Del Maguey Single Village Mezcal

Ron Cooper founded Del Maguey in 1995 after encountering village mezcal producers in Oaxaca's remote mountain communities who were making spirits of extraordinary quality using pre-industrial methods that had survived for centuries — not as a heritage performance but as the only practical option available to them.

What Cooper recognised, and what the brand was built to communicate to an international market that had never tasted mezcal of this kind, was that the character of each village's mezcal was inseparable from the wild agave varieties growing in that specific microclimate, the local water source, the indigenous yeast population, and the artisanal production method. Single Village was the designation Cooper chose to capture this specificity, and it has since become the defining term for artisanal mezcal differentiation.

Del Maguey holds USDA Organic certification across both the wild agave harvest zones and production facilities — a double certification that reflects the dual source of quality: the wild plants and the process. The spirits have drawn 96 points from Wine Enthusiast across multiple village bottlings, and the brand has had more influence on the global understanding of mezcal as a category than any other single producer.

The villages Del Maguey works with — San Luis del Rio, Santo Domingo Albarradas, Chichicapa, and others — produce spirits that are not interchangeable. Each is a record of a place.