Worming its way into hearts

Eighteen-year-old Marisol Reyes had just given us a guided tour of the distillery, called a \o7palenque \f7in Spanish. She told us about the agave plants and how they're harvested and cooked. We watched a donkey drag a huge stone wheel round and round a track crushing agave pulp. We saw agave juice fermenting in copper vats, infusing the air with the smell of charcoal and burned sugar. We sampled young mescals and mescals aged six months in oak casks. We tried flavored versions, like cappuccino and passion fruit.

Now it was time to get on with it.

A woman behind the bar put a shot glass of youthful mescal in front of two tourists who were about the relative maturity of the liquor. One happened to be my stepson, Ben Shepard, who's in his early 20s. The woman fished out two pale worms -- each about 1 1/2 inches long -- from a jar and placed them on a wedge of lime.

The cameras came out. The crowd hushed. Ben's mother winced.

"\o7Salud\f7," the woman said.

They drank. They chomped down on the limes. They swallowed the worms.

Mescal tradition was maintained.

"How'd it taste?" I asked.

"Not bad," Ben said. "Bland."

I asked the barkeep if she ever eats the worms.

"\o7Ay\f7!" she exclaimed, "\o7No!\f7"

*

Tequila's cousin

ARTISANS are one of the attractions of the state of Oaxaca, and nearly every village seems to specialize in some world-class craft: black pottery, rugs, rustic figurines.

Although Oaxaca city has been roiled by protests and police action, the villages still move at their traditional easy pace. We avoided politics and stuck to exploring the art of making mescal, of which Oaxaca, by tradition and government designation, is the capital.

Mescal is made from the native agave plant, those fleshy succulents with spear-like fronds. If you dig up an agave and cut off the fronds, you get a \o7pina \f7-- a pineapple. Roast, pulp, squeeze, ferment and distill the pineapple and, eventually, you get a clear liquor whose taste varies from fiery and raw to, well, fiery with interesting overtones.

Mescal is often considered the country-bumpkin cousin of tequila, which is also made from pulped agave, specifically blue agave from Jalisco. Many think tequila is to mescal as bourbon is to moonshine.

But some mescal makers dispute this notion. Ron Cooper, 62, an American who founded the Del Maguey Mezcal company, which, in small villages outside Oaxaca, makes several award-winning artisanal mescals.

Cooper described the taste of mescal in near-poetic terms. "Imagine a sweet potato, imagine caramel, imagine grass, all combined," he said. "Imagine pumpkin like a pumpkin pie. It's impossible to describe. How would you describe the flavor of a strawberry?"

He pointed out proudly that you won't find anything curled up in the bottom of a Del Maguey bottle. And that brought us back to this worm thing.

It's not clear who started the practice of preserving a worm (it's actually a moth larva that feeds on agave plants) in bottles of mescal, but the first exports to the U.S. in the 1950s had worms. It became a sales gimmick for the rowdy, I'll-do-anything-once crowd that's often attracted to Mexican border cities.

In fact, Cooper, who grew up in California, had his first drink of mescal in 1963 at Hussong's Cantina in Ensenada. "I was the fool who every night upended a bottle, waiting for the worm to come down," he said in a phone conversation from his U.S. base in Taos, N.M. "Of course, I had horrible hangovers. I was an idiot. But that smokiness created an interest." Thirty years later, he got into the mescal business.

The hint of smokiness and other subtle overtones is boosting mescal's cachet. In the past few years mescal has begun to ditch the worm and its reputation as the drink of college louts. It also has begun to challenge tequila as Mexico's export liquor of choice.

But none of this concerned us at first. For our 10-day Oaxaca trip last year, my wife, Jody Jaffe, and I had planned to explore the markets and villages, and eat every kind of mole possible. Ben wanted to immerse himself in colonial architecture; his brother, Sam Shepard, 17, wanted to practice his Spanish.

Then, Sam, a college lout wannabe, learned about the mescal connection, and we had to push worm hunting to the top of our to-do list.

We got our first taste of mescal on Mina Street, a few blocks from Oaxaca's main downtown square or \o7zocalo\f7. \o7 \f7Mina is the center of the city's chocolate district. After sampling various sweets and watching them make mole at Mayordomo, the city's biggest chocolatier, we walked a few doors down to a smaller chocolate place, La Soledad.