Cultivado

Cultivado is the Spanish word for "cultivated," the counterpart to silvestre on mezcal labels. It denotes agaves grown in cultivated parcels (monoculture rows), reproduced almost entirely by clonal hijuelos (offshoots) rather than by seed. This is the default for commercial Agave tequilana Weber Azul (Blue Weber), which is now produced at near-100-percent clonal scale in Jalisco, and it is the default for most cultivated A. angustifolia espadín in Oaxaca and elsewhere.

The clonal monoculture has a botanical cost: drastically narrow genetic diversity. A. tequilana populations sampled in commercial Jalisco fields show genetic uniformity indistinguishable from a single clone replicated across millions of hectares. This is a textbook vulnerability profile: a single pathogen or pest outbreak (such as the Fusarium oxysporum wilt that has periodically swept Jalisco fields) can sweep an entire cultivar in a way that a genetically diverse wild population would resist. The botany chapter covers this monoculture-vulnerability problem in depth.

The labeling gap discussed under silvestre runs in reverse for cultivado. 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). does not legally define cultivado either, so the term has no enforcement mechanism. In practice, since almost all commercial mezcal that is not labeled silvestre is implicitly cultivado, the absence of a legal definition is less commercially consequential than for the silvestre side, but it is still a regulatory void. The regulation chapter walks the silvestre / cultivado / semi-silvestre proposals that have circulated.