Sinaloa, Nuevo León and Querétaro are seeking to obtain the Denomination of Origin to produce and market mezcal, according to Hipócrates Nolasco, director of the Mezcal Regulatory Board, which opposes the expansion.
“The government, through the Mexican Institute of Intellectual Property (IMPI), wants to grant it to places where the interest is obviously tourism, leaving aside the cultural roots, when precisely that is why a Denomination of Origin is established. , and that is the part we are claiming, “says Nolasco, whose council brings together more than 1,300 mezcal brewing companies.
For a state to become part of the denomination, it must show that it has an endemic maguey (natively), which produced ancestral handmade mezcal, and that its cultural persists, which indicates that there are still producers of this beverage in the area.
The politicians of those states ensure that they meet the conditions. On October 11, the Senate of the Republic published through a statement that the mezcal industry has been present in Sinaloa since 1850, with an artisanal process, and expanded in the southern part of the state, where they produced approximately 20,000 liters per day. However, it was not considered in 1994, when the denomination was granted to 12 other states.
“Since its inception, and until 1979, the municipality of Mazatlan was a large producer of mezcal, and Sinaloa achieved the third place in national production, until this activity was banned by Governor Leopoldo Sánchez Celis,” said senator Mario Zamora, of the PRI, in a statement.
Therefore, Zamora proposed an agreement in which the Senate urged the Mexican Insititute of Intellectual Property (Instituto Mexicano de la Propiedad Intelectual: IMPI) to complete the administrative procedure, and authorize the request of the government of Sinaloa to expand the area of protection of the denomination of origin of mezcal and include the municipalities of San Ignacio, Mazatlan, Concordia and Rosario.
“It all started as a bad joke, trying to accept Aguascalientes, the State of Mexico and Morelos a few weeks ago, but we see that the federal government is trying to create a business chamber that validates these requests “, adds Nolasco.
On August this year, the IMPI included the following states as part of the Mezcal Denomination of Origin (DOM):
- Morelos (23 municipalities)
- State of Mexico (15 municipalities)
- Aguascalientes (6 municipalities)
The resolution allows the producers of these municipalities to brew, process, bottle and market this traditional Mexican drink, which used to be exclusive for the states of Oaxaca, Guerrero, Michoacan, Tamaulipas, Durango, Guanajuato, San Luis Potosi, Zacatecas and Puebla.
The National Chamber of the Mezcal Industry (Canaimez), the Maguey Mezcal Product System and the Consejo Regulatorio del Mezcal CRM oppose the extension of the denomination of origin, as they argue that it was granted without involving the mezcal sector, the mezcal villages and the indigenous communities that integrate it, and denounced in a statement that this is an “outrage” against thousands of families producing this traditional drink.
SMT Newsroom with information from expansion.mx
