Montelobos Mezcal Pechuga

Drinkhacker gave Montelobos Pechuga an A-minus and called it the standout of the lineup — borderline decadent, a pour to revisit slowly at the end of a meal. Iván Saldaña, a molecular plant biologist, founded Montelobos in 2011 on certified-organic, never-wild agave and sold it to Campari in 2018; the name means mountain of wolves, and the brand funds the Wolf Conservation Center's Mexican wolf program. Pechuga is the Day of the Dead mezcal: the house's organic Oaxacan espadín — stone-pit roasted, mule-milled, wild-fermented in pine vats, double-distilled in 300-liter copper stills — distilled a third time with turkey breast, fruit, and spices in the still, bottled at 47.9% ABV (95.8 proof), and, remarkably, kosher certified despite the animal protein. Drinkhacker found immediate marmalade with apricot, smoky and herbaceous but fruit-forward, then baked and dried fruit — citrus into guava and deep-fried plantain — pulled back from too-sweet by green, woody, herbal notes, with a long, sweet finish and welcome acidity. 88 Bamboo tasted it across the whole range; Montelobos itself says drink it neat. Honest note: pechuga is the most labor-intensive mezcal a house makes and is priced at the top of the range — a celebration bottle, not a Margarita. Neat, in a copita, after dinner. The wolves' pechuga.

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