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Combatting Claims Of Cultural Appropriation, Three Texans Distill A Spirit Typically Made In Mexico

Tara Nurin
This article is more than 6 years old.

Michael Thad Carter

As tequila races to the top of the best-seller charts, American drinkers are having a good time discovering some of its lesser-known Mexican relatives. Among them, mezcal holds unwavering dominance … but savvy sippers recognize two more obscure offerings that are sneaking up from behind: raicilla and bacanora. One more, called sotol, often gets categorized along with the first four but because the plant that bears its name traces its lineage to the Nolinaceae family instead of taking root in the agave plant like the others, it is, despite conventional wisdom, not a mezcal.

Though sotol proves incredibly hard to track down (no more than two New Jersey bars appeared to carry it in May 2016), on November 16, its name should resonate a little more with American imbibers as a suburban Austin, TX, distillery opens as the first since Prohibition to harvest and produce it domestically on a permanent basis.

“For as long as I can remember people were moonshining it in West Texas,” says co-founder Judson Kauffman, the 6th generation Texan who conceived of the idea to make Desert Door Texas Sotol.

Desert Door

The story behind Desert Door is certainly a romantic one. The descendant of a pre-Civil War brewery owner retires from a prestigious career in the Navy, enrolls in an MBA program and turns a team project into an honest-to-goodness business where he and his two (also former military) classmates hand-harvest an underutilized and plentiful Tex-Mex weed and distill it into a soon-to-be popular spirit. A pre-opening day interview with the heavily drawling Kauffman, 34, and equally accented 5th generation Texan Brent Looby, 47, flourishes with evocative words like heritage, resurrection and awestriking, while professionally moody marketing photos portray the rugged trio like cowboys working out on West Texas’ equally rugged hill country.

By leasing and borrowing harvesting rights on 75,000 acres of private land and making the liquid almost entirely by hand using custom equipment and techniques to steam the sotol heart (called the “pina”) according to modern rather than traditional methods, Desert Door’s owners hope to turn their Texas-grown, Texas-branded sotol into the state’s official spirit. For now, the public can try it alone, in cocktails or along with a $25 tour at the distillery in Driftwood or, starting in 2018, at a bar, restaurant or store in select Austin-area accounts, 24 miles to the northeast.

“Texas has a lot of pride as a state and unfortunately we don’t have any spirit to call our own,” says Kauffman. “We want to make sotol to Texas what bourbon is to Kentucky.”

Michael Thad Carter

While the friends and relatives who invested the start-up capital can’t wait to celebrate a product they can call their own, founders won’t be getting much support from some historians who study mezcal and sotol and wonder aloud whether the Texans who own Desert Door aren’t profiteering off a product that at least in spirit belongs to Mexico.

“Agave distillates and sotol have a very close association with Mexico so you have to ask if it’s not appropriation of Mexicans’ intellectual capital,” says John McEvoy, mezcal blogger and author of Holy Smoke! It’s Mezcal!

“Distilled spirits are sacred when they involve an identity,” says Ricardo Pico of Sotol Clande, a co-op of five artisanal Mexican sotol producers, who notes that the Mexican government persecuted peasant sotol makers throughout the 20th century in an effort to clear the market for foreign luxury brands. The liquid was finally legalized less than 30 years ago.

“You don’t need to be a 4th generation sotol maker,” he says, “But it has to have to have a soul.”

Desert Door

Legally, Desert Door has no issue using the sotol label, either with or without the optional “Texas” qualifier. Similar to official names like Champagne, Bordeaux or Parmesan, which can only be used to describe goods produced in certain geographic regions, as of 2004 sotol does enjoy a legal designation of origin (DO) that spans the three northern Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila and Durango. But unlike the aforementioned gustatory items, “sotol” carries legal weight in Mexico, though not in much of the rest of the world, including the United States. Given its miniscule production size (approximately 20-30% of mezcal and --- of tequila), it’s unlikely Mexico’s sotol producers have managed to put together the time, effort or money to seek international naming rights like its bigger siblings tequila and mezcal.

But that doesn’t stop the cries of cultural appropriation. Pico says even though the sotol plant grows in the wilds of West Texas, along with Northern Mexico and parts of New Mexico and Arizona, there’s no evidence to suggest anyone north of the border making moonshine out of it.

“I’ve asked around and we’ve found no sotol being homemade in Texas. More likely it was brought over the border and was drunk in Presidio (Texas),” he says.

Michael Thad Carter

Either way, Kauffman insists Texas can stake an equal claim to sotol, and not just because the plant has been growing across the Chihuahuan Desert since long before anyone drew up national borders.

“We owe a lot of our appreciation of sotol to the distillers in Mexico that have produced this amazing product that we ourselves have enjoyed drinking,” he emails. “That said, our product is different. Our plants are harvested in Texas and are a different species (Dasylirion texanum) than what's found in Mexico, and the taste of the sotol is very dependent on where the plant is grown.”

Plus, he argues, the Spanish conquistadores taught Native Americans how to distill in the 16th century, before Mexico existed as a political entity, and his consultations with historians and archaeologists show the first humans to rely on undistilled sotol for food, eating utensils, fermentation, and the like, lived in the Lower Pecos Canyonlands, now Texas. But if one plans to use pre-Columbian geography as a basis for ownership, it’s likely no one will win. Pico, who’s also consulted with historians and archaeologists, says Spaniards did teach residents of New Spain -- governed from Mexico City and comprising Mexico, Central America and parts of the Southern U.S. -- to distill, and anyway, the site that houses ancient evidence of sotol being used as food, utensils and fermentation is called Paquimé, lies in the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

Desert Door

Truthfully, it’s likely that in this case, everyone’s a little bit right and a little bit wrong. Before the United States annexed Texas in 1845, the state formed part of Mexico, and before that, Chihuahuan Desert cultures and tribes lived transnationally and probably brought their customs along when they migrated. Besides, Pico and McEvoy both admit they’re not familiar enough with the Desert Door story to issue a formal opinion and are merely presenting parameters that Kauffman, Looby and their partner, Ryan Campbell, may or may not fit within.

“It’s okay to create new things and experiment but the most honest projects are the ones that already had roots,” Pico says.

In Kauffman’s mind, however, the answer is clear. It doesn’t pertain so much to territory but to lost history and heritage.

“There is a resurrection here,” he says, in his sixth-generation West Texas drawl.