Santa Catarina Minas, Oaxaca
Santa Catarina Minas is a striking blend of Oaxacan beauty with a Mediterranean touch. The blue-and-white church anchors the center, and across town, fenced gardens (rare outside the capital) overflow with flowers and tall pines. Streets are wide and paved, and one notices trees that seem out of place among typical Oaxacan flora: tabachines, araucarias, pomegranates, and loquats. Olives might have grown here, one thinks though they do not. The air smells of toronjil and anise, and along the sidewalks, cuish agaves grow to impressive sizes.
MINAS MEZCAL: THE NOBLE SLOW WAY
“The real value of this mezcal lies in not letting this town die. It’s like our dead: they don’t die unless they’re forgotten. We must not forget how this is done: its essence, its foundation, how it was first created.”
“With a clay pot it’s slower, but nobler.”
What the Mines Left Behind
Once a hub for silver, gold and copper extraction, Santa Catarina Minas owes its name to the mines that shaped its land. Beneath its quiet streets lies volcanic-rich terrain where mineral veins once drew fortune seekers. Today, water remains its true treasure: wells and rain-harvested reservoirs sustain the clay pot stills and the agave fields that inherit the mine’s legacy.
The Learned Family of Minas
It’s unusual to find ancestral mezcaleros whose children all went to college, and even more so to see them return to the palenque. In Santa Catarina Minas, where ancestral production is guarded like a family secret, the Carlos family stands out for combining formal education with inherited knowledge. Luis, the eldest son of Luis Carlos, studied veterinary medicine; one sister trained as a chef, the other as a nurse. Each chose a different path, yet all three returned to mezcal with the same conviction their grandfather Florencio, Don Lencho, once had. That mix, education and tradition, is part of what makes Minas feel so singular, a place where cultured lives orbit around an ancient craft.
The result
The combination of altitude, tradition and traditional methods produces a mezcal that is not a standard profile, but a spirit that reflects its origin - unmistakably of this place, and true to the way it is made.
See ProductsMezcales from Santa Catarina Minas
Minero
Price for Standard Shipping. Price may vary per store. Exclude delivery fees.Santa Catarina Minas is recognized in Oaxaca as the Cradle of Mezcal (La Cuna de Mezcal). Village maestro Luis Carlos Vá…
Arroqueño
Price for Standard Shipping. Price may vary per store. Exclude delivery fees.A rare delicacy distilled from semi-wild agave that matures over 18 years. The family roasts the piñas in a conical pit…
Barril
Price for Standard Shipping. Price may vary per store. Exclude delivery fees.Honouring the extraordinary skill of the late Florencio Don Lencho Laureano Carlos Sarmiento former patriarch of Del Mag…
Pechuga
Price for Standard Shipping. Price may vary per store. Exclude delivery fees.Del Maguey and the Carlos family´s Pechuga recipe is the original recipe approved for export from Oaxaca to the world. I…
Ibérico
Price for Standard Shipping. Price may vary per store. Exclude delivery fees.Born from a visit by Chef José Andrés whose ThinkFoodGroup team proposed replacing the chicken breast used in Pechuga wi…
Shaped by the Land
Explore the regions where each mezcal takes its character.
Axocopan
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Las Milpas
Las Milpas is made from the stuff of fantasy. A dreamy, isolated place some three hours away from Oaxaca City, with only a handful of houses overlooking the rolling hills in the open landscape. It is the only village not named after a Saint, but after the very landscape: The Milpas (The Cornfields). Everything around...
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San Baltazar Chichicapam
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San Jose Rio Minas
San José Río Minas is a very small village in Oaxaca’s Mixteca Alta. It takes about four hours to get there, but the drive is surreal: it runs through microclimates, milpas, small streams, and wild agave fields as far as the eye can see. The town sits at high altitude but inside a valley, on...
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San Luis Del Rio
San Luis del Río is dramatic: mountains rise so sharply they seem to lean over the road, their slopes packed with spiky agave plants that turn the landscape blue. The car feels tiny against these vertical walls, and at the valley floor, a fruity humidity gathers; palm trees grow along the Río Hormiga Colorada (Red...
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San Pedro Teozacoalco
San Pedro Teozacoalco lies about three and a half hours from Oaxaca City, in the great mountains and dormant volcanoes of the Mixteca Alta. The road twists through shifting ecosystems: conifer forests, dry desert valleys, and stretches where both overlap, with fan palms, pines, and plump magueyes sharing the same landscape. The town appears after...
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Santa Maria Albarradas
At the foot of Mount Tobalá lies Santa María Albarradas, a small village of fewer than a thousand people, high in the cloud forests of the Mitla region of Oaxaca. Mount Tobalá is an almost mythical mountain, its peak so high it hides in the sky. A captivating forest grows there, rich with wild agaves...
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Santo Domingo Albarradas
After a three-and-a-half-hour drive through forests, climbing up and down the mountains, Santo Domingo Albarradas feels like arriving at a small utopia. The town sits at the end of the road, tucked into a gorge, surrounded by steep green walls. You drive down into it. The air grows humid. This is a high-altitude tropical zone,...
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