NOM-070 is the regulation that legally defines mezcal in Mexico — approved in 2017 after years of debate, it dictates production methods and what has to appear on a label. It exists to protect the category’s integrity. It also, according to producers who’ve chosen not to comply with it, can push traditional techniques toward whatever the certification process can actually measure and approve.
Some ancestral practices don’t translate cleanly into regulatory thresholds — fermentation in raw leather vats or clay ollas, for instance, can produce chemical profiles that don’t sit where NOM-070’s testing expects them to. A producer whose family has fermented a certain way for generations sometimes has two options: adjust the process until it clears certification, or skip certification and lose the legal right to call the result mezcal at all. A growing number are choosing the second option and selling what they make as “destilado de agave” instead — a spirit that looks, smells, and tastes like mezcal by any honest definition, made with the same techniques, just without the protected name.
That’s a strange outcome for a regulation built to protect tradition: in a real number of cases, staying inside the NOM-070 system means altering the very practices that make a producer’s mezcal distinctive, while staying true to those inherited practices means giving up the legal right to the word. Destilado de agave carries none of mezcal’s export recognition or price premium, which makes this a genuinely costly choice for family producers, not a symbolic one.
The result is a quiet split running through Oaxaca’s mezcal-producing towns: some families adjust their process to keep the label. Others keep the process and lose the label. Nothing on a shelf tells you which decision a bottle’s maker made.