Tequila with the bat man

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0:52A rain-soaked agave field as night falls in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Mexico's iconic agave spirits tequila and tequila's older sibling mezcal are worth around$10 billion globally, employing many thousands along the supply chain, a chain which often leads north of the border to the US consumer. I'm here to catch bats. Because this mezcal producer is certified as bat-friendly, and surprising as it may be, the health of Mexico's lucrative and beloved agave spirits, is tied to bats. But why? And why is this complicated industry so riddled with controversy? I'm meeting the conservationist and bat advocate at the heart of this project to find out.

1:42This is the BBC World Service. I'm Sarah Trino. This is Rodrigo Medellín, also called the Batman. man. There's bats with enormous ears, with tiny ears, with huge eyes, with tiny, tiny little eyes, with very long snouts, very short snouts, big, small, all kinds of bats. Rodrigo loves bats. He also loves tequila and mezcal. Today we have tequila and mezcal. Thanks to the bats. We don't have the bats. We don't have tequila. That would be a very sad world. What are the issues facing the agave that these spirits are made from? We have many issues and many challenges because now all the people around the world want to drink mezcal.

2:32This is a tragedy in the making. All it takes is for one disease to hit one plant and all of your plants are going to be sick. Why a booming industry can be a double-edged sword. There are a lot of contradictions that are woven into this. It is about tradition, but it is also fundamentally about marketing a tradition. Can you continue to make tequila in an ethical way, really, if you're also trying to make a profit? And is there a future for back-friendly tequila in a rapidly changing market? We have a huge bottleneck, and that bottleneck is me. And do you plan to retire? Absolutely not.

3:43with energy. First, the nickname, the Batman. Rodrigo tells me it's actually the result of a meeting with the legendary broadcaster and environmental advocate, Sir David Attenborough. People stop me sometimes on the street and they say, oh, he's the Batman. Well, yeah, I mean, if you know me for my work and you've seen me defending bats and you learn something from there, call me the Batman. Absolutely. But not on your business card? No, not even in my office. I don't have that like a sign on my office this is the bat cave no. Rodrigo's mother was a famous opera singer. The youngest child he was indulged in his passion for nature.

4:26He'd bring home rattlesnakes and even had a collection of vampire bats he kept in the bathroom he shared with his brother. I knew how to keep them alive. I went to the vet school to bleed cows and defibrinate the blood and freeze it in my freezer so I would thaw one ice cube of blood per vampire per night. They knew me. The vampires are incredibly smart, so they would land and wait for the blood. But when my brother would come in, they would snarl at him and they would try to lunge at him. So my parents were really, really patient with me. we walk across a sprawling city center park it's here that rodrigo held a bat festival in 2024 flying the flag for the often maligned creatures it was good bat pr it's funny you know bats are the most unfairly treated animals in the world from the taco that you ate in the morning to the tequila that you're drinking in the evening those are connected to you thanks to the bats Explain that connection for me.

5:35There's three main benefits or services that we get from bats. The first one is pest control. Agricultural pests, insects primarily, are eaten by bats by the ton every night. So if you look at corn or cotton or rice or chilies, you will find that the main predator of the main pests of those crops are bats. The second one is seed dispersal. There's many, many fruits that we get in the summer in Mexico, in the markets in Mexico, that are dispersed by bats. And then the third benefit that we get is pollination. There's many economically or ecologically important species of plants that depend on bats for their pollination.

6:30And what can I say, Sarah, as a Mexican, one of our foremost, most important products that are very closely associated with our identity, tequila, comes from agaves. And agaves are pollinated by bats. So no bats, no agave. Imagine that. that would be a very sad world indeed. So speaking of tequila and its cousin mezcal. We're going to go to an incredible mezcaleria. But what is tequila and what is mezcal? Well tequila is a mezcal. In fact it was known as mezcal de tequila until it was decided that it was more marketable to drop the mezcal part. Tequila is made with blue agave only and in the state of Jalisco.

7:18There is a town called Tequila which is a traditional hub for producers. I love mezcal and I used to drink a lot of whiskey. Mezcal is way up there. If you are someone who loves nature, if you are someone who respects biodiversity, your drink to go to is mezcal.

7:44Mezcal, which can be made from various types of agave, was somewhat neglected by international drinkers until relatively recently. And it's in the state of Oaxaca, where about 80 % of it is produced. After a short one-hour early morning flight to Oaxaca, a centre of indigenous culture and food, a bustling city of low-rise colourful buildings, I hop into a truck belonging to a local mezcal producer and we climb steep rural roads until we reach the agave.

8:16it's cold and wet but Rodrigo is overjoyed to be out in the field it's quite striking when you enter the field how impressive and how beautiful the plants are they're probably about six feet tall spines and spikes sort of a hand spans width which end in a point a bit like a spear. There's hummingbirds, lots of insects. A large, very fine mesh net is unraveled and staked into the ground. This will catch the bats. When it tangles, it tangles a lot. You need to be very careful. Very careful handling. Yes. Rodrigo explains what makes this producer bat-friendly and points to the tall agave flowers, which punctuate the neat rows of spiky plants.

9:11Agaves produce the exact amount of nectar that the bats need, and the bats are the best conduit for that pollen to move from one flower to the next, to the next, to the next. However, humans have learned that if you harvest the agaves before they invest every last ounce of those sugars into one single sexually productive event, you harvest the plants before that, you maximize the amount of alcohol that you produce. So for 150 years, they have not allowed a single plant to flower. The fields are replanted with only clonal baby agaves that grow under the parent plant that are exact genetic copies of the parent plant, and they're losing genetic diversity, including the ability to adapt to climate change, to new diseases, to new pests.

10:02So what makes it bat-friendly is we ask them to allow 5 % and only 5 % of those agaves to flower. That allows the bats to come, exchange genetic information with other plants, secure the future of agaves and feed the bats in the process. Rodrigo went to the Tequila Regulatory Council, the tequila industry's governing body, 30 years ago with concerns about the lack of genetic diversity in agave plants. The CRT, as it's known, is the official organisation responsible for ensuring standards and traceability. He told them, This is a tragedy in the making. All it takes is for one disease to hit one plant and all of your plants are going to be sick.

10:51Thank you very much, Dr. Meagin. They're so very nice. That's a fantastic project. Goodbye. Six years later, the disease shows up. I swear, Sarah, I did not put it in. It was not me, right? But then when the disease shows up and it starts killing agaves left and right, they come back. And that is when I found the door to this idea with the help and direct assistance of Mr. David Suro, who knows all of these incredibly committed tequila producers. And they immediately understood the concept but then they started applying it. The CRT helped connect Rodrigo to open-minded industry insiders with clout.

11:34David Suro, who is on the board of the Bat Friendly program, is also the owner of Siembra Azul, a small batch artisanal premium tequila and well-known in the business. He introduced Rodrigo to Carlos Camarena, a third-generation master distiller who produces tequila that sells in big volumes globally. Having these producers on board was a huge win. Rodrigo isn't trying to bend the ears of the biggest companies owned by multinationals. He's focused on creating a grassroots collective of independent producers, ensuring healthy bat populations. This is not an official or government programme. It's entirely voluntary.

12:13And it's an exclusive club too. There are around 10 brands Rodrigo has bestowed with his Bat Friendly sticker, which they can place on their bottles with pride. What checks are there to make sure that they are deserving of that bat-friendly sticker? First and foremost, that they are leaving a 5 % of the plants to flower. That is first. But then that the bats are visiting, and then also that that field was not deforested from original vegetation to become agave. That must have been agave for the last 5 to 10 years, and then we give them that certification. We are pushing a little more, a few more criteria.

12:55Some of these criteria are that companies will collect seeds from their agave to store and share. A seed vault of sorts. And then excitement. We have a bat.

13:10It's impossible not to feel sorry for the tiny creature. It struggles to fly away. It has to be warmed in Rodrigo's pocket. So what have we got here? This is the long-tongued bat and it is partly responsible for the mezcal that we are drinking here while we're waiting for the bats to come into the nets. It's very cute. It's very small. It looks very fragile.

13:43Rodrigo Medellin:Hello, Greg Jenner here. I'm the host of You're Dead to Me, the BBC comedy show that takes history seriously. Every episode, I pair up a top historian with a fantastic comedian, and we have a lovely, funny, fascinating chat about a different subject from world history. And in this new series, we're beginning with an epic voyage through the story of Homer, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. And that's with Kyle Smith-Bino joining us. And then we'll be learning about Francis Galton and the racist, discredited pseudoscience of eugenics with Desiree Burch. We'll meet many medieval saints in their bone boxes with Rachel Parrott.

14:16Rodrigo Medellin:So if that sounds like your sort of thing, listen to You're Dead to Me wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you. Bye. I'm Simon Jack. I'm Zing Zing. And on Good Bad Billionaire, we're exploring the life and fortune of music megastar Sir Paul McCartney. Macca. As one of the primary songwriters in The Beatles. And with an extensive solo career. His work generates vast and continuous royalty streams. But were song royalties alone enough to break the billion? And earn him the title of the first British billionaire rock star. Find out in Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

15:03So who are the producers Rodrigo is working with? The very few certified as bat-friendly.

15:09Rodrigo Medellin:Ernesto Martinez-Sanchez, soy de la comunidad de San Luis Amatlan. Ernesto Martinez-Sanchez is a Mezcal producer. He says that it's a long and complicated process to make the spirit. The agave takes eight to ten years to grow, and then there's the harvesting, the shaving, and then baking the piña, the hearts or the fleshy cores of the agave, which eventually become the mezcal. Then there's the distilling. He doesn't use chemical fertilisers. It's organic and produced by hand, and they end up with only about 200 litres a year. Big brands, he says, have more money to invest in marketing and production methods.

15:48It worries him, and he thinks it takes something away from the product, which is culturally important to him and his community. Another producer in Oaxaca, whose company is much larger, making 12 ,000 litres a year, has a different take. Everyone has their own business, he says. He is not worried about foreign-owned companies. He wants international consumers to know more about Mezcal, because that will help build profits.

16:18Ted Genuay spent years researching the history of the spirits and recently released a book, Tequila Wars, Jose Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico. Coincidentally, his father is a bat biologist and knows Rodrigo. He says that Rodrigo's fears of a blight are by no means without precedent. The industry as we know it now emerged out of this massive crisis that occurred in the industry in the 1860s through the 1880s that was sparked first by the French intervention in Mexico. It was also the judgment of the French and German occupiers that tequila was an unpleasant spirit, that they were not interested in trying to keep alive and export to Europe.

17:04And so they closed the distilleries down and abandoned the fields of agave and a fungal blight spread through the fields when they were untended that killed off the crop. The thing that made that occur is really the thing that is still the primary problem in the tequila industry, which is that the plants are rarely, and even at that point, were rarely allowed to reproduce sexually. Sonobio Sousa was the person in the 1880s who figured out that the agave, the blight, would not affect the plant if it was planted at higher elevation, if it was in cooler, drier mountain air. As soon as the plant started to thrive in the highlands, that solution caught on with some of the other prominent families in the town of Tequila, including the Cuervos, but also established the industry as we know it now.

17:58So what about Mezcal, Ted? It's a minnow compared to tequila worth about a billion dollars a year. Mezcal has seen a huge boom, especially among sort of well-heeled drinkers in the United States. And that is great for the small producers. It also means that there's a lot of pressure now to kind of industrialize or find ways to produce at greater volume, just as happened with the tequila industry at its inception. And so I think it's really smart on Rodrigo's part to focus there and say, let's try to make sure that as mezcal grows, it's able to grow in a way that is sustainable and preserves what people love about it, rather than just letting it sort of run wild as ended up happening in the tequila industry.

18:46In Oaxaca, I attend a mezcal tasting held by Rodrigo and an associate, Yesenia, from the Oaxaca-based Centre for Studies on Maguey and Mezcal. The organisation runs courses, promotes mezcal and sustainability. Neither of them pull any punches when it comes to their views on mass-produced spirits. You're not going to find a good mezcal. You're going to find mezcals that are pushed by a massive marketing machinery. I am Guadalupe Yesenia Hernandez-Marquez. I am biologist. I belong to the Zapotec people in South Mexico. We have many issues and many challenges because now we are experiencing a phenomenon called the boom mezcalero.

19:29All the people around the world want to drink mezcal. So this situation is a driver of land use change. This is the main and most critical problem. And the second one is the over-harvesting of wild agaves. And the third one is as we are exporting, we are selling our mezcal and other derivatives. Sometimes the cultural values of mezcal are changing. We say that mezcal is our social lubricant. Mezcal is a precious gift and mezcal is in our life since we were born until we passed away. How do you get a balance between making sure that people can enjoy mezcal but also that things are produced in a way that is kind to the environment and sustainable and culturally respectful?

20:25We have some certifications in labeling, and we're working on more certification. For instance, the bat friendly. We have also a big challenge with the person that book a lot of mezcal from the local producers, put in the bottle and sell, but the local producers are with more pressure to produce more and more and more because the price is not fair. And the last word here is the consumer. So it's quite difficult because we need a lot of time and mezcal is, wow, is one of the pop stars now. Chantal Martineau is the author of the book How the Gringos Stole Tequila, the modern age of Mexico's most traditional spirit.

21:12The industry grew so quickly. They have to be planting these big, big fields at a more of an industrial kind of farming level. So it's just, you know, this cycle of planting and planting and planting. Doing that kind of work is incredibly dangerous. Each spiny leaf of the plant is tipped with a razor-sharp needle. It's not uncommon to see people with cuts and stuff on their arms or their faces. I saw a guy with his eye had been poked out by an agave spine. The mezcals in the small villages that are handmade might be made in a place that has no electricity. The agave is always harvested by hand, but it can be pressed mechanically in a bigger factory.

21:55That also comes into why it's so expensive, because they are so time and effort intensive to make. And as the success of the spirits has soared, some of the most popular brands have been fronted by celebrities. Ted Genoways again. These things are a double-edged sword. I think the reason that people understandably sort of negatively react to celebrity-owned brands is that it's sort of obvious that a Kardashian doesn't have, you know, a multi-generational connection to this process and this tradition. That there's a sort of outside interest that's there that as an industry became popular, as sales were soaring, that people saw an opportunity to invest and to make a good deal of money.

22:42You know, George Clooney with Casamigos, you know, made a billion dollars when they sold that brand. There's this tendency to talk about the tequila industry as something that's been sort of overrun by foreign interests. Having studied the history of this, I can tell you that in the 1870s, the tequila industry was calling for investment in infrastructure like railroads and so on so that they could reach American drinkers, so that they could reach European drinkers. That has been the goal of the industry for more than 150 years. All of these wonderful artisanal mezcals that are produced in such small batches, they often retail in the U.S.

23:26for$150 or$200 a bottle. I think it should also be noted that it's pretty difficult to sell a$200 bottle of mezcal in Mexico and particularly in Oaxaca. So there are a lot of contradictions that are woven into this. It is about tradition, but it is also fundamentally about marketing a tradition and capitalizing on a tradition. Rodrigo says. And it is up to the consumer to decide whether to take it or not, whether to decide to drink that bad friendly tequila or something else. It's the consumer that is going to drive the whole process. People who have the interest of the industry, of their plants in their hearts, they immediately come into the program.

24:10But people who are interested in just the fashion of a celebrity tequila, they are not interested in anything remotely related to sustainability. They're interested in selling the face of that celebrity on the label. None of those brands are butt-friendly. You know, some of those brands have approached us, but the processes that they use are not compatible with the ethics behind the bat-friendly program. For example, if you are a tequila producer using Filipino stills, you are using diffusers, which the end product of a diffuser is pure ethanol with zero aromas, zero taste. You're not part of this group.

24:59You're not part of this group. Because by definition, a tequila that has been produced using a diffuser, you have to have additives. Additives for taste, additives for flavor. We don't want that kind of thing associated with a bad friendly problem. And yet, as Chantal Martineau points out, a pinch of celebrity isn't a recipe that's going away. The ongoing onslaught of celebrity tequila brands, I just don't know when people will get sick of them. I'm surprised. You can still come out with a tequila brand as a celebrity and people will still kind of buy into it. There are some pretty decent ones.

25:43I mean, Dwayne The Rock Johnson is like someone who was like a really hands-on partner with his tequila producer. sir.

25:52Rodrigo Medellin:At Terra Mana, we put mana into every step of our small batch process. Terra Mana by the US megastar Dwayne The Rock Johnson. Rodrigo tells me off mic that they have been in touch to find out how they can become bat friendly. Terra Mana says that their exploration of the bat friendly movement is still in the early stages and something they're excited about. But it's a little too soon to contribute to this program.

26:24Would having a well-known brand like this one on board be a win for Bat Friendly? Author Ted Genoese. So many of the producers, the agave producers, are independent and sell essentially on contract or independently to these larger brands. That if two or three of these brands said this is our established protocol, everyone would follow that because you didn't know who you were going to be selling to seven to ten years down the road. You know, things like this are really complicated and contentious. And so it's not an easy thing to force these kinds of changes from the outside. Chantal Martineau.

27:01I don't know. I can see both sides of that. That's kind of the question, isn't it? Can you continue to make tequila in an ethical way, really, if you're also trying to make a profit? I asked Rodrigo, given the controversies, the debates, the push and pull of commercial interests, What's next for the Bat-Friendly program? The Bat-Friendly tequila program is growing very slowly because we have a huge bottleneck, and that bottleneck is me. I am a university professor. I cannot dedicate my life to promoting Bat-Friendly. So I need to replicate this effort and in every state have a team of people, and then the Bat-Friendly program is really going to go through the roof.