Mezcal — EspadínOpen
Vago Espadín en Barro
Oaxaca · 50.2% · Vago
Flights & collectors
A guided tasting, and the people you pour with.
Pick a goal — learn something, or a blind challenge — and Tahona puts four of your own bottles in an order that teaches something. It saves as a tasting, so the people you follow can pour the same flight and disagree with you.
Blind flight · regions · four pours
- 1 Fortaleza Blanco
- 2 Vago Espadín en Barro
- 3 Bozal Ensamble
- 4 Real Minero Largo
Why a tahona
A tahona is a two-ton volcanic stone wheel, dragged in a circle by a horse or a mule over agave that's spent days roasting in an earthen pit. It crushes the cooked hearts slowly, without heat. A mechanical shredder does the same job in minutes.
The stone doesn't strip the fibre out of the must the way a shredder does. Fibre, pit char, and grit from the stone itself all end up in the ferment, and that's part of what gives a tahona-pressed spirit its character: earthier, less clean, more particular to wherever it was made. Most distilleries switched to shredders decades ago because a stone wheel pulled by an animal can't keep up with real production volume. The producers who kept one usually did it on purpose.
That kind of bottle deserves more than a photo in a camera roll. Tahona keeps the process, the maker, and the year attached to it instead of losing them the way most collections do.