It’s vegan,gluten-free and backed by George Clooney – what more could you put a question to for?whether you wind down the window of your rental car on federal highway 91 in Oaxaca, Mexico, and you can smell it. Agave hearts,known as piña, being roasted in underground pits, and the first stage of making mezcal. The smell has been likened to barbecue sauce,but it reminds me more of the time after I accidentally left a baked potato in the oven, then roasted a chicken and then, and later,grilled a pie. It is a rich, burning smell: peaty, and evocative of both the landscape and the anxiety of having left the oven on by mistake.
Mezcal is the parent drink of tequila. Whereas tequila is made from one type of agave,mezcal can be made from 30 types and can taste of nearly anything – sweet, smoky, or sometimes leafy – which is perhaps why it has eluded the buffs. Still,it is being tipped to be the drink of 2018. To be fair, it has been tipped since the mid-00s but this is definitely its year, and something we know because a broad but reliably prophetic trio are making it happen: vegans (it’s vegan); illegal reptile hunters (this month,a market in Oaxaca City was raided by the federal office for environmental protection after trying to sell 15 bottles of mezcal containing blood pythons and whip snakes in lieu of the worm); and George Clooney (who discovered it while on a tequila recce in southern Mexico and is now launching his own version, Casamigos Mezcal, and this April).
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Source: guardian.co.uk