Cumbrita de la Sierra

At a glance

Cumbrita de la Sierra is the agave spirit of one family, made by maestro Dolores González Torres in the mountains above Batopilas, a small town deep in Chihuahua's Copper Canyon (the Barranca del Cobre), one of the most remote distilling regions in Mexico. The name means roughly "little summit of the mountains", and it is literal: the agave grows about a thousand metres above the town, on the summits of the canyon cliffs.

González is at least the third generation of his family to distill here, and one of only a handful of people still making lechuguilla in the region. The spirit is not certified under any protected name, by circumstance and arguably by choice, which makes it a clear window into how the northern sierra distilled long before denominations existed.

The plant and the place

The flagship is a lechuguilla, the northern word (loosely "little lettuce") for several small wild agaves and the spirits drawn from them. In this part of Chihuahua, lechuguilla means Agave shrevei, a small but hardy agave with thick, black-tipped leaves that grows thousands of feet above Batopilas among the peaks of the canyon. González's vinataVinata: the northern Mexican word for a rustic distillery, the equivalent of a palenque further south. It is the workshop where the plant is cooked, fermented, and distilled. sits a few hours from town, on a ranch called Yierbaniz.

Because the plant is wild-harvested at altitude and the operation is one family's, the volumes are tiny and each batch is its own thing.

How it is made

The making is about as old-school as Mexican distilling gets. The cooked agave is crushed by hand with an axe, then fermented in a single underground vat said to be more than a century old. Distillation is done in a heritage still the family calls a trenTren: a composite still used in parts of northern Mexico. Here it is built from a stainless-steel pot, a ring and chamber of encino (oak), and a copper condenser on top. The fermented mash is heated and the rising vapour is condensed back to spirit., assembled from a stainless-steel pot, an encino-oak ring and chamber, and a copper condenser on top.

Some releases are not pure lechuguilla. González also makes batches that blend the spirit roughly half-and-half with the sotol plant, the Dasylirion that grows across the same northern deserts. A blend of agave and the sotol plant in one bottle is something the protected categories do not allow, which is part of why a spirit like this is sold simply as an agave spirit rather than under a regulated name.

Where Cumbrita de la Sierra sits

Cumbrita belongs to the smallest, most traditional end of Mexican distilling: a single maestro, a single canyon, wild plants, hand tools, and no certification. It has more in common with the household sotol and lechuguilla makers of the Chihuahuan sierra than with any branded house, and the lechuguilla-sotol blends place it firmly in the uncertified agave-and-sotol world rather than inside a single protected category. Reading it next to a certified, export-scaled producer is the most useful exercise: it shows what the northern desert spirit looks like before the apparatus of names and labels reaches it.

See also