8 p.m.
Yola Jimenez is in the wrong place. Instead of the restaurant where we’re meeting, she’s on the other side of Manhattan, because that’s what happens when you travel: You’re forced to rely on a smartphone to tell you which “Pietro” is the aggressively pink restaurant and which is the leather handbag shop. By the time she arrives—silk shirt, blazer, close-cropped pixie and serious, dark eyes—her business partner, Gina Correll Aglietti, and I are on our second round of mezcal negronis.
The negronis are made with Yola, of course—Jimenez’s mezcal brand, which seems suddenly to be everywhere I want to be these days. The Swedish-born pop singer and model Lykke Li is the third partner in the project. She isn’t around that night, but her name comes up a lot. It’s a name that gets Vogue to write about your parties and The Standard to bankroll your benefit dinners and people to write headlines like “Lykke Li Launches Her Own Mezcal Brand.” But, as I learn over the course of a mezcal-soaked night, the story of Yola goes deeper than Hollywood Hills house parties and galas in Manhattan hotels. And the stuff itself? I’m no expert, but I’ll say this: I woke up without a single regret the next day.
9 p.m.
Over plates of lemony fusilli and roasted cauliflower, Jimenez and Aglietti tell me the stories of how they all met—Gina and Yola, Lykke and Gina, Lykke and Yola. It’s confusing and serendipitous but not really, because people who exude this kind of passion and extreme amount of cool tend to eventually end up in the same place.
But…mezcal? For that story, Jimenez has to start at the beginning, 1971, the date on the Yola bottle and the year Jimenez’s grandfather bought the farm outside Oaxaca and started making mezcal. Jimenez was born there, too, but she grew up in Mexico City—her father was a lawyer, and her mother studied and taught philosophy. She went to the “lefty” high school then to Cambridge, England to study feminist political philosophy. That’s when she first came across this theory that, when you give money to women with families, the money stays in the household, but when you give it to men, it tends to fly away. That’s why the Yola bottling facility, in Mitla, Oaxaca, employs women only. “Everyone in these towns is working, and everyone’s a part of making mezcal,” Jimenez tells me. “Why should one guy, the father, get paid for everyone’s work?”
Jimenez moved to New York after college, because she’d always wanted to live there. “I had this fantasy that it was cheap and artists were there and you could do so many things,” she says between bites of steak. “But when I got there, that was pretty much gone.” She was about to start a Masters program at the Sorbonne, in Paris, when her grandfather got very sick. So she went back to Mexico instead.
It was 2008, and Mexico City was blooming. Friends who’d gone away for college, like Jimenez, were coming back. “We were young and had all these ideas but also a deep love for Mexico,” she says. “We saw all the possibilities and how rich the culture was here.” In her hometown, she found the energy she’d been looking for in New York. Jimenez’s grandfather had passed away, leaving her the mezcal farm. “I was shocked the first time I went back to his town [San Juan del Rio],” she says. “I couldn’t even compute the poverty and the isolation. Yes, the people were happy, but they could not afford paint to cover their cement walls.” The town felt empty; a lot of the men were in the U.S., looking for work. Mezcal was the only industry around.
Jimenez started going back often, working on the farm and driving across the agave-rich region, learning about mezcal from other farmers. “Now it’s more competitive,” she says, “but, at the time, you’d just go and learn, and they’d recommend other places, and you’d go there and see how they do it and how different it was from one town to the next.”
She and two friends decided to open a bar in Mexico City that would buy mezcal directly from the mezcaleros in Oaxaca. No one claims that La Clandestina started the mezcal craze in Mexico City, but it was certainly ahead of the curve. Within a year of the bar’s opening, it was as if something had spread in the air. “Everybody I knew was only drinking mezcal,” says Jimenez. “People were starting their own brands, their own clubs.” La Clandestina is where she first met Aglietti and, later, Li. Meanwhile, Jimenez was going to Oaxaca regularly and driving back with gasoline bottles full of mezcal.
“For the first years, I thought mezcal would be a project that I was going to develop, and it was going to be fun, then I’d do other stuff, “ she says. “But I never stopped.”
11 p.m.
“It’s so cleanly made, so close to nature, that it doesn’t affect you the way most alcohol does,” says Aglietti. We’ve finished dinner and moved around the corner to the all-day cafe De Maria, where dinner service is wrapping up. Another round of Yola mezcal appears, this time in green-hued cocktails with kiwi juice and lime.
Mezcal and tequila both come from agave plants—tequila from blue agave and mezcal from a type called espadin. The core, or piña, of the espadin gets smoked before it’s distilled, which gives mezcal that burnt, almost scotch-like taste. Unlike tequila, which is now produced at a massive, industrial scale, mezcal has been made the same, simple way for hundreds of years. Still, I’m not sure that Aglietti’s claim, that I can sip Yola all day and never get drunk, is true.
Aglietti’s role here seems to be equal parts devoted friend, hype machine, and Italian mother for Jimenez, who’s not a natural self-promoter. She tells me about the night they decided to make Yola’s grandfather’s mezcal into a brand (It was her birthday in 2014.). Aglietti was Lykke Li’s stylist and roommate; they shared a house in Laurel Canyon, and Jimenez was coming up every few months from Mexico City. “We had this kitchen with an open bar, so I’d be cooking and Yola would have all these apothecary bottles on the table, and she’d be making cool drinks,” Aglietti recalls.
Mezcal was just starting to pop up in bars in L.A., but “none of it was as good as Yola’s or branded as well,” she says. “Her recipe felt like the one women really responded to.” Friends were calling her up after parties looking for more mezcal, asking, “Is Yola still in town?”
“I didn’t want to do a brand,” admits Jimenez. “But those parties, and becoming friends, are what changed my mind. I trusted them and I trusted their taste.”
A few weeks later, I talk to Li on the phone. She speaks rapturously about Yola, calling it her "magic juice." Before she met Jimenez, she had bad experiences with alcohol—whiskey made her lose her voice, and wine made her stomach ache. Now she drinks Yola pretty much all the time. She keeps bottles of it at her recording studio. If she has to go somewhere she doesn't want to go or do something she doesn't want to do, she takes a bit of Yola with her in the car (we're assuming she's not driving herself). Li even credits her relationship to Yola. "It's how I met my baby daddy," she says, referring to her partner Jeff Bhasker. "It's responsible for a lot of love-making."
Li, a self-described "full-on, hardcore feminist," is also the brand's creative director; she's the one deciding what the world of Yola looks and feels like. I ask her to describe that world, and she tells me it’s about a certain kind of woman: "who's maybe androgynous, who's strong, who’s vibrant, who loves life, music, art, furniture, books, travel." The Yola woman, she says, loves a taco as much as a fine French dinner. She's got a sort-of '70s-era joie de vivre.
She calls it "unfortunate" that so much of the press about Yola has made her the focus, but thinks that, if her name is helping the brand, that's ultimately a good thing. "We'll ride the groove," she says. "I don’t want it to be taking away from what Yola’s family has been working on for generations. But, in our world, the mezcal is Yola's. And we're big fans of hers."
12:30 a.m.
We've made our way to a loft downtown, for a party that seems to be in Jimenez’s honor. Aglietti introduces me to the host, Alexander May—”the artist who did the paint swipe!” she says, holding up one of the many Yola bottles stocked in the kitchen. He’s a close friend and somehow involved in the three women’s connection—the details are unclear. But there he is, offering us bowls of his mother’s vegan soup. And there’s the next round of mezcal too—straight, now, with just a couple cubes of ice.
It’s late, and we’ve been drinking for hours, but no one seems to be fading, and I’m starting to wonder if Aglietti is right about mezcal’s magical properties. She’s floated away to mingle while Jimenez gets started on those other mezcal brands, brands-that-will-not-be-named, who are not using traditional methods and not paying their mezcaleros a living wage. She tells me that all profits Yola makes in Mexico go back to the workers on the farm. “The model has always been to help the people in Oaxaca,” she says. “We haven’t made any money so far.”
That could change if mezcal takes off in the U.S., as it’s primed to do. But despite the fact that it seems to be everywhere, the market is basically microscopic, clustered in a few cities like New York, Austin, and L.A. Jimenez has complicated feelings about that. She doesn’t want mezcal to go the way of tequila: Blue agave is basically extinct. “Everything you’re drinking is a clone,” she says, “and a lot of it’s made with a ton of chemicals.” But she’d like the people in her grandfather’s village to have jobs; she’d like the women to have money to buy their kids backpacks and paint their concrete walls.
Hearing all this, I get why Jimenez might sometimes feel like she’s in the wrong place. She’s still bouncing between Mexico City and L.A., with frequent hops to places like New York and Tulum. She’s talking to farmers in Oaxaca about sustainably growing more espadin; she’s explaining economic philosophy to me over $14 cocktails made from the plant. She’s a woman with great privilege, selling something made by people who likely couldn’t afford to buy it. There are a lot of people like Jimenez out there; few are thinking about it as much as she seems to be.