Nov. 30: Scorpion Mezcal with Master Distiller Douglas French...
Fellow Drammers!
Mark your calendars for November 30th at 8pm EST / 5pm Pacific, as we welcome back Douglas French, Master Distiller at Scorpion Mezcal (and also Sierra Norte), who will join us to unveil our 3 newest Drammers picks, which are truly historic releases. The tasting will include those 3 expressions and will also include their standard core range for comparison (blanco, reposado, anejo).
Good things come to those who wait, and our friend, Master Distiller Douglas French, has been waiting a long, long time to release these special mezcals that are some of the oldest ever released. Long before he started making Sierra Norte Mexican Whiskey, he created the Scorpion mezcal brand, and over a decade ago he built an underground warehouse to experiment with aging some extra-old mezcals which are finally ready. These go way, way beyond the normal definitions of mezcal aging (“anejo” is aged at least 1 year, “extra anejo” at least 3 years. These three releases are all between double and 4 times the definition of extra anejo. Tequila aside, virtually nothing like it has ever been released.
At our barrel pick event at the Scorpion Palenque (distillery) in Oaxaca in October of 2021, our club was given the special opportunity to taste these as potential picks for the club. We went in planning to pick one, but the range of flavors was so varied, in the end we couldn’t resist picking three of them: espadin aged 12 years in a barrel, tobala aged 7 years in a barrel and the “barril” agave aged 6 years in a barrel.
There are several important things to note here:
These are easily some of the oldest mezcals ever released, and we say “some of” mostly because of course tequila is a type of mezcal, and there are some extra-aged tequila bottlings out there, many of them from our friends at Fuenteseca. But when it comes to extra-aged mezcal other than tequila, there are hardly any.
The next thing to note here is that these age statements — 12 years, 7 years etc. — represent the amount of time this mezcal was in a barrel. By contrast, our friends at Single Cask Nation released a wonderful mezcal produced by our fiends at Fidencio that was aged in a barrel 5 years, and then rested in glass for 4 years, which they labeled “9 years old” on the bottle. If anyone is wondering if these Drammers Picks from Scorpion are a mix of aging in barrels and in glass, the answer is no, the numbers on these Scorpion mezcal expressions are the amount of time in the barrel alone.
Next it is important to note that most mezcal is note aged at all, and so of course this is going to taste very different. Many people subscribe to the theory (and we’re often in this camp) that the barrel influence overpowers and steps on the beautiful nuances between the different agave types and (perhaps even more importantly) the different soils and terroir where the agaves are grown. In some ways, this extra-aged mezcal has absorbed enough barrel influence that the resulting flavors are somewhere in between the flavor wheels of mezcal and whiskey. The other 9 mezcal batches we’ve selected to date are all unaged, and likely going forward we’ll stick to that, but these unicorn releases from Scorpion are something else, and we think something very special, altogether.
Lastly, it’s worth noting that these are not single barrel picks — we did “pick” them at a tasting of our members in Oaxaca in 2021, but they are batches of several barrels and we have been allocated a limited number of bottles from the batches for an exclusive period of time.