San Martinero

San Martinero (also written san martín) is a producer-recognized sub-variety in the Agave karwinskii complex, named for the village of San Martín Lachilá and the adjacent communities where the plant is propagated and harvested. In producer use, it is one of the cleanest illustrations of how Oaxacan karwinskii naming is geographically reticulated rather than systematically Linnaean.

The most common pattern: in the Zona Refrescadera, "san martinero" is used as a synonym for barril. The plant a Zona Refrescadera maestro calls san martinero is morphologically the same barrel-form karwinskii (fatter, more rounded piña; shorter trunk) that a Miahuatlán maestro would call barril. The renaming is geographic rather than morphological: the village of origin attaches its name to the plant, and producers across the Zona Refrescadera follow the local label.

In a minority of producer accounts, san martinero is treated as its own phenotype, distinct from the standard barril morphology. The case is harder to make from morphology alone (the plants overlap), and the prevailing editorial reading is that san martinero is most often a regional alias for barril, with occasional producer-specific exceptions where the name marks a slightly different local population.

Distillate tendency, in line with the barril alias, leans honeyed, slightly sweeter, and broader on the palate than the leaner karwinskii forms (cuixe, tobaziche). The botany chapter's karwinskii section discusses why this kind of geographic naming should not be flattened into a single canonical label.

Botanical status: A. karwinskii. Confidence: medium (often a regional alias for barril; sometimes a distinct phenotype in some producer accounts).