Agave de Cortés: Six Generations in Santiago Matatlán, and What Capón Means

Santiago Matatlán calls itself the world capital of mezcal, and it is not really a boast. A large share of everything the category exports comes out of this one town in Oaxaca.

Agave de Cortés is made there by the family that has been doing it the longest.

Casa Cortés

The Cortés family has been growing, foraging and distilling maguey in their Zapotec community for close to two hundred years, with the line usually traced back to the 1840s. Six generations.

This bottle is distilled by sixth-generation maestro mezcalero Francisco Javier Cortés Hernández. The family owns the brand outright, which is worth noting in a category where a lot of labels are owned somewhere else and made under contract.

How It Is Made

Every step here is the traditional one, and the importer lists them plainly.

The agave is 100% Espadín, Agave angustifolia. Plants are harvested between six and twelve years old. They are cooked with oak in a conical earthen pit oven, milled with a traditional stone tahona, fermented in open-air wooden vats called tinas, and distilled twice in a copper pot still.

That combination is what earns the Mezcal Artesanal designation on the label. Nothing in the chain is mechanized in a way that would push it into the industrial tier.

It is bottled at 45% ABV.

The Word Worth Knowing: Capón

At least 60% of the agave used here is harvested capón, and this is the detail most people have never had explained.

An agave spends its whole life storing sugar in its core so it can do one thing: send up a quiote, a flower stalk that can reach several meters, bloom, set seed, and die. That single flowering consumes the sugar reserve the plant spent a decade building.

Capón means the quiote was cut off before it could bloom. The plant keeps living, keeps the sugar, and keeps concentrating it. The piña gets sweeter and denser than it would have been.

It also means a harvest window, not a harvest date. Cutting the quiote is a decision made in the field, plant by plant, and then the plant sits for months afterward. When a producer tells you their agave is capón, they are telling you someone walked the rows twice.

What It Tastes Like

Smoke is present but subdued, which is characteristic of a well-run pit rather than a heavy-handed one.

Underneath that, vegetal ripeness and florals on the nose. On the palate the proof and the acidity balance each other, and the flavors stack: lemongrass, damp earth, faint fruit, and a dense clay minerality. The texture is silky and the body is fuller than the price suggests.

How to Drink It

Neat, at room temperature, in a copita. Small pours.

At 45% it takes a couple of minutes in the glass to settle. If you taste it the second it is poured you will get mostly alcohol and miss the clay note underneath, which is the most interesting thing in it.

Pair It With

Charcoal-grilled skewers, anything with char on it, and salty fried food.

Try It at Juraku

Agave de Cortés is part of the agave selection at Izakaya Juraku, Lower East Side. Bottles on this shelf rotate, so check the current menu or ask the bar what is open.