Largo

Largo ("long" in Spanish) is one of the most genuinely ambiguous names in the Agave karwinskii sub-variety system. It carries two distinct meanings, both of them well-attested in producer use, and the disambiguation depends almost entirely on which village the producer is from.

In Santa Catarina Minas, largo refers to tobaziche. The lean-trunked, narrow-leaved, austere-distillate plant that producers in Miahuatlán call tobaziche is, in Santa Catarina Minas, called largo. This is the cleanest single-village renaming in the karwinskii complex, and it is documented across the Mezcalistas archive and in producer notes from the village's leading mezcaleros.

In other producer accounts, largo denotes a separate long-trunked karwinskii form distinct from both madrecuixe and tobaziche. Real Minero's catalog includes a clay-pot ancestral Largo expression where the producer's notes specifically distinguish the plant from both madrecuixe (different piña size and shape) and tobaziche (different trunk character and distillate profile). Under this reading, largo is its own phenotype within the karwinskii complex.

The most defensible editorial position is that both readings are correct within their respective producer contexts. The name has not stabilized across Oaxaca, and producer-by-producer attribution is required for any specific bottle. Distillate profile follows the producer's reading: lean and mineral and herbal-green if the producer treats largo as tobaziche; a slightly broader, longer-finishing variant if the producer treats largo as its own phenotype.

Botanical status: A. karwinskii. Confidence: low (genuinely ambiguous between tobaziche-by-another-name and a distinct phenotype; depends on producer and village). The botany chapter's karwinskii section uses largo as one of its main examples of how producer naming reticulation should be respected rather than flattened.

Reference bottles: Real Minero Largo (distinct-phenotype reading); various Santa Catarina Minas tobaziche releases sold as Largo.