As an M.B.A. student at the University of Texas at Austin, a former marine pilot named Brent Looby befriended two other veterans, Judson Kauffman and Ryan Campbell. When the men were tasked with coming up with a business plan and a pitch deck to win over investors for a class project, “we were focussed on solving the world’s problems, like grad students do,” Looby told me. “Then Judson was, like, ‘Could we at least do something fun?’ ” They came up with the idea of opening a Texas-based distillery. “Texas is a global brand in and of itself,” Looby said. “You go around the world, you tell people you’re from Texas, and it automatically sets you in a different class of people. We knew we wanted to leverage that.”
Looby had his heart set on making “the coolest, best bourbon in the world.” But, when a friend returned from Puerto Vallarta raving about raicilla, a regional Mexican spirit made from several species of agave, the three men were inspired to change their direction. “We were looking at all the trend lines. Premium spirits are going up. Agave spirits are way outpacing everybody. And it’s good if you have an authentic backstory, because authenticity is a big thing,” Looby said. “If we can touch all three, we’d be onto something.” After more research, they settled on sotol, which is made from dasylirion, a desert succulent that, when distilled, produces an earthy spirit that’s less smoky than many mezcals but more flavorful than most tequilas. To Looby, the idea was a no-brainer: “We thought, Why isn’t anybody doing this?”
Converting the sotol plant into a palatable liquor proved more challenging than expected. “We’re under the cover of dusk, jumping over people’s fences off the highway and ripping plants out of the ground to teach ourselves how to do this. The first few goes—oh, my God, they were just so amazingly foul,” Looby said. “There’s no YouTube videos on how to do this.” In 2017, the men began selling Desert Door Texas Sotol. Although sotol remains relatively obscure, it’s starting to gain traction. “You have big brands like Pernod Ricard being, like,‘This could be the next sleeping monster. I gotta get in on that,’ ” Victor Ibarra, a partner in the Mexican company Sotol Oro de Coyame, said. Last year, sotol attained a key milestone for any liquor trying to gain a foothold in the international marketplace: the launch of the first celebrity brand, Lenny Kravitz’s Nocheluna. “There’s enough tequilas and gins and vodkas and things, but what intrigued me about this was that no one knows about it,” Kravitz told Rolling Stone. “I wanted to introduce this on a global level.” Looby told me that he found Kravitz’s investment in sotol encouraging: “I think one hundred per cent it’s going to leapfrog mezcal.” (Mexico produced more than eight million litres of certified mezcal in 2021; Ricardo Pico, a promoter of Mexican sotol, estimated that it has yet to reach the million-litre mark.)
In keeping with its market research about the importance of authenticity, Desert Door emphasized the founders’ Texas bona fides. In photographs, the trio wore scuffed boots and leaned against a vintage Ford. “I’m fifth-generation Texan, Judson’s sixth-generation, and Ryan, well, he got here as soon as he could,” Looby said. But the question of heritage eventually came to be a sticking point.
Under Mexican law, a spirit can be labelled “sotol” only if it is produced in the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango. (Distillers elsewhere in the country also make a dasylirion spirit; it’s often called cucharilla.) Similarly, liquor distilled from the blue agave plant can be labelled “tequila” only if it comes from certain municipalities within a handful of states. These laws are meant to protect products with distinctive environmental and cultural characteristics; this is why champagne has to come from Champagne and Scotch from Scotland. In practice, the designations aren’t always honored between countries.
In 1994, as part of NAFTA, the U.S. agreed to honor the designations of origins, or D.O.s, for tequila and mezcal. When the trade deal was renegotiated, in 2020, initial drafts included a provision recognizing the D.O. for sotol, as well as two other Mexican spirits, bacanora and charanda. Then John Cornyn, a senator from Texas, spoke up at a Senate Committee on Finance hearing. “For those members of the committee who’ve never consumed sotol, I would recommend it,” he told his colleagues. Cornyn argued that recognizing the D.O. would mean killing a nascent Texas industry; the provision was struck from the final agreement.
Although the legal pathway to make Texas sotol was now open, critics argued that its production amounted to colonialism and cultural appropriation. They pointed out that, although the sotol plant grows on both sides of the border, the tradition of making the spirit is overwhelmingly Mexican. “It’s a matter of identity and culture,” Ricardo Pico said, at a recent panel. “It’s not only the plant being used. It has a tradition. It has a name.” Some of the most fervent criticism has come from Sandro Canovas, an activist from Mexico City now living in Marfa, where a former feed plant by the railroad tracks was recently converted into a sotol distillery. Canovas occasionally stations himself outside the building, passing out fliers to would-be drinkers and decrying Texas sotol through a bullhorn: “Sotol es mexicano! Boycott these culture vultures!” He put up banners on a fence across from the distillery, one of which accuses the Marfa Spirit Co. of “APPROPRIATION & THEFT.” Recently, he has taken to wearing a shirt that reads “Sotol Police.”
Looby conceded that there may be “some merit” in criticisms of Texas sotol. “I just don’t think it’s applicable to us. The plant does grow here, and it’s been here for a long time. And we’re one hundred per cent self-taught from the ground up,” he said. “With that, you have the creative license, the artistic license, clear white space.” Desert Door would rather “focus on the things that connect us more than the things that divide us,” he noted.
A few weeks ago, I met Pico in Chihuahua City, Mexico. Pico is thirty-nine, a compact man with a boyish air and a voice strained from overuse. The state of Chihuahua has been plagued by cartel violence, but its capital has a burgeoning foodie scene, and Pico, a natural-born promoter, was eager for it to gain recognition. (In between our visits to sotol vinatas, or distilleries, he brought me to several places with, he said, “excellent coffee programs.”) Recently, he has taken to wearing a piece of quartz around his neck. “It’s a weird time in my life,” he said. “I’ve never seen this many detractors and haters.” The legitimacy of Texas sotol was, it turned out, just one of the swirling controversies over the rising popularity of the spirit, and Pico was caught in the middle of it all.
Although sotol is now the primary preoccupation of Pico’s life, it was not on his radar until around twelve years ago. At the time, it was largely considered northern Mexico’s version of moonshine, looked down on as a field drink made for and by rural ranchers; when Pico and his friends went out clubbing, they drank Scotch or rum. After college, Pico was hired by Hacienda de Chihuahua, the country’s largest sotol producer, which makes the spirit using industrial processes, and sells it for relatively cheap. “It’s easy to convince someone to buy a twenty-dollar bottle,” he said. As he travelled through the U.S., meeting with liquor distributors and managers of cocktail bars, he witnessed the boom in artisanal mezcal, whose sales increased seven hundred per cent in a decade. Mezcal is a Mexican spirit once reviled as rustic and now in demand for the same reason, and Pico wondered if there was anyone making sotol in a similarly small-scale manner.
In 2016, he stopped at a liquor store in rural Chihuahua and asked about local sotol. The woman behind the counter looked at him warily, then pulled out a bottle. “I took one sip, and it was, like, Wow,” Pico recalled. The woman wouldn’t tell him who’d made it, but agreed to pass his card along. Eventually, Pico managed to connect with more than a dozen sotol distillers throughout Chihuahua, some of whom, such as Eduardo Arrieta, better known as Don Lalo, were carrying on the tradition taught to them by their forefathers. Pico took trips to tiny desert villages and into the foothills of the Sierra Madre, making arrangements with sotoleros to sell their spirits under his brand Clande Sotol, a nod to the spirit’s clandestine history. After a falling out with his original business partner, Pico relaunched the project as Sotoleros.
In the cluttered Sotoleros office, a cardboard box held a dozen two-litre soda bottles full of clear liquid—a batch of sotol from a distiller in the Sierra Madre. Pico would decant the liquid into glass bottles sealed with wax; once they made it to liquor stores in the U.S., they would retail for around a hundred dollars each. The target consumers of Sotoleros are connoisseurs of small-batch spirits, the kind of people who appreciate a liquor label that tells them whether a batch was distilled in copper or stainless steel, and whether the sotol heads were milled with an axe or a mallet.
As a self-styled ambassador for sotol, Pico is rarely without a bottle (or a dozen). In an antique store in Chihuahua City, Pico chatted with the proprietor, whom he did not know, then brought a bottle out. It had been brewed by Lupe López, a sotol distiller in Madera, a town in the foothills of the Sierras. The clear liquid was sweetly vegetal, yet I could drink it only in small sips—traditional sotol often has an A.B.V. of around fifty per cent.
On my second day in Chihuahua, Pico drove us to Madera to visit Bienvenido Fernández, a seventy-year-old sotolero with a bristly mustache and a relaxed, grandfatherly air. We sat in the vinata’s small sitting room, which Norma, Fernandez’s daughter, had decorated with smiling plaster donkeys. Fernandez told me that his family was a part of a sotol-making collective, and he had begun helping around the age of ten. He and his brother would take a donkey into the mountains, where they’d pry plants out of the ground using a steel bar, shave off the thick outer leaves, and place the dense inner cores of the succulent in a basket on the donkey’s back to haul to town. This was before international alcohol companies had made inroads into Mexico, and sotol was what everyone drank in the cantina and at home. The demand for sotol was so high that production never stopped, except during Holy Week; people would camp outside the distillery, awaiting the next batch.
The sotol made and sold in the countryside existed in a legal gray area, largely unpermitted and untaxed. Beginning in the early nineteen-hundreds, Mexican officials had cracked down on distilleries. When Fernández was growing up, in the sixties and seventies, he recalled agents burning equipment and shooting holes in stills. After a raid, the agents would sometimes ask the family to make them dinner, he said. The Fernández family kept producing, but retreated farther into the mountains. The raids took a toll. By the time that the Mexican government officially recognized sotol, in the nineties, an entire generation had “lost the taste” for it, he recounted. “Vodka, whiskey, beer—all the legal, packaged, taxed stuff has displaced it,” Pico added. (Looby bristled at the idea that Mexican sotol distillers were oppressed. “You hear about them being persecuted,” he said. “And I’m, like, ‘No, wait a second. The Jews were persecuted. You guys were breaking the law.’ ”)
The following morning, Pico was bright-eyed even before coffee. He’d heard a rumor about a woman selling sotol in town. We found her in a small, dusty convenience store. The woman, who preferred not to give her name, ushered us into a back room and pulled a plastic bottle from the fridge—a batch made by her brother up in the mountains. She cleaned a small cup with her shirt, and we passed a sample around. The sotol was bracing, earthy—not ideal for ten in the morning but appealing nonetheless. Pico left the woman his phone number to pass on to her brother. “I haven’t done anything like this in a while,” he said, as we drove away. Our backroom tasting seemed to put him in a reminiscing mood, and he talked about the early, exploratory days of Sotoleros, when he travelled to parts of Chihuahua that he’d never otherwise have visited. “This is where the narcos pulled us over that one time,” he said, offhandedly, as we went down a nondescript street on the outskirts of town.
These days, Pico has less time to explore. Selling artisanal, small-batch sotol had left him plagued with “cash-flow issues,” he said. The producers he worked with needed money—to fix equipment, to hire workers, to pay for medical bills—and he couldn’t always provide it. He daydreamed about sotol-centric ecotourism: Americans coming across the border to tour distilleries; water-sucking pecan orchards replaced by native, drought-tolerant sotol plants; thriving local economies. “There’s a lot of opportunity in this industry, but right now it’s untouched,” he said.
Last year, Pico and Don Lalo launched Nocheluna Sotol, in partnership with Lenny Kravitz and Casa Lumbre, a Mexican liquor company known for tweaking obscure spirits to make them palatable for mainstream audiences. The venture was also backed by the liquor conglomerate Pernod Ricard. “Everything moved really quickly,” Pico said. Don Lalo got to drive a new pickup truck; Pico went to launch parties in Brooklyn, Paris, and Mexico City. But, amid the excitement, Pico found himself “cancelled a little bit,” he said. His friends in the world of artisanal spirits considered him a sellout. “It’s like a cool-kid club, the industry people. They’re all these purists,” he said, sounding more sad than angry. “I spent a lot of time with purists—a lot of them were the first ones to receive me.” He was still making Sotoleros, his passion project, but he said that sales have dropped precipitously since October, when Nocheluna was announced. “I’m not sure what to make of it,” Pico said.
Pedro Jiménez, the founder of Mezonte, a non-governmental organization that supports traditional mezcal producers, said that he considers Pico a friend, but also that he believes that “mass production is the death of agave spirits.” Every major liquor conglomerate now owns a mezcal brand; according to Jiménez, the flood of global investment has harmed mezcal-producing communities. “Saying that you’re creating jobs—it’s the easiest thing to say to clean your conscience,” he said. “But at what cost?” He rattled off a list of issues: deforestation, soil depletion, loss of biodiversity, conflict within communities. “People stop growing other plants to plant more agaves, because they yield more money. That changes their way of eating—now they’re buying from a supermarket instead of growing themselves, and that creates health impacts.” Big brands tailor the taste of a product to suit an international market; producers may be lauded in marketing materials as “mezcal maestros” but have little control over the product’s flavor profile. Jiménez told me that he respects Don Lalo, but he was disappointed when he tried Nocheluna. “You can see that there’s part of that spirit still there, but it’s, like, ‘What happened?’ It’s not there any more. It’s not quite there,” he said.
Although artisanal Mexican spirits are often marketed on the basis of their authenticity, there is a clear tension between promoting them and preserving them in their traditional form. A handful of Mexican entrepreneurs, including Pico, have founded an advisory body to certify bottles of sotol. A similar regulatory council for mezcal has insured a level of quality control, but this has also meant that some traditional producers are now prohibited from using the word “mezcal” on their bottles because they don’t meet the council’s standards. Small-scale producers were almost wiped out by the expansion of the international liquor industry; now, according to people such as Pico and Victor Ibarra, their best chance at survival is entering that marketplace on its own terms. (Jiménez disagreed that these were the only options: “We do have examples of another way, like with single-malt Scotch from the Scottish highlands. They get some support from the government to produce less, but with better care.”)
“At the end of the day, the consumer has the last word,” Ibarra said when I visited him, in Aldama, an agricultural community a half hour north of Chihuahua City. “The future relies on being able to expand.” Ibarra lives in New York and spent his career as an industry consultant for Dos Equis, Johnnie Walker, and Jägermeister. Now he’s a partner in Oro de Coyame, the Mexican sotol company, which makes the liquor for more than a dozen brands, as well as for its own label.
There’s also the question of whether the ecosystem can bear the growing interest in sotol, which is currently made with plants harvested in the wild. Mexican law requires a permit to do so, and usually limits the harvest to no more than thirty per cent of the plants in a given area. (No such laws apply in Texas, where you can harvest as many as you want.) Jesús Miguel Olivas-García, a professor of agronomy at the Universidad Autónoma de Chihuahua, has been studying the sotol plant since 1997. “If we keep using only wild populations, maybe we have enough plants for no more than ten years of production,” he said. Faridy Bujaidar Ávila, an anthropologist who works in sotol-producing communities, told me about a sotol maker who had exhausted the local plant supply. He was now buying sotol plants from Durango, more than ten hours away, at a much higher cost. (Nocheluna and Oro de Coyame are both attempting to farm sotol plants, but their experiments are in the early stages.)
It was sunset by the time Pico and I reached the Nocheluna distillery, in Aldama. The property used to be a country club, but was long abandoned by the time Pico started renting it. The empty swimming pool and weedy basketball courts gave the place a kind of haunted charm. Eight copper stills dripped inside a metal-roofed open-air structure. It was hardly the corporate behemoth that critics painted it as. But Nocheluna would soon be moving to a new facility, Pico said; as it grew, things would have to be a bit less improvised. Don Lalo came to join us. He was an elegant, reticent man, a fourth-generation sotolero, heritage in the flesh. I asked him what his grandfather would have thought about Nocheluna. “I don’t think he would’ve liked it,” he said, smiling a little sadly. “He would think it was too big.” ♦
