The Game of Names

THE PLANT

In the Bible, “Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field,” and, in the eighteenth century, Swedish Botanist and Taxonomist Carl Linnaeus took it upon himself to do it all over again. In 1753, in his Species Plantarum, Linnaeus cataloged the plant kingdom, and re-baptized the plant already known as the mezcal, or the maguey, with one of the Greco-Latin names that he used in his new system. He called it "Agave," after a Greek mythological figure famous for dismembering her own son while intoxicated. Why the Swede made the connection is unknown.

Outside academia, “agave” did not catch on until the 1960s, only two centuries later, when it became the "cool" marketing name for the plant in the US, while in Mexico the word assumed the cachet of trendiness which, following their Doctrine of Malinchismo, the locals all too often give to imports.

So, today, Americans and Mexico's urbanites call the plant "agave," Mexico's indigenous population "mezcal," while the rural Criollos, descended from the early Spanish settlers, use "maguey,” which is the Carib-Taino word that the Conquistadores had adopted before they reached Mexico and turned into Criollos before mixing, by degrees, into Mestizos.

However, just to complicate things more, recent marketing trends have for a decade tried to persuade US consumers that agave implies "plantation-grown" while maguey is "agave foraged in the wild," hence the recent trait, legally sanctioned as optional by the TTB government agency in the US, of labeling "100% Agave" mezcal as "100% Maguey" mezcal.

THE SPIRIT

Whatever Mexican nativists argue, before the Spanish Conquista of Mexico in 1519, there were no distilled agave spirits in the Americas, only fermented agave sap, known in Mexico as pulque and by the Incas in South America by the tongue-twister of chaguarmishque. Once the colonizers imported their distilling technology, Agave Spirits spread across Latin America, in particular in Mexico and Venezuela. The colonized Mexicans knew it as vino de mezcal, "agave wine,” since "vino" meant "any alcoholic beverage," not just fermented grape juice. The term vino was then, over time, supplemented with a geographic origin marker for marketing, such as in vino de mezcal de Tequila (the name of the town and adjacent county), or as in vino de mezcal de Oaxaca (the state).

Historically, throughout the ages, linguistic laziness makes people shorten long names, and, by the 1920's, Mexicans had abbreviated vino de mezcal to just mezcal, the name of the plant. On the other hand, Vino de mezcal de Tequila dropped the first four words and simply became "tequila."

This was the normal evolution in usage. But, in 1974, intellectual property (IP) law enshrined the word “tequila” making it an appellation contr?lée (A.C.) marque mandating all makers of vino de mezcal de Tequila to label their products tequila. However, deferring to factual accuracy, until the late 1970's, U.S. law still mandated that all Tequila-only denominated agave spirits be labeled "Tequila - a distillate of the mezcal plant.".

A decade later, to reshape reality to match their prescriptive mythology, the Mexican government legally differentiated tequila from (vino de) mezcal originating in the rest of Mexico, and ruled that tequila must be made only with Agave Tequilana Weber, also known as the "Blue Agave," a botanical constraint which does not apply to other (vinos de) mezcal. That in turn brought about today's eco-monocultural cul-de-sac in Jalisco.

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Outside Mexico, going back two centuries, mezcal both the drink and the plant, became widely known as mescal with an "s," probably a perpetuated mistake by one of dictionary publishers, although legal U.S. label archives from the 1970s show that Cuervo had opted for mescal with an "s" and Sauza for mezcal with a "z." With computer age auto-spell, mescal with an "s" has now been enshrined.

Just to complicate things a little bit further, in 2020, in a landmark case fought by Porfidio, the TTB in the US ruled that mezcal, the drink, must be spelled as mezcal with a "z," but the plant as mescal with an "s," hence establishing a new American dictionary standard. The ruling furthermore established that the plant name mezcal, henceforth mescal in the US, must always be shown on labels jointly with the word plant, as in "mescal plant", contrary to 'mezcal, the drink', that is not deemed to need any explanatory adjunct, as in "mezcal spirit."

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By 1994, the year of NAFTA.01, the word mezcal, which until then had just meant "agave spirits," was legally expropriated from the Mexican vocabulary, when it became an A.C. marque like tequila in 1975, whose use, from 1994 forward, was only legal for (vino de) mezcal makers who distilled within politically haphazardly-selected, but rigidly specified districts in Mexico.

The government’s edict created a void in the Mexican vocabulary, compelling agave distillers outside those districts, and those within without a politically-privileged access to a licensing contract for the Mezcal marque, to invent an alternative word to label their agave spirits, even if consumers still called them mezcal from force of centuries’ old habit. The distillers collectively came up with a “Mexicanism," destilado de agave, or “agave distillate,” or in Castilian Spanish, “distilled from agave.”

In the US, among Mexican-Americans, a lateral trend developed re-baptizing “agave spirits” with espirituosas de agave, the Spanglish mirroring of the English word “spirits” which does not exist in the Spanish proper, but even so it is now widely used and, according to some US-based Spanish publishers, is the only "politically correct" translation into Spanish of the English term agave spirits.

Also in 1994, Mexico's SECOFI ministry department supervising distillers’ compliance with the Tequila AC marque laws was, de facto, privatized, and reborn, de jure, as a private non-governmental entity, the Tequila Regulatory Council (CRT). Over the years, unhindered by the Mexican government, which is the legitimate owner of the IP rights to the Tequila A.C. marque, the CRT assiduously registered the “tequila” in trademarks, certification marks or collective trademarks in their own name and title throughout the world, effectively privatizing ownership of the word, so that it became Tequila? with a capitalized T and ?, sowing the seeds for future litigation on this peculiar subject of bifurcated ownership of one and the same IP property.

Counterbalancing one IP usurpation with another IP creation, in 2001,?inspired by the coining of the term Super-Tuscans for non-AC "Chianti" wine a decade earlier, Porfidio coined Super-Jalisco to describe agave spirits distilled from 100% Agave Tequilana Weber, or "Blue Agave," specifically in the State of Jalisco, the cradle of tequila.

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Still bubbling with verbal creativity, more than two decades later, in 2020, faced with soaring sales in Mexico of destilados de agave to the perceived detriment of A.C. agave spirits, the Mexican government, prompted by the CRT and CRM, prohibited the use of the Mexican-Spanish term destilado de agave on labels despite 25 years of usage. Instead, they mandated the use of aguardiente de agave, literally “agave firewater.”

On the side of sanity, however, also in 2020, the US government ended its labeling ban on the English term "agave spirits," in place of the hitherto legally required legal term of "Spirits distilled from Agave." But tempering the outbreak of commonsense, "agave spirits" still have to be labeled today in the US as "Spirits distilled from Agave" when their Alc/Vol content is below 40%, let's say 38%, the European and Mexican standard, hence mandating a legal co-habitation of two different legally required terms for what is effectively the same agave spirits.

Other Anglo countries, such as Australia and the U.K., dissented with the American plural and opted instead for the singular "agave spirit."

Also in 2020, Porfidio coined the name Auscal for Australian (vino de) mezcal, or agave spirits made in Australia.

In other historically-active Latin American agave distilling countries, agave spirits are known in Spanish as cocuy (de penca) in Venezuela and miske (de penca) in Ecuador, since penca is their word for the plant maguey, agave or mezcal (or mescal).

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As the CRT took the Game of Names global, teleporting us now from European to Chinese linguistics, the name "tequila" is spelled out in the simplified Chinese, adopted as the legal standard in the PRC, as “龙舌兰酒.” The character 酒 means "any type of alcohol, whether fermented or distilled." So, despite the gulf between languages, Chinese, both in its simplified, traditional, and spoken versions, is conceptually in harmony with the broader Mexican-Spanish word "vino," as we explained, rather than the Castilian-Spanish word for "wine," also vino.

The three characters "龙舌兰", on their own, in turn, signify "agave." Hence, the composition of all four characters, as in 龙舌兰酒, share the same logic of the Spanish vino de agave that only acquires a terroir meaning by adding a geographic marker to the four characters such "from the town of Tequila," as in "tequila from Tequila."

Taiwan and Hong Kong, unlike the Mainland, kept the orthographic rules of traditional Chinese as their legal and schooling standard, and write "Tequila" as 龍舌蘭酒. However, the meaning is the same as in simplified Chinese since only the writing style of the first three characters, those for agave, or "龍舌蘭," differ. Singapore and Malaysia for their part, following the PRC standard, legally stipulate the simplified Chinese characters of 龙舌兰酒 as their written word for tequila, but only in conjunction with the English term "tequila," as befits poly-lingual nations.??

As elsewhere around the world, the CRT also lobbied hard to register the word "tequila" as their privately-owned trademark for their exclusive licensing privilege in Mainland China. They partially succeeded in so doing as the PRC in 2006 allowed the CRT to register the phonetic characters for tequila, or “特其拉,” as a trademark, which is different from the written characters in both simplified and traditional Chinese. But at the same time, Beijing refused the CRT's trademark application for the written word for tequila in Chinese characters, or “龙舌兰酒.” This points towards a sage, truly Confucian political compromise in terms of bilateral trade relations between Mexico and the PRC in that the spoken word "Tequila" is now a CRT-owned trademark in the PRC, whose spoken infringement is punishable by law, but the written word for the drink in Chinese characters, as spelled out on every Tequila label in the PRC by law, is a generic word for the tequila slash 'Blue Agave spirits' spirits category.

PERSPECTIVE

Complicated as all of this might be for consumers, and maybe rarely following commonsense, today's trend, inspired by wine naming conventions, is towards the use of varietal identifiers, such as '100% Agave Espadin', '100% Agave Tobala', for different agave bases, but only Nostradamus could foretell whether the name maguey will impose its historicity over agave over the next few decades to identify those varietals!

And so, closing this round of the Game of Names, it is memetics that define our linguistic perceptions, the meaning and associated feelings that come with each word, when Newspeak becomes Oldspeak, in a continuous power struggle over who is the victor who controls, for monopolistic commercial or political gain, the identities and meanings of words, and agave spirits and the agave plant itself are obviously no exception to that rule. But we encourage connoisseurs not to mind, since the Game of Names does not affect the quality of the agave spirit they actually drink, as long as it is truly made from 100% Agave! Thus spake Martin Grassl.

? Martin Grassl