This year, I will be among the many celebrating the versatility, vigor, rigor and future of the century plant, aka agave, maguey or mezcal. For many of us, our initiation into the culture of tequila, mezcal, and other agave spirits was love at first sip. We intuited that we were entering into an endlessly fascinating domain of Mesoamerican culture, agriculture, folklore, and pleasure, though we could not initially taste or see all the profound dimensions of the agave spirit world.
Even after some of us have become agave spirits aficionados, we became amazed at how often they surprise us with unforeseen pleasures and wondrous stories. I’ll be telling you some of those stories in brief the next couple months as David Suro and I ramp up for the release of our co-authored book, Agave Spirits, The Past, Present, and Future of Mezcals, coming from @wwnorton on 5/16. Preorder now!
–Gary Paul Nabhan
