This Rare-Bottle Mezcal Collector Offers Unique Tastings in Oakland

Behind a Victorian house near High Street in East Oakland — in a residential neighborhood where adults and kids playfully linger outside after dark, and rubber tire marks etch the concrete like scriptures from a history of sideshows — the Bay Area’s most off-the-radar mezcal session awaits.

This is where Hugo Gonzales, a self-described mezcal storyteller, invited me for a private crash course on the smoky Mexican spirit.

Our night began by picking up an order of three plates of tacos from nearby Taqueria El Paisa. We loaded up on multi-colored salsas and took our loot back to a nondescript garage, where Gonzales proceeded to deliver the most educational and quirkily passionate mezcal tasting I’ve ever had.

With over 100 rare bottles of regionally diverse Mexican spirits in his personal stash to go along with a bookshelf of related texts, mezcal production maps, vintage mezcal paraphernalia and a “tasting wheel” — a large set of concentric circles with a dictionary’s worth of vocab to precisely pinpoint any mezcal flavor profile — Gonzales is more than qualified to teach others about Mexico’s ancient relationship with the agave distillate.

But his journey into mezcal isn’t what you’d expect. Having grown up in the Xochimilco area of Mexico City, Gonzales was once a lawyer and a government employee before marrying a U.S. citizen and moving to Cambodia for environmental work. Eventually, his wife — a first-generation Hungarian American who was raised in the Bay Area — convinced him to move here in 2013.

Gonzales once preferred to drink pulque, a fermented beverage that is nearly impossible to find outside of Mexico. He slowly became a fan of mezcal while living in California, where he gained a newfound appreciation for the distilled spirit’s Mexican traditions. At the time, he worked in construction. Despite being good with his hands, the physical demands and constant overtime shifts led him to seek another, more inspiring career path based on his heritage.

“It’s not the life I wanted, but I gave five years to that,” he says while pouring me a splash of micro-batch, Oaxacan mezcal. “In Mexico, we have something called ‘saboreada’ (tastings). I decided to start doing that here. I don’t want to go back to construction.”

Gonzales didn’t bluff. For the past six years, he has plunged himself deep into the mezcal multiverse. The devoted connoisseur regularly visits Mexico’s palenques (old-world mezcal distilleries) and occasionally treks into the Mexican hillsides for days on end to accompany the maestros as they concoct tiny 40-liter batches from start to finish. He then returns to the Bay Area and disseminates what he’s learned.

Currently, Gonzales works part-time as a mezcal consultant at Odin Mezcaleria, a Mexican restaurant in Oakland’s Jack London Square that serves the best variations of mezcal cocktails I’ve encountered in the Bay. He’s also a member of Maestros del Mezcal, a non-profit that supports the artisanal traditions of non-corporatized mezcal producers in Mexico, which he sometimes gives public talks about (including at a recent KQED Live event). He is a brand ambassador for a handful of mezcals that have entered the U.S. market in recent years.

Like mezcal itself, Gonzales is somewhat roguish — a Mexican immigrant who simply loves the beverage and genuinely wants to inform others about how, where and why it’s produced. He’s especially mindful of the maestros, too.

“It’s important to talk about small productions of small [scale] mezcaleros,” he tells me. “[It’s] one of the most important things. Transparency.”

During my visit, he makes a point to name every maestro when holding up each bottle. (Most small-batch productions show the region where the mezcal comes from, the genus of agave, any materials and processes used, and who made it by first and last name.) Throughout the night Gonzales riffs like a freewheeling jazz musician, improvising with personal anecdotes and backstories about each mezcal and its maestro. It’s not just a flamboyant show of bravado; Gonzales also drops hella knowledge.

One of the main points he drives home is simple: Each mezcal is extremely nuanced in process, craft and result, differing from maestro to maestro, pueblo to pueblo. Mezcal is extremely varied and comes from multiple sources (Mexico has over 300 agave species that vary across the changing climates of the country’s 32 states). Though largely associated with Oaxaca — which admittedly accounts for over 90% of mezcal production in the world and has grown in demand at an alarming rate — mezcal is cultivated in ten disparate regions of Mexico. Oaxaca’s biodiversity certainly allows for an ideal proliferation of the agave-based drink, but as my time with Gonzales progressed, he went deeper into his metaphorical bag to reveal some of the rarest mezcals I’ve ever tasted, spanning from areas in Guerrero, Chihuahua, Zacatecas and Tamaulipas. He effectively took me on a tour of Mexico with each quarter-shot of mezcal while connecting the dots on his agave map.

One shot of mezcal might yield a zing of gun metal. Another could evoke strawberries. The next? Maybe copper. One mezcal I tasted even had notes of salt and seafood.

In explaining each pour, Gonzales is more of a professor than he is a bartender, more poet than salesman. As a former construction worker who knows what it means to use his hands as a means to make ends meet, he has a kindred gratitude for the type of corporeal rigor that mezcal-making demands of its maestros. This isn’t a big-corporate industry, after all; mezcal is still largely homegrown and handmade, demanding a kind of slow-burning discipline of bygone techniques that reflect the slow burn that follows each sip.

Coyote-, armadillo- and turkey-distilled mezcals (made with a redistillation process wherein the animal’s carcass is hung over the still)? He’s got that. Unlabeled stashes straight from the pit-fired earth? Yep, it’s a casual part of his rotation. But more than the sipping and smoke blowing, it’s about the context — the magical surrealism that is inherent in Mexico that Gonzales so effortlessly summons on this side of the border. In the broadest sense, to learn about and better understand mezcal — its permutations, its origins, its peculiarities — is to learn about and better understand Mexico. (“Not all of it is smoky,” Gonzales says of mezcal, but his aphorism can be applied to the negative perceptions surrounding Mexico as well.)

To be clear, I’ve had my fair share of mezcal dalliances; I once found myself drinking mezcal with the governor of Michoacan at a family dinner on a bull ranch. I’ve also sipped it with my uncles and cousins across the border, and enjoyed it at family parties in the States. But an evening with East Oakland’s underground mezcal king is unlike any bar stool I’ve sat on or any drinking tour I’ve attended. For some, mezcal is seen as a spiritual aid, and it is with this kind of deep reverence that Gonzales handles the holy beverage.

Mezcal in the Bay Area is usually associated with high-end cocktails, which tend to dilute the spirit. It’s rarely consumed in the same way bar-goers might ask for a shot of tequila or a glass of whiskey on the rocks. Though mezcal has entered the mainstream’s vocabulary in recent years, it remains far behind tequila and Corona in terms of its market size and popularity. Part of the reason is that mezcal simply requires a Herculean effort — along with a deep, intimate knowledge — to produce. It lacks the kind of celebrity investment, distribution and brand power of other, more popular Mexican alcoholic beverages. Mezcal is more esoteric, and the Mexican government has sometimes struggled with enforcing the “quasi-illegal shenanigans” surrounding it.

For Gonzales, those misunderstandings are part of what attracts him to mezcal. Like the rest of us, he’s learning as he goes. Sitting inside a clandestine garage with a belly full of suadero and a few pours of rare mezcal, I’m happy to be along for the liquid ride.

“People ask me, ‘Are you a sommelier for mezcal, a mezcalier?’ No, I am not,” he says. “I am not an expert. Actually, every time I start to read more about it or try to study it too hard, I get more confused. So the only thing I can do is go to Mexico to explore, to make connections with the people and master distillers, to get the most direct knowledge I can. Then I share the best that I can with you. I am just a storyteller.”

Hugo Gonzales is available for private tastings and educational mezcal sessions. Contact him on Instagram (@agavesanto) for more details.