Mezcal Spotlight: Mezcal Cuanax

By Jonathan Lockwood

Why do Cecilia and I enjoy Mineral de Pozos so much? The truth lies in what I heard her tell a friend several years ago. They commented that it was pretty small and there wasn’t much to do there. Cesy’s reply? “Exacto!”     

But this time we were honored with an invite to a 4^th of July gathering at the home of friends Don and Marilyn Sibley, who are longtime residents there. So we turned it into a weekend, and an opportunity for a return trip to Casa Cuanax, where Mezcal Cuanax is made, for this very article.

Juan Antonio Castellanos Cardona has been in and around agave and mezcal since 2007, when he worked as an instructor for the Department of Agriculture in San Felipe, Guanajuato, helping local communities organize and formalize their production. He spent years training mezcaleros in the region, and eventually earned a doctorate along the way, one that took him deep into the history and culture of mezcal itself. He calls it his national investigation.

Back then, along with a colleague, Juan Antonio helped certify the very first artisanal mezcal made in Guanajuato under its own Denominación de Origen, back on October 2, 2015, in San Luis de la Paz.

By 2018 he was ready to build something of his own. He bought land in Mineral de Pozos and started construction that December, with barely a roof over his head by the time he opened that Holy Week in 2019. What exists there now is considerably more than a mezcalería. Casa Cuanax has grown into a small compound: a working mezcal bar, a restaurant serving flamed dishes and molcajete sauces, a boutique hotel with rooms named for maguey varieties, and tours through the Ruta Cultural del Mezcal GTO that Juan Antonio helped build himself.

His mezcal has picked up eight medals over the years, including a Gran Oro at the México Selection by Concours Mondial de Bruxelles for his Salmiana. It's the mezcal he's proudest of. Salmiana is a low-sugar, high-effort agave, difficult to work and slow to reward you for the trouble, which is probably why he lights up describing it.

Beyond Salmiana, Cuanax also distills Agave Azul, Espadín, Cupreata, Americana, and ensambles of the above. He's also one of the few in the region willing to work with wild Scabra, a maguey that's hard to find and harder still to cook properly. One detail that says a lot about how he thinks: Juan Antonio distills exclusively with distilled water, refusing to let anything but the maguey itself speak in the glass.

But the thing that captivated me was his Entierro Mezcalero. Every Día de Muertos, Juan Antonio holds a burial ceremony on the property. Visitors buy a bottle, and rather than take it home, they bury it, right there on-site, in honor of someone they've lost. He keeps meticulous maps of exactly where each bottle goes into the ground. Years later, people come back, from all parts of México, but also sometimes from Canada, Germany, Colombia, or the U.S., to dig up their bottle and drink it, remembering that person all over again. It’s noteworthy that most believe buried mezcal improves substantially too. So this is part ritual, part archive, and part enjoying delicious mezcal. I've heard plenty of mezcal traditions passed down through generations, but this one is awfully special. When I asked him what he was really after with all of it, the hotel, the tours, the tastings, the burials, he didn't talk about growing the business. He talked about the culture of mezcal. Not about drinking more of it, but understanding it: sitting with friends, sitting with maestros who can walk you through what's in the glass and why, so the tasting means something beyond just the pour.

That's something I'll admit you can't really get from one of the tastings Cecilia and I host at our home. You'll sample some of the best mezcal on the planet at our table, but you won't stand in the field where it grew, or hear a maestro explain, in person, why it turned out this way.

Juan Antonio offers both. That's the difference a place like Casa Cuanax gives you, and it's worth the trip out to Pozos to get it.

WhatsApp him at 461 1113 359

Jonathan Lockwood is a Mezcal lover, explorer, and collector and writes the Mezcal Maniac Substack: mezcalmaniac.substack.com