10,000 Years of Agave History

10/17/24 • 34 min

Agaves and humans have always had an intimate relationship but, believe it or not, a significant part of if has nothing to do with booze. As we've discussed before in this podcast agaves provided to our ancestors with many charms; from clothing to nourishment. But given the fact that many of these relationships have disappeared, this wider understanding of agave is quite hard to imagine. That is why Marcela Sandoval has been researching how and why and with which consequences did humans domesticated agave. While most of us keep on speculating how agave fields looked a few decades ago, she gets to inspect traces that go back thousands of years. Please welcome Marcela and the incredible agave-stories that she has to share.

Previous Episode

Drink More Pox

Pox, the quintessential Chiapas spirit, is probably the most mysterious Mexican drink that I've encountered in my life. It was a big part of my early 20's, but I never truly understood its technicalities or cultural relevance. Happily, thanks to Javier Oroz, who I just interviewed a few weeks ago (go check the Bacanora episode), I got to meet Zury Guindi.

Zury started bottling bottling Pox back in 2011 under the umbrella of "Siglo Cero". When even mezcal was just starting to happen, he decided to dedicate his life to corn, panela and wheat instead of worshipping agave. In this episode we try to cover as much as we can about this fascinating and delicious drink. Hope you enjoy it!

This episode was recorded at Som, Zury's bar in Mexico City. Nested in the heart of Condesa I can't emphasize enough how fun is to go through all their menu. You'll get to try Pox, rum, raicilla, mezcal, tequila and many other bizarre and lovely Mexican spirits.

Next Episode

Agave's Biocultural Heritage

In this episode on Heritage Mezcal, I had the opportunity to have a delightful conversation with Eric Zandona. He is an incredibly booze-informed gentleman, and the organizer of the ADI’S International Spirits Competition, which, if you were to ask me, offers a great chance for brands of all sizes to break into the US market. Especially if you have something that may shock the nerds. They are not sponsoring this episode, but after being invited a few times as a judge, I can say that I’ve never met a group of people that cared about and loved spirits with such passion.

That being said, this episode covers a lot of ground, but was originally inspired by a petition published in Change Org by Pepe Tequilas titled: “Highlighting the Importance of Protecting Agave’s Biocultural Heritage”.

I prefer not to throw any major spoilers in this introduction, but let's just say that both Eric and I would love for agave spirits' beauty to prevail for at least another thousand years.