DELICIAS, Mexico, July 9, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Under the sweltering sun, a "jimador" uses an ax to cut the thorny leaves of a plant weighing almost 40 kilos in the town of Delicias, in the northern state of Chihuahua. From it, sotol, the new sensation among fans of strong Mexican spirits, will be extracted.
The "jimador," a specialized farm worker who harvests sotol plants, shows the core that will be cooked and later distilled into sotol. Access is complicated, as it only grows in the wild on the steep slopes of the extreme deserts of northern Mexico with scorching temperatures during the day and freezing at night.
One of the main sotol research centers is the Faculty of Agricultural and Forestry Sciences at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua (UACH). At this pioneering center, the plant was domesticated for the first time in the late 1980s.
"We rescued the sotol from the danger of extinction at the end of the last century. And we opened the door to its commercialization," explained Dr. José Inés Palma Escamilla, an academic at the faculty.
The word sotol or zotol comes from the Nahuatl word "tzotollin," meaning "sweet of the head." It is a traditional alcoholic beverage from the north of Mexico characterized by its spirit-making process, which has been safeguarded for more than 800 years by the indigenous communities in the region. It has a high alcohol concentration, which varies between 38 and 45 percent, and smoky and vanilla aromas.
Chihuahua's businesses consider that sotol has a great opportunity for development, but stress the need to increase investment in technology.
This is what Alfonso Lechuga, leader of the Chihuahua Agroindustry and Advanced Food cluster, believes, stressing that it can follow in the footsteps of other successful beverages such as tequila and mezcal if science and business join forces.
For Lechuga, one of the obstacles to growth is that "there are few commercial plantations, which still makes it very expensive" and there is "a lot of diversity" among producers.
However, he said that steps are being taken in the right direction with the creation of a designation of origin regulatory council in the three states: Durango, Coahuila, and Chihuahua, the last of which has 75% of total production.
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