Tobacco leaf and green olive lead into salted caramel, a yogurt-like tang, and orchard fruit, with baking spice and citrus threading through. Savory and oily in texture, with almost no smoke.
Made in Michoacán, not Oaxaca, by the Pérez family in Purépecha tradition on the shore of Lake Pátzcuaro. Mexicano agave (rhodacantha) is not native there; Don Miguel carried seeds home from Oaxaca decades ago and now grows his own. The plants are capón, castrated and left two extra years to concentrate sugar, then milled by a grinder rigged from a 1979 Datsun engine and rested years in glass.
