If you start obsessing over agave, you’ll hear about Odin. The Oakland bar is oft spoken of in a reverent whisper. It might be the best mezcal bar in the country right now. The depth of the bottle list at Odin, and its focus on vintages of agave spirits dating back decades, put it in rare company — alongside The Cabinet in New York City, Mírate in Los Angeles and the upstairs bar at Whisler’s in Austin, Texas.
And it turns out I am obsessed with agave. It wasn’t always this way; I’ve spent the last 20 years, give or take, writing professionally about drinks: coffee, wine, cocktails, mineral water, tea, nonalcoholic beer, fancy restaurant sodas. I was always awareof agave spirits — tequila, of course, and also mezcal and its many variants — but I had filed them away as the stuff of cocktails, like the legendary Oaxaca old fashioned created by Phil Ward at the original Death & Co. location in lower Manhattan in 2007.
There’s a hoary wine cliché about how “all roads lead to Burgundy.” It’s the belief that no matter what you’re into — goofy orange wine or whatever — eventually, someone is going to pour you a glass of Premier Cru Burgundy and nuke your palate from space. This is sort of what happened to me with agave. The easiest way to explain it is that agave spirits are like cocktails unto themselves: They’re so complex that you taste multiple overlapping things in a single sip, a profound intricacy and riotous multiplicity of flavors. But they’re also like wine, in that they taste positively alive in the bottle.
At the same time, the small production, artisan nature of mezcal and many agave subcategories, wherein batch sizes and idiosyncratic bottle releases can number in the mere dozens, scratches the same deep, extremely online itch for me as sneaker drops or whatever other totem of supposed scarcity and desirability that’s come to define rarefied consumer appreciation in the 21st century…