If you see a bottle of bacanora on the shelf of your local liquor store, don't think, just buy. With a flavor that lands somewhere between tequila and mezcal, bacanora is one spirit we're totally okay with drinking neat. We loved it from the first sip, and want to know everything about it. So, we spoke to Patrick Dacy, owner and operator of Duke's Liquor Box in New York, and Cecilia Rios Murrieta, founder of Mexican spirits company La Niña de Mezcal, to learn what bacanora is exactly and what makes it so insanely delicious.
Bacanora is a type of mezcal from Sonora, a state in northwest Mexico, except it's a whole lot less smoky than most mezcals. Like tequila and mezcal, bacanora is made from the spiky agave plant native to Mexico. Mezcal is an umbrella term that describes agave-based spirits that are fire-smoked or roasted before fermentation. Another distinction to note: tequila is technically only made from the blue agave plant, while mezcals can be made from dozens of different versions of the plant. Both Dacy and Rios Murrieta describe agave spirits in terms of terroir, and say it's the dry, arid climate, the hot days and cold nights, of Sonora that give bacanora its alluring flavor: dry, complex, and peppery with an earthy finish.
Rios Murrieta, who is launching her bacanora brand this week in California and Washington, has family from Sonora, including a great-grandfather who loved the stuff, so she filled us in on centuries-old lore. First, the story behind bacanora's the stuff Hollywood films are made of. Production of bacanora was banned, Prohibiton-style, in the early 1900s, because the governor of Sonora at the time was very religious and believed drinking and producing alcohol was immoral. "Back then, bacanora was the number two economic activity in the state—and then all of a sudden, he banned it. If they caught you making it, you could be hanged," she said. It wasn't until 1992 that the ban was lifted. "The tradition kind of got lost. And fields that used to be planted with agave were now planted with other things," she explained.
Because of that, most agave harvested for spirits like bacanora still grows wild. Cielo Rojo, for example, still harvests wild agave, according to Dacy: "A year ago, they were still sending people on donkey or horseback to rip these plants out of the ground and bring them to the distillery."
The methods for making the spirit are similar to mezcal, and are seriously old school, said Dacy. The agave's roasted in a big pit in the ground lined with wood charcoal and green (usually banana) leaves, then filled with quartered agave. Then, in order to crush the agave in the pit, the old-fashion method would have a stone wheel pulled by a donkey or men working with giant wooden mallets "like giant dreidels." The result, which "looks like pulled pork," is brown and fibrous and gets left in the open air where wild yeast and bacteria aid fermentation. The mixture is distilled twice then cut with water until it's between 40-50% alcohol. The whole process takes about two weeks.
Since 2011, Cielo Rojo Bacanora Blanco has been the dominant brand on the scene. But bacanora, along with two other regional Mexican agave-based spirits, raicilla and sotol, are breaking onto restaurant and bar menus across the country in a big way. At restaurants like La Biblioteca in Denver, Cosme in New York, Scotch & Sausage in Dallas, and Mexicano in Los Angeles, bacanora's already making appearances on menus, served in cocktails or on its own.
Thanks to growing affinity for mezcal in the U.S., and slow but steady interest in alt-agave spirits more generally, bacanora brands other than Cielo Rojo are bursting onto the scene. The bacanora from La Niña de Mezcal and Bacanora Los Cantiles 1905 are just two launching this year. Still, "Even though there's been awareness of it, it's still the type of product that's a slow-mover on our shelves," said Dacy. "But, once we have people try it, they get into and swear by it. It's really appealing to scotch drinkers, especially."
Bacanora is the agave spirit we've always wanted. As Rios Murrieta put it, "It's the missing link between tequila and mezcal. It tastes better than tequila, but it's way friendlier than mezcal." And we're very, very into it.