Tosba Tobala Mezcal

Tosba runs nurseries so it never has to over-harvest tobalá — and Mezcalistas found cardamom, green tea, and overripe pineapple in the result. Two cousins from a Zapotec village in the Sierra Norte, working in Silicon Valley in 1999, went home and planted agave before they'd built a palenque; Elisandro González Molina and Edgar González Ramírez founded Tosba in San Cristóbal Lachirioag to rescue the region's disappearing mezcal and stem migration, and NPR's Planet Money told the story in 2014. Tobalá — Agave potatorum, the small king of the wild agaves — is seasonal and limited in the Sierra Norte, so Tosba reproduces its own; it's roasted in an earthen pit, crushed, fermented with wild yeast, and double-distilled in copper by Edgar, bottled at 47 to 49% ABV depending on the lot. Mezcal Reviews' tasters: a sweet, fruity nose, big green apple, then green apple, cinnamon, applesauce, green grape, unripe watermelon, salt, and vanilla — rich, vegetal, light smoke, fruity, and medicinal, all the trappings we love in tobalá, with a sweet menthol heat at 49% that most tobalás don't carry; a good classic tobalá, clean and delicious, a rock-solid option. Honest note: one taster came in with sky-high expectations from the Espadín and wasn't blown away — it's excellent rather than transcendent, and priced like a microbusiness's tobalá. Neat, in a copita, slowly. The Sierra Norte's king, from a nursery.

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