Cinco Sentidos La colección Mixteca Edition 4--Blanco

This is mezcalero Delfino Tobón Mejía's first solo distillation of the agave he calls Blanco, a massive varietal that spent nearly fifteen years growing on the dry slopes outside Tehuacán in Puebla. Cinco Sentidos bottled this as Edition 4 in their La colección Mixteca series, and it's a rare chance to taste a producer working through unfamiliar material in real time. Delfino—one of several mezcaleros featured under the Cinco Sentidos label, founded by Jason Cox at Oaxaca's El Destilado restaurant—harvested these piñas in early 2024 with family, quartered them to fit his brick-lined underground oven, and roasted them over mesquite and tlahuicole for three days. He milled the cooked agave with a mechanical shredder, let it dry ferment for two days, then added spring water and fermented the mash for six more days before distilling it once through his hybrid three-plate copper still. That setup—somewhere between a pot still and a column—preserves funky, vegetal character while smoothing out the harsher volatiles. Delfino proofed the spirit by blending heads, hearts, and holanda, a traditional technique that gives the maker full control over texture and finish. The batch yielded just 225 liters, distilled in May 2024 and bottled a month later. What you get in the glass is the weight of fifteen-year-old agave: deep minerality, a faint char from the mesquite, and a savory, almost umami finish that lingers from the long fermentation and single-pass distillation. It drinks cleaner than many village-level mezcals but still has presence—this isn't a polished blanco engineered for cocktails. Sip it neat at room temperature to appreciate the agave's heft, or pour it alongside roasted pork shoulder, mole verde, or aged manchego. The minerality holds up to fat and spice without disappearing. For Chicago drinkers looking beyond Oaxaca's central valleys, this bottle offers a snapshot of Puebla's quieter mezcal tradition, where small-batch experimentation and village-level craft still define the category. Cinco Sentidos pays above-market rates and shares profits with producers—Cox prints the mezcalero's name on the label, not his own—so each bottle supports the people making it.