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.”
