Luneta
An independent house founded by Jed Wolf that bottles uncertified agave spirits from family distillers across Oaxaca, Puebla, and San Luis Potosí, labelling them "agave spirits" rather than mezcal by deliberate choice, with a flagship Mexicano from maestra Berta Vásquez of San Baltazar Chichicapam.
At a glance
Luneta is an independent house founded by Jed Wolf that buys, bottles, and sells the agave spirits of family distillers in three Mexican states: Oaxaca, Puebla, and San Luis Potosí. Wolf, a former game designer, began travelling through Mexico's distilling regions after a 2018 career break and built the project around the small family producers whose work he could not find in the United States. Luneta is not a distillery; it is a curator and bottler that names the maker behind each bottle.
The single most important thing to understand about Luneta, and the thing it shares with NETA, is a deliberate labelling choice: Luneta calls its bottles agave spirits, in Spanish destilado de agave, and not mezcal, even though much of the liquid would legally qualify as mezcal. Understanding why is a short course in how Mexico's naming rules actually work.
Why "agave spirits" and not "mezcal"
Mezcal is a protected name. To put the word on a label, a producer must certify each batch with the mezcal regulator and pay the associated fees, and the spirit must come from inside the legally defined mezcal Denomination of OriginDenomination of Origin (denominación de origen): a legal protection that ties a product name to a defined geographic area and ruleset. Only spirit made inside the zone and certified to the standard may use the protected name. Tequila, mezcal, bacanora, sotol, and raicilla each have one.. Oaxaca, Puebla, and San Luis Potosí all sit inside that zone, so Luneta's spirits could in principle be certified and sold as mezcal.
Luneta opts out. As the house explains it, agave spirits can be made from the same plants, with the same techniques, and yield the same distillate as mezcal; they simply are not registered with the regulator. Bottling instead as destilado de agave spares the small family distilleries Luneta works with the prohibitively expensive certification fees and reduces the paperwork on both ends. The trade is real: the bottle gives up the marketing power of the word "mezcal" but keeps full control over how the spirit is made and described. This is the same distillate that the older regional vocabulary simply called vino de mezcal long before there was a denomination to certify.
High confidenceHigh confidence: the main claims on this page are backed by primary sources (regulatory documents, peer-reviewed research, or direct producer attestation) and have been verified against the editorial correction log.That Luneta labels its products as agave spirits / destilado de agave rather than mezcal, and its stated reasons (certification cost, sparing small family distillers the fees and paperwork), come directly from the house's own explanation and are consistent with independent coverage of the wider "agave spirits" movement. They are Luneta's framing of its own choice rather than a neutral third party's, but the framing is well documented and widely shared across this corner of the category.The flagship Mexicano and the makers
Luneta's flagship is its Mexicano, made by Berta Vásquez, a Zapotec maestra from San Baltazar Chichicapam in Oaxaca who learned to distil from her grandfather and is among the most renowned women working in the category. The Mexicano is distilled from wild maguey mexicano (Agave rhodacantha), an agave that takes roughly eight to fourteen years to mature. Her process is fully traditional: the hearts are roasted underground over mesquite for several days, milled by a horse-drawn tahonaTahona: a large stone wheel, traditionally pulled by a horse or mule around a circular pit, used to crush the roasted agave hearts and release their sugars before fermentation., fermented in Montezuma cypress vats with local spring water, and double-distilled in copper, bottled at a robust strength near 48% ABVABV (alcohol by volume): the percentage of the liquid that is pure alcohol. Traditional agave spirits are often bottled at full still strength, commonly in the high 40s, rather than cut down to a round 40%..
Beyond the Mexicano, Luneta bottles a wide range of single-varietal and blended agave spirits from its network of makers, including cuishe and arroqueño expressions and ensambles, each crediting the individual distiller. Its labels are handmade in Oaxaca from up-cycled agave-fibre paper.
Where Luneta sits
Luneta belongs to the same small, principled group of houses as NETA: independent bottlers that buy from family distillers, credit the maker by name, and choose to sell under the honest, less marketable label of "agave spirits." It is closest in spirit to a curated bottler like Mezcaloteca, and it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from the large branded and multinational-owned houses elsewhere on this site. Reading Luneta against those is the most useful exercise: it shows that the most important facts about an agave spirit are often not on the front label, and that sometimes the most honest label is the one that gives up the famous word on purpose.
See also
Mezcal
Mexico's broadest agave-spirit category. Distilled from dozens of agave species across thirteen denominated states, governed by NOM-070-SCFI-2016 and protected as a Denomination of Origin since 1994. Produced in three legal classes (Mezcal, Mezcal Artesanal, Mezcal Ancestral) and required by law to be 100% agave.
NETA
An independent Oaxaca house that commercializes single-batch agave spirits from more than twenty small family producers around the village of Logoche, in the Sierra Sur near Miahuatlán, and labels them "agave spirits" rather than mezcal by deliberate choice.