Your Guide to Sotol in Four Bottles

In his 1914 book, Insurgent Mexico, centered around travels south of the border during the revolution, noted journalist and socialist John Reed made several references to sotol, a Mexican spirit found in the north of the country. These cameos did not feature the spirit as a peacemaker. “A barrel of sotol further complicated things,” Reed observed at one dance in Jalisco, shortly before a harpist was shot for playing the wrong note.

Mexican spirits have an uncommonly ornate family tree, and sotol does little to simplify matters. In short, sotol is mezcal’s cousin, once-removed. It’s made from a spindly, stemmed succulent plant called Dasylirion wheeleri (more commonly called the “Desert Spoon,” and, also, confusingly, sotol), which grows in a burst of spiky leaves in the arid hills of northern Mexico, much in the way agave grows further south. Indeed, it was once classified as an agave plant (and is part of the same plant order), which would technically make distillates from it mezcal. However, sotol was reclassified more recently, moving it to its own family tree and creating a separate class of drink.

While relatively new to American cocktail bars, it’s old hat in Mexico, as the John Reed comment suggests. For generations, the sotol plant was dragooned into various uses: Mostly, it was chopped up and used in animal feed or fermented and distilled for industrial alcohol. During Prohibition, a potable version of sotol often cropped up in the court records of smuggling prosecutions. Like early mezcal, it was generally associated with bad behavior.

One hyperbolic 1936 article, headlined “Mexicans Roll Dice of Death,” told of dissolute customers in a Juárez cantina smoking pot and drinking sotol (“a cheap, vicious, Mexican alcoholic drink”) before rolling dice to see who would shoot the next person who walked in the door. Even as late as 1955, a border agent told a Dallas reporter that, “Whenever there is a little trouble down here on the river, sotol is at the bottom of it.”

Today, its reputation is defined less as fuel for misbehavior and more as a regional spirit worthy of serious consideration. With the rise of single-village mezcals and a cool-hunting culture that values spirit terroir, sotol is experiencing a moment. (As are, to a lesser extent, other regional Mexican spirits, like bacanora and raicilla.) Fans of Mexican spirits are finding that sotol, especially those that have forgone aging, can be grassier, less smoky and every bit as complex as a well-made mezcal or tequila. And, as a sign of its growing maturity, sotol has been granted its own “denomination of origin” (like tequila and mezcal), which restricts production to the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Durango.

If you subscribe to the theory that the harder something is to find, the sweeter it will taste, sotol is the nectar of the gods. Although some brands have launched more assertive pushes into American markets, and importers are starting to scout about for other examples to bring north, sotol remains relatively elusive. But keep an eye peeled when on the hunt for tequila and mezcal, and you may spot a welcome interloper.