Pierde Almas

At a glance

Pierde Almas is a Oaxacan mezcal label founded in 2008 by Jonathan Barbieri, an American-born artist who has lived in Oaxaca for more than three decades, in partnership with the Sanchez distilling family of San Baltazar Chichicapam, a small village in the Tlacolula valley east of Oaxaca City. A palenque is the small rural distillery where mezcal is made (typically a roofed open-air work yard rather than a closed industrial plant). The brand's name translates loosely as "lost souls," a phrase Barbieri pulled from local idiom and that the labels lean into with overtly artistic, painterly bottle art that doubles as the brand's identity. Pierde Almas was acquired by Diageo in May 2018, which is when it joined the same corporate stable that holds Don Julio and Casamigos. Barbieri stayed on, per Diageo's announcement, as brand ambassador and master distiller.

The brand is best known for three expressions: a wild-rabbit Conejo pechuga, a more traditional turkey-breast Pechuga, and the +9 Botanicals mezcal-gin hybrid that sits in its own regulatory category between mezcal and London Dry gin.

The 2008 founding and the Sanchez family partnership

Barbieri arrived in Oaxaca in the late 1970s as a young painter, intended to stay briefly, and stayed for the rest of his career. By the mid-2000s he had built relationships with mezcal-distilling families in the Tlacolula valley deep enough to launch a brand around the work of one of them. Pierde Almas was formally launched in 2008 in collaboration with the Sanchez family at their palenque in San Baltazar Chichicapam, with Miguel and Alfonso Sanchez named in the trade press as the brothers most often overseeing production. Select releases (including some Espadín bottlings circulated through Diageo channels after the acquisition) are also attributed to Gregorio Velasco Luis at a palenque in San Luis del Río, the village in the same eastern-Oaxaca corridor that anchors several other artisanal labels. The Sanchez and Velasco palenques both work in the artesanal copper-still tradition that defines most of Oaxacan mezcal (agave roasted in earthen pits, milled by stone tahona or by hand, fermented in open wood vats, distilled in copper pot stills); some sources have described select Pierde Almas releases as clay-pot, but the brand's own communications do not consistently break out which expression uses which still material, and the safe default reading is artesanal copper unless a specific release says otherwise.

The Conejo and the pechuga tradition

A pechuga is the Oaxacan triple-distillation method in which a raw protein (traditionally a chicken or turkey breast, hung in the still during the third pass) is suspended in the still with seasonal fruits, herbs, and spices, so the spirit absorbs both fat-soluble aromatics and a marker of place-specific terroir. Pierde Almas makes both a classic Pechuga (turkey breast) and the brand's signature Mezcal de Conejo, which substitutes the saddle of a wild Cottontail rabbit for the bird. The Conejo recipe at Chichicapam loads the still with apples, pineapples, almonds, pecans, citrus blossoms, and anise alongside the rabbit, all suspended above the espadín distillate for an overnight third pass. The finished spirit lands between 50 and 52% ABV depending on the batch, with the rabbit registering as a quiet gamey, almost herbal backnote rather than a frontal meat flavor. It is one of the most-cited animal-pechuga releases in the modern mezcal canon.

La Puritita Verdá and the artist-series identity

La Puritita Verdá ("the absolute pure truth," in a colloquial Oaxacan turn of phrase) is the brand's artist-series espadín line, with labels designed by Barbieri himself and rotating cover art across releases. The recipe is a single-village espadín mezcal in the same artesanal copper-still mold as the Espadín baseline, but the line is positioned editorially as the brand's storytelling vehicle, with each release tied to a piece of Barbieri's painting practice. It is one of the few brand-design programs in modern mezcal where the bottle art is the founder's own studio work rather than a hired illustrator's commission.

+9 Botanicals: mezcal-gin hybrid

The brand's most regulatorily unusual product is +9 Botanicals, which is not strictly a gin and not strictly a mezcal. It takes the brand's Agave angustifolia espadín mezcal and redistills it with nine traditional gin botanicals (juniper, coriander, star anise, fennel, orange peel, cassia bark, angelica root, orris root, and nutmeg). The result sits in the same regulatory zone as a compound or "bath-tub" gin (a category that takes a neutral base spirit and macerates botanicals through a redistillation) but with smoky agave as the base instead of grain. The category-defying framing has made +9 Botanicals one of the most-cited examples of "Mexican gin" in the trade press, even though the strict regulatory category for it is closer to a flavored mezcal liqueur. Diageo distributes it globally alongside the brand's straight mezcal lineup.

Notable expressions

The active Pierde Almas catalog rotates around these releases:

• Pierde Almas Espadín: the everyday Agave angustifolia baseline; artesanal copper-still, distilled to at least 50% ABV per the brand's house standard.
• Pierde Almas Tobaziche: Agave karwinskii, the tall-stalked columnar wild-relative group that contributes much of the herbaceous, mineral character Oaxacan drinkers chase.
• Pierde Almas Mexicano: a regional name commonly applied to one of the Agave karwinskii group or to a small Agave rhodacantha variant, depending on the producer.
• Pierde Almas Pechuga: the brand's traditional turkey-breast pechuga.
• Pierde Almas Conejo: the wild-rabbit pechuga that put the brand on the specialty US mezcal map.
• Pierde Almas La Puritita Verdá: the artist-series espadín with rotating Barbieri label art.
• Pierde Almas +9 Botanicals: the mezcal-gin hybrid described above.

Editorial framing

Pierde Almas sits at the seam between two stories the modern mezcal category is still working out. On one side, it is a Barbieri-led artist-founder project that took a single palenque family's work into the global specialty market and helped define what an animal-pechuga release could be at scale. On the other side, since 2018 it has been a Diageo-owned property, and most of the same questions readers ask about Don Julio or Mezcal Vago under Bacardi apply here too: how the same incentives that built the brand will govern decisions about agave sourcing, yields, and release frequency under a multinational owner is not a question with a public answer. The bottles in current distribution carry the same village, the same maestros, and the same recipes the founder built the brand on; the strategic direction sits inside the world's largest spirits company.

See also

Mezcal Vago: another multi-maestro Oaxacan mezcal portfolio that joined a global corporate spirits portfolio (Bacardi, 2022) while publicly claiming operational independence at the palenques.

Don Julio: Diageo's flagship Highland tequila and the largest other Mexican-spirits property in the same corporate stable as Pierde Almas.