Sotol isn't mezcal — the Dasylirion it's distilled from is a wild desert shrub in the asparagus family, not an agave, and this bottling comes from the arid municipality of Ciudad Aldama in northern Mexico, where the plants are cut by hand with a machete after twelve to fifteen years of growth and the hearts carried out on donkeys. The desert bottling is a blend of three Dasylirion varieties, a formula the master distiller arrived at only after long experimentation. Everything downstream is stubbornly old-fashioned: the piñas are cooked for 24 hours in underground conical ovens built of desert and mountain rock and fired with wood from nearby nut-tree groves, then crushed with an axe instead of a mill and fermented in pine tubs — the step the distiller considers the most important of all — before a double distillation in copper alembic. Sotol carries its own Denomination of Origin, and the fact that we can buy it at all is recent history: after prohibition-era crackdowns, some distillers worked in secret until commerce was finally legalized in the mid-1990s. Cardenxe makes three labels — Desierto, Pradera and Sierra — each named for a different environment where the plant grows, and this is the desert one. If you like your spirits with a story and a sense of place rather than a marketing budget, start here.