from Oaxaca City to Santiago Matatlán winds through the vast central valley of Oaxaca, an arid plain walled by scrub-colored hills. You’ll know you’re getting close when rows of what look like giant green anemones stitch their way through the browned landscape. This is agave, the spiky succulent used to make tequila and mezcal. A miraculous plant, agave can grow in the driest environments with no need for irrigation, and it’s provided food, fiber and intoxication to Mexico’s Indigenous peoples for thousands of years.

Soon, roadside shacks advertising mezcal in a dozen varieties begin to appear. These are the tasting rooms. Distilleries, alternately chic and industrial, sit like islands of glass and concrete in a choppy sea. By the time you reach Matatlán and pass under the “World Capital of Mezcal” welcome sign, the fields of agave dominate the hillsides with their beautiful, quilted monotony.

Most of this is new to an era in which mezcal has risen from relative obscurity to become the “it” drink of connoisseurs and cocktail shooters alike. In a little more than a decade, production has soared from less than 1 million liters (264,000 gallons) to more than 14 million, according to the Mezcal Regulatory Council. No other liquor has expanded so fast.

Ironically, the explosion of interest in mezcal rests on its artisanal nature, its reputation as agave’s anti-tequila. Most tequila is a mass-produced commodity churned out in gleaming factories by the global liquor giants, but mezcal still comes from thousands of small family operations across Oaxaca and eight other Mexican states, using methods that have barely changed in centuries. The wild agave species, wood fires, open fermentation vats, steampunk stills and whims of the mezcalero all contribute to an astonishingly flavorful and diverse spirit that mixes floral, fruity and herbal notes against a beautiful backdrop of smoke. Collectors discovered mezcal in the 2000s, bartenders and influencers followed, and the land rush was on.

The corporations that control the booze business were caught napping, but they adapted. Pernod Ricard SA bought Del Maguey, the mezcal industry leader, in 2017. Diageo Plc— which paid a billion dollars for George Clooney’s tequila brand, Casamigos, the same year—immediately added a mezcal to the lineup. Constellation Brands Inc. and Campari soon acquired mezcal brands of their own. Bacardi Ltd. joined the club in 2023, buying Ilegal Mezcal for $130 million. Now all this investment is giving rise to a generation of distilleries and agave farms that dwarf anything in mezcal’s indie past. Where an old-school operation might produce a few hundred liters of mezcal a month, the new factories can pump out thousands of liters a day.

It takes a lot of hillsides to feed those beasts. In Oaxaca’s mountains, companies deliver truckloads of baby plants and starter cash to poor farmers, promising to return in six years when the plants are mature to pay the rest of the price and collect the crop. Other farmers are clearing wildlands to plant more, supported by a government that’s handed out free seedlings, stills and cash to expand the industry. And the fields are changing hands, selling in large blocks to wealthy speculators. Prices for farmed agave have risen from $50 per ton in 2012 to more than $500 today, and they go higher still for increasingly rare wild agave. The crop’s futures are even being bought and sold on international markets.

To most people Bloomberg Businessweek spoke with on the ground in Oaxaca, one of Mexico’s poorest states and by far the largest producer of mezcal, this is happy news. For decades most of Oaxaca’s young people left, seeking work in the US. Now many are staying for jobs in mezcal, and some are starting their own companies. There’s also no crop better suited to the area or the climate change era. In water-stressed regions, including much of Mexico and the Southwest US, it can be a godsend.

And yet even some mezcaleros with much to gain are beginning to ask: How big is too big? “For us, the next five years are going to be about survival,” says Graciela Ángeles Carreño, a fourth-generation leader of Real Minero, the fiercely traditional mezcal producer that’s led the fight against industrialization. “These brands that are owned by transnational corporations are not going to be satisfied to stay at their current size. They need to make more.” And that means snapping up land, agave and independent producers. “They’re going to absorb as much of us as they can. I can’t see what things look like on the other side of that.”

One answer to this question can be found 500 miles northwest, in the state of Jalisco. The tequila business is 50 times bigger than that of mezcal, but there’s no reason mezcal couldn’t become the new tequila. There’s even a word for this process, spoken in foreboding tones in Oaxaca’s agave fields and tasting rooms: “tequilization.” And to most of the people trying to preserve mezcal’s gusto histórico—its historic taste and culture—no fate sounds worse.

An agave plant blooms just once in its life, slowly storing sugars in its heart for 6 to 30 years, depending on the species, in preparation for one massive act of reproduction. When it’s ready, it sends up a towering flower stalk, called a quiote, that looks like the Jolly Green Giant’s asparagus. The flowers that unfurl gush nectar as an offering to the bats that cross-pollinate the agaves while feeding. The act exhausts the reserves of the plant, which dies after flowering.

At least five centuries ago, Indigenous Mexicans learned to make spirits from those sugars. At the first sign of a quiote, the plant’s pineapple-shaped heart, known as a piña, is harvested, roasted, mashed, fermented and distilled. The resulting spirit was always known as mezcal, but in the 20th century a handful of wealthy producers in the tequila region moved to differentiate themselves from the rustic versions made by Indigenous mezcaleros elsewhere in Mexico. It was a time when mass-produced goods held more cachet than handmade, and the tequila families invested in factories that could churn out a modern, predictable product. Out went the wood-fired ovens, clay stills and open-air fermentations. In came the gas-powered autoclaves and steel distillation tanks.

The result was a dirt-cheap spirit with an inoffensive flavor, and soon the margarita was a megahit in the US. The catch was that the agave plant is ill-suited to industrialization. Unlike other sources of fermentable sugars, such as grapes and grain, agave doesn’t yield an annual crop. Each plant can be used only once, and it can take decades to mature.

As tequila boomed, it triggered agave shortages and a mad scramble to make more. No quiotes meant no new seeds. Producers instead planted shoots from existing plants, a technique that yields clones of the original. More recently, companies have resorted to lab tissue culture, where millions of clones are started in petri dishes. The result is a biological desert of barren monocrops more inbred and disease-prone than a King Charles spaniel.

In the 1940s the tequila industry dramatically relaxed its promises about quality, allowing as many as 30% non-agave sugars to be added to the mix. From then on, the average tequila contained a lot of cheap cane sugar. In the 1970s the allowable non-agave share rose to 49%. (The better tequilas, however, are still made with 100% agave.) To further extend the supply, producers developed machinery to leach sugars out of immature piñas. These days the profile of many contemporary tequilas comes less from the agave than from artificial additives such as glycerin, oak extract, caramel color and syrup. As long as these additives amount to less than 1% of the total weight of the spirit, producers don’t even have to mention them on their labels.

No one can argue with the success of this playbook. Powered by celebrity tie-ins and savvy marketing campaigns, tequila is now a $20 billion industry. More than 650 million liters are produced per year. It recently eclipsed whiskey to become America’s No. 2 spirit and is expected to grab the No. 1 spot from vodka as soon as this year.

Even so, the people doing most of the heavy lifting aren’t reaping commensurate rewards. Day laborers in tequila’s fields and factories are burdened with the same terrible pay and unhealthy working conditions as migrant farmworkers everywhere. Anyone living in the region is grappling with deforestation, rivers poisoned by waste and other byproducts, and poor soil from overuse of pesticides and fungicides. Land and capital are concentrated in the hands of corporations and tycoons. Their success has also drawn Mexico’s drug cartels, which use tequila to launder money.

That hasn’t happened in Oaxaca yet, but as the money migrates to mezcal, traditional producers increasingly find themselves competing with big-budget pretenders. For now it’s pretty easy to spot the phonies, says Justin Briggs, who specializes in importing and distributing traditional mezcals for Skurnik Wines & Spirits, a New York wholesaler. “If it’s presented like a lifestyle brand on the website, that’s a red flag,” Briggs says. “If a celebrity is involved, red flag. If they’re throwing parties and giving away product, they’re probably not producing so little of the stuff that it’s precious. If it just says ‘mezcal’ on the label and doesn’t list the variety of agave, or what state and community it’s from, those are major red flags.” Other pros offer an even simpler test: Find the family behind the brand.

of agave in Santiago Matatlán, Matt Morrison and Monica Cortés of Casa Cortés, one of the remaining family-owned producers, stand beside square pits chiseled out of the rock. The pits were used for mezcal fermentation as far back as the 1840s by Cortés’ great-great-great-grandfather. As a kid she spent summers in town helping her grandparents with their mezcal business, washing bottles and removing labels and riding from town to town in their blue pickup, selling out of the back.

Casa Cortés’ El Jolgorio series helped bring mezcal to America’s attention. Each mezcal in this line was made from a single species of wild agave, as different from one another as a winemaker’s grapes. Tobalá, for example, is rich and fruity. Jabalí is vegetal. Mexicano is floral, and Tepeztate is fragrant and peppery. But the agave species is just the first of many factors that influence the flavor. There’s the terroir, the age of the plants and the type of oven and wood used to roast them, the crushing method, the water source, the fermentation vat, the still and so on. One of the things that makes mezcal unique is that all these specs are listed on the back label, beneath the name of the mezcalero responsible. That nerdy tradition has protected mezcal’s authenticity—aficionados know to avoid any bottle that doesn’t dish—and has given some old mezcaleros a rock star status they never expected.

Those old-timers are also careful not to overharvest their agave supply, a resource they intend to pass down to their children. For centuries the system remained sustainable because the landscape was so vast and the production so small. Most mezcaleros were hobbyists. Once or twice a year they’d head into the hills with their burro, load it up with mature agave and make just enough to sell locally and to supply the town fiesta. Impact on the wild was minimal.

In the 1990s an American expat artist named Ron Cooper became obsessed with the quality and culture of these single-village mezcals and determined to bring them to the US. He launched the brand Del Maguey and spent years reforming mezcal’s eat-the-worm reputation, one listener at a time. Eventually, Del Maguey’s distinctive green bottles became ubiquitous in better bars, and other small-batch brands followed. But even as mezcal became a cult favorite in the US, production was tiny. It was expensive, hard to find and meant to be sipped, not slammed. That’s now changing, fast.

Most affordable mezcal is produced with an easily cultivated variety called Espadín, which matures in six to eight years and has a fairly simple flavor. Premium bottlings require cult varieties such as Tepeztate, which takes 25 years or more to reach maturity and contains enough sugar to make only a few bottles per plant. Although some of these wild varieties are now being planted, many are too slow and temperamental to work on an industrial scale.

Morrison says they’re already starting to see rivals’ quality slip as the other producers harvest immature plants to keep up with demand for rare varieties of mezcal. By the same token, he adds, the good times are far from over: “This is the golden age of mezcal, the time we’ll talk about in 20 years to say, ‘Man, remember when you could get 2 ounces of Tepe for 40 bucks?’ ” He points at the ridgeline above, where a line of huge quiotes is silhouetted against the sky like streetlights. “Every single one of those is a Tepeztate. Tepe isn’t going to run out tomorrow. But eventually it will.”

The loss of a great drink would be bad enough, but wild agave means far more than that. It’s the linchpin of the extraordinary desert ecosystems that stretch from central Mexico across the US border. And there are troubling signs that if wild agave goes, it will take those ecosystems down with it.

dominate the landscape of the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán Biosphere Reserve, an arid expanse of mountains and canyons about a three-hour drive north from Oaxaca City. For centuries mezcal has been a pillar of village life. “It’s part of the essence of this community,” says Pablo Cortés (no relation to Monica), a lifelong resident of the area. “But it was never a business. It was for local consumption. We only have three mezcaleros. Together they make maybe 200 liters per year. That’s what this region can sustain.”

In the 2000s, though, mezcaleros in the region ramped up production to take advantage of booming demand. Others began making mezcal for the first time. And still others came from afar, lured by the forests of agave. “We started to see mysterious trucks on the highway, loaded with piñas,” Cortés says. “That was when we started doing patrols.”

Cortés is currently serving a three-year term as commissioner of a 50,000-acre ejido in the reserve. Ejidos are large pieces of communal land given to peasant communities in the early 20th century as part of the land-reform efforts that followed the Mexican Revolution. Cortés’ ejido was once loaded with agave, but it’s been heavily poached in recent years. He now coordinates 35 volunteers from the ejido who patrol the backcountry, looking for looters. They find new signs every month. “They mostly work at night, especially when there’s a full moon,” he says. “They pull up the piñas and pile them by the side of the road, then come back with a truck to pick up the piles.” Culprits are rarely caught. More often, the patrols just find the holes in the ground and the piles of severed leaves. “But this time we got there first.” The night before, his team had seized 3 tons of piñas, acting on a tip from a rival agave gang. “They’re starting to snitch on each other,” Cortés says.

Most of the pilfered agave gets sold to mezcaleros within the Tehuacán-Cuicatlán region who’ve run out of their own supply. “I know it’s wrong,” says one mezcalero, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “And yes, I’m concerned that it’s going to run out in the future. But it’s a question of survival. If the government doesn’t want us to use this agave, it needs to give us some other means to make a living.”

This is a top mezcalero, proud of his craft. He owns a few acres of hilly land and planted it all with agave, nestling the seedlings against other shade plants, careful to maintain the natural vegetation and erosion controls. It’s been a model of smart cultivation. But even after years of development, the plants have provided only a small fraction of the 30 tons of piñas he needs each year.

Cortés agrees that the government is part of the problem. “Right now the government is promoting the culture of mezcal in all these villages that don’t have enough agave,” he says. He has sympathy for the mezcaleros trying to get by, but only up to a point. “If they can’t do it from their own lands, that’s too bad, but they can’t take ours.” He also concedes that the battle is hopeless. “Every month they’re stealing more. They’re destroying these plants that are a fundamental part of our history and culture. We used to see the hillsides covered with yellow agave flowers every year. Now we never see that anymore.”

The situation is critical, says Alfonso Valiente Banuet, an ecologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, who works with villages in the reserve to establish agave reforestation programs. In addition to overharvesting, wild agave is threatened by urbanization, cattle ranching and climate change. “Mezcal is produced by using at least 53 species of agaves,” Valiente says. “And the distribution of those agaves is the same as for the columnar cactuses.” The two types of plants form the foundation of the ecosystem and depend on the same pollinators: bats. “We found that the agaves feed the bats for almost seven months of the year,” Valiente says. The other five months of the year, the bats feed on cactus nectar.

The benefits go both ways. As the bats dip their snouts in the flowers to lap the nectar, they get pollen all over their furry faces. And as they feed from flower to flower, they cross-pollinate the flowers and fertilize the plants. The fruits and seeds produced not only make more agave and cactuses, but they also feed more than 100 other animal species.

If the agave is removed from the system, Valiente says, the whole thing falls apart. “We did an analysis, and we found that if the agave disappears, that could collapse the ecosystems of central Mexico.” Without agave blossoms to get them through seven months of the year, the bats don’t survive to pollinate the cactus flowers. Soon there are no new generations of cactus or agave, and the desert dies.

“It’s out of control,” says David Suro, a Mexican American restaurateur and co-author of the 2023 book Agave Spirits: The Past, Present and Future of Mezcals, which calls for a return to traditional practices and a focus on quality over quantity. “We’re losing wild agave species every day. If we don’t go back and start to focus on the families that have had the wisdom and the knowledge to take care of the land for millennia, we won’t have agave spirits as we know them in the future.”

Fortunately those families can still be found. And they point the way toward a very different vision of mezcal’s future.

hillsides of Oaxaca’s Sierra Norte aren’t far from the city, but they feel like another planet. Papaya, mango and banana trees shade the villages. Crystal rivers cascade down the slopes. High above, the 10,000-foot peaks are shrouded in dripping cloud forest.

It seems an unlikely place to make mezcal, yet agave flourishes in the humid region, and so has the Mezcal Tosba distillery, a hand-built brick-and-adobe bungalow clinging to one of those slopes at 2,600 feet. Flanking it, in an ergonomically efficient line, sits a roasting pit lined with river stones, where agave piñas are baked for days over wood coals; a horse-drawn millstone for crushing them; four wooden vats for fermenting the mash, made by a local carpenter out of mountain pine; and four copper alembic stills in brick housing. As smoky wood fires crackle beneath the stills, pure mezcal rises up copper pipes, spirals through a brick cooling basin of river water and spits into plastic jerrycans.

Tosba was founded in 2000 by two Zapotec cousins, Edgar González Ramírez and Elisandro González Molina, as a way to save their region from depopulation. Migration to the US had shrunk the town from 2,800 people to only 1,200, and the two cousins were part of the wave. They moved to the Bay Area in the 1990s to bus tables and tend bar, sending the money back home and worrying about the area’s dependence on remittances from the US. “I just kept thinking there must be another way,” González Molina says. “We were focused on creating something out of these mountains.” They settled on mezcal, which had been made in the mountains for centuries before disappearing during the diaspora. González Ramírez moved back home to learn the arts of agave cultivation and distillation, and González Molina kept bartending to fund the project.

With limited resources and a climate too humid for some traditional agave varieties, they learned to collect wild seeds and germinate them. When the price of agave skyrocketed, that turned out to be a lucky thing. They started making mezcal in 2012 and today have planted hundreds of thousands of agave plants, including a previously unknown local variety called Warash. “It’s the taste of these mountains,” González Molina says. Every year they plant more than they harvest, letting their best agaves go to seed for future supply.

To prevent erosion, they plant sturdier, faster-growing corn and squash between the agave, mimicking the ancient Mexican milpa system. Because the slopes are too steep for trucks, agave is carried from the fields by burro. Water comes straight from the river. The stills are fired with driftwood collected after the annual floods. Bottles are filled by hand. Solar panels keep the lights on.

Most important to González Molina, Tosba has renewed a culture of entrepreneurship in his region. “We’re creating an economy around mezcal,” he says. Dozens of locals are involved. Some neighbors have revived their farms and planted agave, knowing they have a ready buyer. Others have begun building their own microdistilleries under González Ramírez’s tutelage.

If mezcal is to avoid tequilization and preserve its gusto histórico, many more operations will need restoration programs like those at Tosba and Real Minero, which is creating a seed bank of agave varieties for wider distribution in the industry and the wild. But it won’t be easy. Letting some of your agave go to seed, replanting, paying your workers well and crafting small batches all makes traditional mezcal wildly expensive. How many consumers will pay $150 for a premium bottle when they can get a serviceable one for $30?

So far, plenty, says Briggs, the New York wholesaler. “Even just a few years ago, I couldn’t have imagined us being able to sell so many unique small batches,” he says. “Now there’s people asking for them, and supporting those producers. That’s huge.”

Briggs sees a precedent in the world of vineyards, noting that wine lovers have kept the great estates going despite a glut of industrial options. But such an understanding, he adds, often needs to be taught. “More than any category I’ve worked in, mezcal demands a lot of education,” he says. “Consumers have to take that education and run with it.” If that happens, perhaps mezcal’s golden age is just beginning.