Dusty Roads: A Stirred Mezcal and Cocchi Americano Cocktail with Tobalá

The Dusty Roads is a stirred, low-ABV mezcal cocktail that drinks like an Oaxacan aperitivo. It leans on Del Maguey Tobalá, a splash of Cocchi Americano Rosa, a homemade lemon verbena cordial and three dashes of Peychaud’s, then finishes with a garnish of roasted chapulines. If you are browsing our library of mezcal cocktails, this is the slow, spirit-led sipper of the collection.

You are not building a sweet or fruity drink. Every measure here is set so the wild agave stays in the foreground while the aromatized wine and the herbal cordial frame it, the way dust settles softly on a back road at dusk. That balance is what makes the Dusty Roads read as a true aperitif rather than a cocktail that hides the mezcal.

Ingredients

• 22.5 ml / 0.75 part | Del Maguey Tobalá
• 30 ml / 1 part | Cocchi Americano Rosa
• 7.5 ml / 0.25 part | Lemon verbena cordial
• 3 dashes | Peychaud’s bitters
• Garnish | Roasted chapulines (grasshoppers)

Nutrition (per serving · calculated by Del Maguey)

Step by step

Prep time: 4 minutes (plus the lemon verbena cordial, made ahead).

1. Combine the Tobalá, Cocchi Americano Rosa, lemon verbena cordial and Peychaud’s bitters in a mixing glass filled with ice.
2. Stir until properly chilled and diluted, around 20 to 25 seconds.
3. Strain into a rocks glass over fresh ice.
4. Garnish with roasted chapulines.

Lemon verbena cordial (make ahead)

Chop lemon verbena leaves and gently muddle them in a bowl. Combine 1 part of the muddled leaves with 2 parts sugar and 2 parts water in a saucepan over medium-high heat and stir until the sugar dissolves. Stir in the lemon verbena leaves, remove from the heat, and let the mixture steep and cool for half an hour. Strain, bottle, and refrigerate for up to one week.

What is the Dusty Roads? A low-ABV mezcal aperitivo cocktail

The Dusty Roads is a stirred mezcal cocktail in the aperitivo family, built around equal-spirited measures rather than juice or heavy sweeteners. It pairs the smoke and minerality of Tobalá with Cocchi Americano Rosa, an aromatized wine whose bittersweet, lightly citrusy profile makes it a natural partner for agave.

You will notice it sits closer to a White Negroni or a Bamboo than to a sour. There is no shaking, no foam and no citrus juice, only a clear, spirit-forward pour over ice. That is what lets the wild agave speak first and the herbs answer second.

Cocchi Americano Rosa, lemon verbena cordial and Peychaud’s: the aromatic spine

Cocchi Americano Rosa is the quiet engine of the drink. It is a quinine-touched, aromatized wine with red fruit and gentle bitterness, and at one full part it softens the Tobalá without ever masking it. Unlike Lillet Blanc, it leans on a more pronounced quinine edge and a red-fruit character, which is exactly what stands up to the smoke of the agave.

The lemon verbena cordial is the bright thread. A quarter part is enough to lift the aromatics with a clean, lemony herbaceousness that echoes the green, high-altitude character of the agave. The three dashes of Peychaud’s then lay an anise-and-cherry frame across the top, tying the wine and the cordial together at the edges of every sip.

How to serve and drink the Dusty Roads: an Oaxacan aperitivo

Serve the Dusty Roads over fresh ice in a rocks glass and drink it slowly, before a meal. Its low strength and bittersweet backbone are built to open the appetite, which is exactly what an aperitivo should do. If you want to understand where it fits in a mezcal ritual, our guide on how to drink mezcal explains the aperitif and sipping traditions in depth.

The large ice and the slow stir matter here. They keep the dilution gentle so the drink stays cold and silky from first sip to last, instead of turning watery. Treat it the way you would a good vermouth on the rocks: unhurried, aromatic and contemplative.

The chapulines garnish: an Oaxacan finishing touch

The roasted chapulines are not a gimmick. Toasted grasshoppers seasoned with chili, lime and salt are a staple of Oaxacan tables, and their savory, slightly smoky crunch mirrors the earthiness of the Tobalá. They turn a quiet aperitif into a sense of place.

If chapulines are hard to source, a strip of orange peel expressed over the surface keeps the drink honest. But the grasshoppers are what make the Dusty Roads feel like Oaxaca in a glass, a nod to the same land that grows the agave.

Del Maguey Tobalá: the wild agave behind the Dusty Roads

Choosing Del Maguey Tobalá is the whole reason this cocktail works. Tobalá is a wild agave (Agave potatorum) that grows in the shade of oak trees in the high-altitude canyons around Santa María Albarradas, and it takes around eight of its small piñas to equal a single Espadín. Bottled at 45% ABV, it carries a floral, fruity depth that a cultivated agave cannot.

Behind the bottle are the maestros Rogelio Martínez Cruz and Leopoldino Miranda, who distill it in copper stills from agaves hand-harvested in the wild. Del Maguey’s Tobalá was the first wild varietal mezcal available in the United States, and in the Dusty Roads it gives the drink its backbone, its perfume and its sense of the Oaxacan hills.