SotoMayor

At a glance

SotoMayor is a sotol brand from the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua, made at a distillery called Innovación Licorera and built around the idea of bottling each desert-spoon species on its own so the drinker can taste the difference between them. Sotol is the regional spirit of the Chihuahuan Desert, distilled not from agave but from Dasylirion, a slow-growing rosette plant locally called sotol or "desert spoon." The brand dates its work to 2013.

SotoMayor is worth a careful look because of a name that has caused real confusion. One of its bottlings is labelled Texano, and it is made from a species called Dasylirion texanum. Some early importers and listings read "Texano" and "texanum" and concluded the spirit was distilled in Texas. It is not. The word points at the plant, which botanists named for Texas because the species also grows north of the border, and not at a place of production. SotoMayor is a Mexican sotol made in Chihuahua.

One plant, three species

What sets SotoMayor apart from a generic blended sotol is that it releases single-species bottlings. The desert-spoon genus contains many species, and the three the house works with give noticeably different spirits:

• Texano is the rare Dasylirion texanum expression, distilled three times rather than the usual two, and is the bottling the house treats as its showpiece. Triple distillation strips the spirit toward a cleaner, lighter, more delicate profile.
• Leiophyllum comes from Dasylirion leiophyllum, a species of the higher, cooler Chihuahuan grasslands, and tends to read greener and more herbal.
• Cedrosanum is the Dasylirion cedrosanum expression, the workhorse desert-spoon of the region, generally the earthiest and most savoury of the three.

A fourth release, sold as an Ensamble or Excepcional, blends the three species into a single spirit. Reading the line as a set, with one plant species per bottle and the blend as a summary, is the most useful way to understand what the house is doing: it is a study in how much of sotol's character comes from the species rather than the distiller.

How it is made

The production follows the traditional pattern of the Chihuahuan sotol country. The desert-spoon hearts, the cabezas (heads, the sotol equivalent of the agave piñaPiña: the cooked heart of an agave or, here, a sotol plant. After the spiky leaves are trimmed away, the rounded core that remains looks like a pineapple, which is what piña means in Spanish; it is roasted to turn its starches into fermentable sugars.), are roasted in a pit or stone oven for several days, fermented with wild yeasts that arrive on their own rather than being added, and distilled in copper. Most of the range is double-distilled; the Texano expression is triple-distilled, which is unusual for sotol and accounts for its lighter, more refined character. The house describes its sourcing and methods as organic and traditional. Sotol carries its own Denomination of Origin, governed by the standard NOM-159-SCFI-2004A 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-159-SCFI-2004 (Sotol). The official Mexican standard for sotol production. Names only two legally permitted species (Dasylirion cedrosanum and D. duranguensis), limits production to Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango, and permits up to 49% non-Dasylirion sugar (analogous to tequila mixto). Notably excludes D. wheeleri, which is the most-distributed sotol plant in the Chihuahuan Desert; a regulatory gap., and may be produced in Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango.

Where SotoMayor sits

SotoMayor belongs to the modern, export-minded wing of Chihuahua sotol, sharing shelf space with houses like Hacienda de Chihuahua and Flor del Desierto, but its single-species releases line it up most usefully against a producer-focused brand such as Sotol Clande. Reading it against those neighbours shows how much variation hides inside the single word "sotol," and it is also a small lesson in label literacy: when a desert spirit's bottling is named after a place, it is always worth checking whether the name describes where the spirit was made or merely what plant went into it.

See also