By everyone’s admission, the first harvests of blue agave on the Gaviota Coast have been a bit clumsy. Unlike plucking fruits, picking vegetables, or mowing grains — activities that are familiar enough to the everyday Californian farmer — these sharp-spined, sturdy plants are much more bizarre beasts. Their fibrous leaves must first be severed with a spade-like tool called a coa, and then the shallow, spindly roots are hacked away to release the piña. That oversized, pineapple-looking orb — which can grow as big as 150 pounds, although these early ones are only a third that size — is then chopped into chunks that will later be cooked, mashed, juiced, fermented, and distilled into liquor.
It’s backbreaking work, especially when you don’t really have anyone to teach you the way, and the three harvests that have happened so far at La Paloma Ranch in the foothills above Refugio State Beach have been peppered with plenty of laughter, speculation over proper technique, and severely poked butt cheeks. (“Harvest” is itself a clumsy word: Only five piñas have been unearthed in total so far.) The inexperience extends from the growing — these first agaves surprised everyone by maturing and shooting their flower stalks much sooner than the 7-10 years expected — to the processing, as the men down the coast at Ventura Spirits who’ve mastered the distillation of grain and fruit are perplexed by how to best convert these cacti into booze. (Technically, agave aren’t even cacti, but more closely related to the lily species.)
Of course, a steep, slightly silly learning curve is only natural when it comes to the first crack at a new crop. Agave, as most everyone knows by now, is the basis for Mexico’s famed tequila, one of the most sought-after liquors in the world. But tequila — which can only be made from Agave tequilana, aka blue agave, in Jalisco and a few surrounding states in Mexico — is merely an intensely regulated version of mezcal. That’s the name for spirits distilled from more than three dozen species of agave throughout Mexico, from the massive Agave mapisaga (which grows 14 feet tall and wide) to the more diminutive Agave potatorum, whose two-foot-wide piñas are turned into coveted $150 bottles labeled “Tobala.”
So when it comes to turning agave into alcohol, Mexico enjoys a firm head start over California. The indigenous Mesoamericans came first, making a fermented, beer-like beverage called pulque from agave for at least 1,000 years. There’s a sliver of research that suggests distillation may have occurred prior to Spanish contact, but the dominant belief is that it was the conquistadors of the 1600s who first started making liquor out of the plant when they grew thirsty for brandy. The tradition was professionalized over the next two centuries, primarily by the Cuervo and Sauza families. In 1974, the Mexican government protected and regulated the “tequila” name, much like France owns “Champagne,” and did the same for “mezcal” in 1994.
The country is vigilant in their defense of those monikers, and purists are probably smirking to learn that their neighbors to the north are embarking on a grand agave experiment. La Paloma’s owner, Eric Hvolboll — whose family has tended to this slice of land for more than 150 years — is the first to admit the whole thing could completely fail. “It might just be a lark and we don’t continue it,” he said. “But we won’t know for a number of years.”
What no one is laughing about here in California, though, is the potential that agave presents for the Golden State’s drought-parched, fire-prone landscape. The plants use far less water than avocados or citrus, thrive in marginal soils where little else will grow, and are so naturally waterlogged that they can stop a wildfire in its tracks. Doug Richardson witnessed that firsthand behind his Toro Canyon home during the Thomas Fire of 2017, which couldn’t penetrate the line of cacti that he planted.
“Driving around Santa Barbara all these years, I’ve seen so many clumps of agave that are suitable for making distilled spirits just growing out on their own,” said Richardson, a longtime farmer, former SBCC professor, and landscape contractor in Carpinteria who’s fast becoming the prophet of North American agave. “I thought, ‘This is something we should look into.’ And I am definitely someone who really enjoys the distilled spirit form of agave in mezcal and tequila.”