A Medios Chiles

At a glance

A Medios Chiles is an artisanal mezcal made in San Pablo Etla, a town in the Etla valley just north of Oaxaca City, by maestro mezcalero (master distiller) Don Fortino Ramos. The mezcal is the product of his hands and the experience of three generations, built around agaves selected to suit the land they grow on.

The name is a piece of everyday Oaxacan speech. A medios chiles is a Mexican expression for being pleasantly merry, tipsy and warm but not drunk, exactly the state the maker hopes a measured glass of his mezcal will leave you in. For a newcomer, that name is the spirit of the house in miniature: this is small-scale, traditional mezcal made to be enjoyed with care rather than consumed by the bottle.

How the mezcal is made

A Medios Chiles is made by the full traditional method, with a few signature touches. The agave hearts are roasted in a conical earthen oven, the wood-fired pit that gives the spirit its gentle smoke. The roasted agave is then crushed in a wooden canoe or mill, and the milled agave is fermented naturally in vats of Sabino wood, the Montezuma cypressSabino: the Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum), Mexico's national tree. Its wood is used here for the fermentation vats; the choice of wood is one of the variables a maestro uses to shape a mezcal's character.. The mostoMosto: the fermented mash of crushed agave, fibre, and liquid that goes into the still; after distillation it becomes mezcal. is then double-distilled with careful temperature control.

A distinctive habit of the house is timing batches to the full moon, a traditional practice the maker holds enhances the character of each mezcal. Whatever the mechanism, the effect is the same as the rest of the method: small batches, made by hand, that vary from one run to the next rather than being engineered toward a single fixed flavour. This is mezcal in the artisanal mould recognised by the mezcal standard (NOM-070-SCFI-2016A regulatory-standard NOM is a federal Mexican product norm. Unlike facility NOMs (4-digit identifiers of specific distilleries), a standard NOM defines the rules for an entire category of product: which raw materials are permitted, where the product may be made, how it must be processed, and how the bottle must be labeled. Standard NOMs are written as "NOM-XXX-SCFI-YYYY" where XXX is the standard number and YYYY is the year. NOM-070-SCFI-2016 (Mezcal). The official Mexican standard for mezcal production. Defines three production tiers (Mezcal Industrial, Mezcal Artesanal, Mezcal Ancestral) with specific equipment and method requirements for each, lists the permitted agave species and states, and governs labeling. Enforced by the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal (CRM).): pit-roasted, traditionally milled, open-fermented, and copper-distilled, with no industrial shortcuts.

The range

The everyday workhorse is espadín (Agave angustifolia), the cultivated agave behind most Oaxacan mezcal, with reviewers noting lemon, pineapple, and pear over a sweet, lightly herbal core. From there the house works through slower-growing wild and semi-wild agaves: madrecuixe, a columnar form of Agave karwinskii known for savoury, mineral, earthy depth, and arroqueño (Agave americana), a large, very slow-maturing agave that yields a rich, full-bodied spirit. The house also bottles an ensamble, a deliberate blend of more than one agave distilled together, which gives the maestro a way to balance the bright top notes of one plant against the depth of another.

Where A Medios Chiles sits

A Medios Chiles belongs to the broad and vital world of single-maestro Oaxacan palenques making excellent traditional mezcal under their own name, without a celebrity founder or a multinational owner. It is the same artisanal, family-rooted category as houses like Rey Campero and the producer-credited bottlings of El Jolgorio, distinguished by Don Fortino's full-moon batching and Sabino-wood fermentation. Reading it against those houses is the most useful exercise: the differences are of village, agave, wood, and hand, not of category. Independent documentation is lighter than for the larger names, so the specifics here lean on the maker's own account alongside retailer and importer notes.

See also