We already covered the basics on puntas back in Vol. 4. You can read them there if you’d like a primer on what that means.

If there’s anything “bad” we can say about Lalo’s mezcal, it’s that his batches rarely have the element of surprise. We hear “puntas de espadín,” imagine their platonic ideal, open the bottle and… yup, there it is. Then again, that’s kind of the point. His aim isn’t to be a modernist creator, pushing the limits of fermentation and distillation; it’s to be a faithful documentarian of each plant’s finest qualities. Searching for an analogy, there are less parallels between Lalo’s work and any artistic movement, than there are with the fractal geometry of nature whose vast complexity and total predictability exist as one.

Normally, we talk about appreciating “the hand of the maker,” each mezcalero’s signature touches that distinguish their work from the stuff being made down the road. Perhaps the best thing we can say about Lalo is that his work feels like it was signed only by nature, and somehow came directly to us from the plants without human intervention.

All of the above is doubly true when it comes to tasting Lalo’s puntas, which leave us feeling like we’ve experienced some kind of sci-fi mind meld with the plants, seen their souls in our mind’s eye, or something that could really only be explained and understood on a mushroom trip.

This batch was distilled in October of 2022, using espadín harvested from Lalo’s field’s in Minas. After composing the final mezcal (balancing the corazones with puntas y colas), there were 200 liters of mezcal at around 49% ABV, and 24 liters of 69% puntas, which were rested in glass galones for a year before being bottled for Mixtape.