Like all great spirits, the story of Volume 7’s arroqueño begins long before it was distilled. For the sake of brevity, we’ll skip the full history of the four generations of the Sánchez family that have produced mezcal in San Baltazar Chichicapam and start in 2002.
As boys, Jesus Sánchez Altamirano and his three older brothers learned to make mezcal while helping their father, the late Don Faustino Sanchez whose work became famous via a successful mezcal brand in the early-mid 2000s. While his brother Poncho moved to Southern California for work, and his other two brothers stayed in town to work in the palenque, “Chucho” as he’s known to friends, took a slightly different path, attending university at UABJO, where he earned a degree in agronomy.

It was in school that Chucho met Zuleima, an education major from San Francisco Infiernillo, a small village in the Mixteca Baja region of Oaxaca. The two would eventually marry, and while they moved to Chichicapam, where he worked with with his family and she became a school teacher, they would make the four hour drive to her hometown somewhat regularly, and Chucho would become familiar with the area’s magueyes and mezcales.

While Zuleima’s family isn’t involved in mezcal production, they helped connect Chucho with some magueyero neighbors, who eventually sold him some tobalá (the region’s most popular maguey), as well as several tons of 12 year old arroqueños which ranged in size from 60-120 kilos per piña, which he would eventually turn into the bottles we have this month.

So far, Chucho has been impressed with the quality of Infiernillo’s maguey, which he says has a higher concentration of sugars than the plants that grow in Chichicapam, and plans to buy more from his in-laws’ neighbors going forward.