generations. It is a form of expertise shaped specially by culture, long before marketing enters the equation.
A palenquero would never share a mezcal they didn’t consider worthy. Beyond their reputation, what’s at stake is their identity and their story. When they offer you mezcal, they are sharing not only a distilled spirit but generations of knowledge, respect for nature, and communal identity.
Yet even this exception is under threat. The global market has captured nearly everything it could capture. Many of the qualities that once defined uniqueness are gradually absorbed by economic logics that favor a standard product, scale, and efficiency. Practices that were once local and handcrafted are often reshaped to meet the demands of volume and consistency. Cultural expressions rooted in community risk being simplified into a limited number of recognizable brands. In this process, sensory richness is frequently diminished, many times not through deliberate intent, but as an outcome of systems that reward optimization. What we consume, in many cases, is no longer the direct continuation of tradition, but the result of market structures that prioritize profitability over lived cultural complexity.
To understand how we arrived at this point, where true flavor is in danger of disappearing, we must look closely at one emblematic case: tequila.
How Corporations Distorted The True Flavor
The primary goal of corporations is to make money as fast as possible, regardless of the consequences to the environment, to resources, and of course, to people.
In their obsession to produce more in less time, large companies have flooded the market with products that are not what they claim to be. They simulate authenticity while hollowing it out sell greater quantities each year.
I remember once thinking that the parmesan cheese I bought at the supermarket was acceptable, though I couldn’t understand the fuss around parmesan, until a friend brought me a piece straight from Italy. Only then did I realize that the green-can powder wasn’t parmesan at all, it was merely an imitation of something exquisite.
The same has happened in the world of distilled spirits. For decades, we’ve been taught to believe that the ideal alcohol content should be below 40%. But that wasn’t a decision based on quality, it was a strategy to sell more volume and maximize revenue. The heart of a well-made artisanal distillation naturally emerges at around 65% ABV. Reducing that spirit to 40% ABV requires substantial dilution, meaning that a significant portion of the final product is added water rather than distillate. What is often presented as refinement is, in practice, a heavily diluted version of the original spirit.
And the industry didn’t stop there. Not only did it dilute products, in many cases big interests were able to leverage their economical and political influence to change and shape regulatory frameworks to allow even greater manipulation. A clear example is the history of tequila, which was a small-scale regional mezcal before industrialization transformed it into a standardized product designed to maximize volume.
In 1949, Mexico defined tequila as a liquor made exclusively from mature agave grown in the state of Jalisco. However, the first official quality standard, DGN R-9-1964, published in 1964, permitted the use of non-agave sugars. It established that at least 70% of the fermentable sugars had to come from blue agave (Agave tequilana Weber), but up to 30% could come from cheaper sources like sugarcane.
With a single legal stroke, a new product was created: mixto tequila, in which a significant portion of sugars no longer came from agave.
The erosion of quality didn’t end there. In 1997, the publication of NOM-006-SCFI-1994 formally authorized that up to 49% of sugars used in tequila production could come from non-agave sources. Two official categories were born:
- Tequila 100% agave: made exclusively from agave sugars.
- Tequila (mixto): made with at least 51% agave sugars and up to 49% from other sources, primarily cane sugar.
This regulation, published in Mexico’s “Official Gazette,” allowed the enrichment of musts with nearly half of their sugar content from external sources.
The justification was technical and economic: blue agave takes 7 to 10 years to mature. Allowing the use of sugarcane, a cheap, fast-growing annual crop, lowered costs and guaranteed supply amid growing global demand. Technically, they claimed that as long as 51% came from agave, tequila’s identity remained intact. Completely false, an institutionalized lie.
By loosening the formula, tequila’s essence was destroyed. A new industrial product was created, yet it continued to bear the name “tequila.” That runs directly against the very purpose of a Denomination of Origin (DO).
A DO exists precisely to protect a product tied to a specific territory, climate, and know-how. It’s a promise to the consumer, a guarantee of authenticity. When a DO is used to protect commercial interests instead of authenticity, it loses its reason for being.
In the case of tequila, and even mezcal, the Denomination of Origin became a marketing tool rather than a cultural shield. The spirit was altered to fit industrial needs, not to protect its identity.
Fortunately, the outcome for mezcal was different (although there is still a lot to improve).
When the first NOM for mezcal was established in 1994 (NOM-070-SCFI-1994), it also included two categories:
- Type 1: mezcal made 100% from agave.
- Type 2: mezcal that could include up to 20% other sugars.
However, thanks to the organized pressure of traditional producers, the 2016 revision (NOM-070-SCFI-2016) eliminated Type 2 altogether. Since then, mezcal, legally speaking, must be 100% agave. It was a cultural victory, though one still threatened today by new forms of technification.
It is important to note, however, that this struggle does not represent the daily concerns of most palenqueros in rural communities, who are far removed from the possibility of competing in national or global markets. For them, survival, continuity, and local practice matter far more than regulatory battles. These tensions become visible primarily among producers who have managed to position their mezcal beyond their villages and who, as a result, are directly affected by industrial pressures, market standards, and attempts to redefine what mezcal can legally be.
So when we talk about mezcal or tequila today, we’re not just talking about trends, flavor intensity, or brands. We are talking of an invisible struggle for authenticity, for respect toward ancestral knowledge and for the consumer’s right to drink something real. Therefore, for conscious consumers seeking to experience the true flavors of artisanal spirits, having clarity on these ideas allows them to make more informed and responsible decisions when tasting an agave spirit.
Do Not Blindly Trust Companies
If the spirit you’re buying belongs to a multinational or a major conglomerate, there’s a big chance that are you’re not drinking the true expression of a producer, but the result of corporate decisions: products engineered for mass markets, standardized according to marketing strategies rather than the wisdom of those who have cultivated and distilled agave for generations.
Seek transparency in your bottles. A label that merely says “Product of Mexico” is your first warning sign, a generic formula that conceals the real origin. “Product of Oaxaca” is slightly better, but still insufficient. Oaxaca is vast, with regions, villages, climates, and traditions entirely distinct from one another. Ask yourself: From which village does this mezcal come? Who made it? What kind of agave was used? How was it fermented and distilled?
Be even more suspicious if a label says “Product of Oaxaca/Puebla” or lists multiple states. That usually means a company has bought bulk distillates from different towns, often paying very low prices, then blending, diluting, and standardizing them in their own facilities. The final product may be marketed as “artisanal” or “traditional” but it’s really an industrial construct, justified only through marketing.
True agave spirits need no advertising embellishments. Their origin, producer, and process should be clear, visible, and proudly explained on the bottle. If the information is vague or ambiguous, that’s probably intentional. Opacity always serves those with something to hide.
Today more than ever, conscious consumers hold immense power. Every purchase we make is a political act: we can either strengthen industrial practices that dilute and empty traditions, or support producers who work with dignity, respect, and authenticity. Because in the end, we are not just drinking alcohol, we are either honoring or betraying an entire culture.
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