Mezcal Is 1.2 Per Cent of Tequila and the Law Keeps It There

One point two per cent

Mexico certified 6,912,256 litres of mezcal in 2025. In the same year it certified 583.5 million litres of tequila. Mezcal is 1.185 per cent of the tequila category — tequila is 84.4 times its size.

That gap is usually explained by demand: mezcal is smokier, harder to mix, a connoisseur’s drink. The explanation is wrong. Mezcal is smaller than tequila because of how each appellation defines what it is allowed to be, and the definition is enforced at certification, not at retail. Mezcal’s ceiling is written into its own standard.

The 2025 collapse was not a demand event

COMERCAM’s 2026 informe público, the mezcal denomination’s own annual report, records production at 6,912,256 litres referenced to 45 per cent alcohol by volume in 2025, a fall of 39 per cent on the 11.36 million litres of 2024.

A 39 per cent fall in one year in a category this small is not consumption. It is the same agave cycle that hit tequila, arriving in a denomination with a longer clock and much less slack. Mezcal’s raw material is not one cultivated plant on a managed estate; it is at least 25 agave species, many of them harvested wild, taking around eight years to reach maturity and considerably longer for some of the larger magueys. When the price of maguey spikes, mezcal cannot plant its way out inside a decade.

What the standard permits, and what it forbids

Tequila’s denomination fixes one species — Agave tequilana Weber, blue variety — inside 181 named municipalities, and then permits an industrial process at any scale. That permission is what produced 583.5 million litres, including 168.1 million litres of mixto, where up to 49 per cent of the fermentable sugar can come from something other than agave.

Mezcal’s standard does the opposite. NOM-070-SCFI-2016 does not merely name a place and a plant; it defines three production categories, and the category is part of what the bottle is:

Set that against tequila. The entire industrial output of the Mexican mezcal denomination in 2025 was about 53,000 litres. Tequila produces that much every hour — 583.5 million litres divided by 8,760 hours is 66,610 litres an hour, on annual average. Mezcal’s whole industrial tier is worth less than one hour of tequila.

This is the ceiling, and it is legal rather than commercial. A mezcal producer who wants scale has two options: industrialise, which moves the product into the 0.77 per cent category that consumers of mezcal largely do not buy; or plant more maguey and wait eight years, on land that is often not his and a plant that is often not cultivated at all. Neither option is available at the speed a brand needs.

Eighty-nine point five per cent in one state

The geography is as concentrated as the process. Oaxaca produced 89.47 per cent of 2025 mezcal. Behind it: Puebla 3.26 per cent, Durango 2.12 per cent, Michoacán 1.57 per cent, Guerrero 1.39 per cent, San Luis Potosí 1.21 per cent, Zacatecas 0.84 per cent and Tamaulipas 0.14 per cent. Guanajuato recorded nothing. Nine of the twelve states in the denomination produced any certified mezcal at all in 2025, and one of them produced almost nine tenths of it.

One state, one harvest, one pest or drought or land-use dispute away from a national supply problem. And unlike Jalisco’s blue agave, much of Oaxaca’s maguey is not a managed crop with a planting register — it is a wild or semi-wild resource whose inventory nobody counts.

The class breakdown says what people actually drink

The same report breaks production by class: Blanco or joven is 95.53 per cent; destilado con is 3.41 per cent; abocado con is 1.06 per cent. Mezcal is a young, unaged spirit in practice, and the aged and flavoured tiers together are under five per cent of it.

That matters for the revenue story. A category that sells almost entirely unaged spirit has no inventory to appreciate and no reserve to blend with — the two instruments that let a Champagne house ride out a bad year and protect a price. Mezcal’s price is set by the current harvest of a plant it cannot replant quickly, and there is nothing in the cellar to smooth it.

The one adjustment available to any comparison of the two categories is alcohol strength, and it is small. Mezcal’s series is referenced to 45 per cent ABV, tequila’s to the standard 38 to 40. Normalised to 40 per cent, mezcal’s 6.91 million litres becomes 7.78 million — 1.33 per cent of tequila instead of 1.19 per cent. It does not change the argument. It does show how much of a category’s apparent size is a decision about what to measure.

What mezcal actually is, competitively

The useful comparison is not tequila. It is Champagne. In Champagne, roughly a third of the appellation’s volume is grower-produced and sells at a structurally different price from the grandes marques — a split between a small, verifiable, provenance-led tier and an industrial one, inside a single denomination. Mezcal has exactly that structure, except the small tier is 100 per cent of the category and the industrial tier is 0.77 per cent, and the whole thing is 1.2 per cent of its larger neighbour.

So mezcal will not close the gap, and the standard is the reason. What it can do is hold a price the industrial category cannot: 566,805 litres of certified ancestral spirit, produced in earthen pits with no industrial shortcut available, is the most defensible provenance claim in the spirits business precisely because the law will not let it be made any other way.

The risk is the mirror image. A category whose premium rests on a legal process definition will face pressure to loosen the definition, because that is the only lever that would allow volume. Watch the standard, not the growth rate. Mezcal’s number is small because somebody wrote the rule that way, and the rule is the asset.