Quiquiriqui

There’s a Mexican saying that you don’t find Mezcal, it finds you. Mezcal found Melanie Symonds in 2011, in the hills behind Puerto Escondido on the Oaxacan coast. The story of a youthful misadventure and a jerrycan of wild Tobalá is recounted in full here. To cut a long story short, what was meant to be a six-week holiday became a six-month immersion into Mezcal folklore and culture and spawned one of the agave spirit’s most authentic and sustainable drink brands.

The first law of Quiquiriqui Mezcal: these drinks are insanely delicious. In a nutshell, these unique spirits are must-tries for any lover of terroir-driven drinks and craft spirits in general. Each Mezcal in the range is a Single-Palenque, 100% agave spirit made strictly according to the newly ratified Artisanal category. Using locally grown agave plants, hand-harvested when mature, the piñas are traditionally roasted in fire pits for three to five days and crushed using a tahona (stone wheel). Fermentation occurs outside in tinas, or oak vats, relying only on the microbe-rich airborne yeasts. The final process is a double-distillation in wood-fired, small copper stills. Bottled unfiltered, each roast produces around 1000 litres of evocative, smoke-wreathed agave spirit.

Great artisanal Mezcal embodies a level of authenticity and raw site-driven quality that is almost impossible to match in the spirit world.

The Espadín is QuiQuiRiQui’s classic, highly mixable house-style mezcal. It’s beautifully crafted in Santiago Matatlán by Carlos Méndez. Méndez comes from prime mezcal stock; his family has made the drink for six generations and that experience manifests in a bold and complex spirit with intense, roasted agave flavours and a peppery finish that is characteristic of the lowland Espadín agave.

Alongside her flagship, Symonds now oversees a rotating series of limited edition silvestres; Mezcals made from decades-old wild or semi-wild agave species. Using traditional techniques and recipes, each made-to-order batch is hand-crafted by families who have been producing traditional Mezcals in their communities for generations.