NOM-070 Explained

What NOM-070 actually is

NOM-070-SCFI-2016 is the current version of Mexico's national mezcal standard, published by the Secretaría de Economía in 2016 and taking effect in 2017. It replaced the earlier 1994 norm and codifies the legal definition of the word mezcal: what plants qualify, what production methods are permitted, what has to appear on the label, and what analytical parameters (ABV, methanol, higher alcohols) every certified bottle must meet.

The norm's most consequential feature — and the reason it matters to anyone reading this site — is the creation of three tiered categories: Mezcal, Mezcal Artesanal, and Mezcal Ancestral. Each category permits a specific set of production methods and prohibits others. Ancestral is the strictest.

The three categories, in detail

Every certified mezcal must comply with one of three category definitions. All three require the product to be 100% agave, distilled to between 35% and 55% ABV at 20°C, with methanol between 30 and 300 mg per 100 mL of anhydrous alcohol and higher alcohols between 100 and 500 mg per 100 mL. The category distinction comes from the process.

Mezcal (Class 1, sometimes called "industrial")

The most permissive category. Cooking may use a pit oven, masonry oven, or autoclave (pressurized steam vessel). Milling may use any method including diffusers — industrial extraction devices that separate sugars from agave fiber without traditional crushing. Fermentation may occur in wood, masonry, or stainless steel. Distillation may use copper pot stills, stainless pot stills, continuous column stills, or any combination.

Most commercial mezcal at the low end of the US market fits this category. It is legally mezcal, but the production framework differs dramatically from what most drinkers associate with the word.

Mezcal Artesanal

The mid-tier category — and where the majority of good US-imported mezcal sits. Autoclaves and diffusers are prohibited. Cooking must use a pit oven or masonry oven; milling must use a tahona, trapiche, Chilean/Egyptian mill, or mechanical shredder (but not a diffuser). Fermentation must occur in wood, clay, stone, or animal-hide vessels — and the crushed agave fiber (bagazo) must be included in the fermenting mash. Distillation must use copper or stainless pot stills (columns prohibited); wood components may be incorporated into the still.

This is the framework producers like Fidencio, Mezcal Vago, Del Maguey (most village bottlings), Nuestra Soledad, and El Jolgorio operate within. Real ancestral method producers like Real Minero and Lalocura frequently ship bottles under this designation to avoid the friction of ancestral certification.

Mezcal Ancestral

The strictest category. Cooking must use a pit oven (masonry ovens are prohibited, autoclaves obviously so). Milling must use a wooden mallet (mazo) or tahona — no mechanical shredders, no trapiches. Fermentation must occur in stone pits, wood, clay, brick, or animal-hide vessels with the fiber included. And critically, distillation must use wood-fired clay pot stills (ollas de barro) with the fiber included in the still itself. The still head (montera) may be clay or wood. Copper, stainless, and column distillation are all prohibited.

This is what the site is about. Ancestral method represents less than 1% of all certified mezcal production. See our full guide to ancestral method for the detailed walkthrough.

The Denominación de Origen

Not every state in Mexico can legally produce "mezcal." The word is protected by a Denominación de Origen (DO) — a legal designation similar to how "Champagne" or "Tequila" work. The mezcal DO was originally granted in 1994 and has been expanded repeatedly.

The DO currently covers:

• Full state coverage: Oaxaca, Guerrero, Durango, San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas
• Partial coverage (specific municipios): Michoacán (29), Puebla (116), Guanajuato (2), Tamaulipas (11), Aguascalientes (7), Morelos (23), Estado de México (15)

The most-recent additions — Aguascalientes, Morelos, and Estado de México — are contested. Oaxaca producers have argued publicly that expanding the DO to states with weaker traditional-mezcal ties dilutes the geographic-authenticity meaning of the designation. This debate is ongoing.

Producers operating outside the DO — including large parts of Jalisco and Michoacán — cannot legally use the word mezcal on their labels, even if their product is made using traditional pit-cooking, tahona-milling, clay-pot-distilling methods. Instead, they ship as destilado de agave or agave spirit. More on this below.

The CRM: certification and enforcement

The Consejo Mexicano Regulador de la Calidad del Mezcal (COMERCAM) — historically and still commonly called the CRM — is the government-authorized certifying body for NOM-070. Every certified bottle carries a CRM-issued hologram, a NOM number identifying the certified palenque, and the category designation.

The CRM is funded partly by producer fees. That funding model is one reason many small ancestral producers do not participate in certification: the per-liter fees and administrative overhead are prohibitive for palenques operating at the scale of a few hundred bottles per year. Producers who stay outside the CRM system ship informally, through curator brands, or as destilado de agave.

The NOM-199 "Komil" controversy

In 2020, a proposed new norm — NOM-199-SCFI-2020 — surfaced that would have prohibited producers outside the mezcal, tequila, and other agave-spirit DOs from using the word agave on their labels. In place of "agave," the proposal introduced a new invented category term: Komil.

The response from producers and drinkers was overwhelmingly negative. NOM-199 would have effectively legislated smaller producers out of a common vocabulary — the very word for the plant they distill from — in the interest of protecting the DOs from perceived encroachment. After more than a year of public opposition and pressure from industry groups, the Mexican government cancelled NOM-199 on February 25, 2022.

The lasting effect: the extra-legal category destilado de agave remained legal and became the standard label for producers outside the DOs — Jalisco raicilla-adjacent production, Michoacán and Colima traditional mezcal-method producers, and various other regional agave spirits. Projects like Mezonte operate primarily in this space.

The certification gap

The gap between "method-ancestral" and "certified-ancestral" is one of the most important — and least-covered — features of the modern mezcal category. Many of the producers whose bottles most rigorously satisfy the ancestral method definition do not carry the ancestral certification on the label. There are three main reasons:

1. Certification costs. The per-batch fees and inspection overhead required to certify an ancestral batch are meaningful expenses for small producers. Real Minero, for example, ships most of its US-imported catalog under the Artesanal designation despite every bottle being clay-pot distilled with the fiber included.
2. Batch inconsistency. A palenque might make one batch that qualifies as ancestral and another that uses a mechanical shredder because the tahona was down for repair. Rather than maintain the paperwork to certify individual batches, many producers apply the more permissive Artesanal designation across the catalog.
3. Producers outside the DO. Mezonte and other Jalisco/Michoacán-based producers simply cannot certify as ancestral mezcal — they are outside the DO and their product ships as destilado de agave regardless of production method.

This site takes an editorial position: we cover method-based ancestral production, with the NOM-070 Ancestral certification treated as a badge that some bottles carry and others don't. See our full guide for the deeper argument.

What to look for on a label

• Category designation: "Mezcal," "Mezcal Artesanal," or "Mezcal Ancestral." Absence of "Mezcal" means it's likely destilado de agave.
• NOM number: five-digit code identifying the certified palenque. Cross-referencable in CRM records.
• Batch number and count: quality producers name the batch and often the bottle count.
• Maestro / palenquero name: serious producers name the person who made the bottle. Curator brands like Vago and Rezpiral do this by default.
• Village of origin: "Santa Catarina Minas," "San Baltazar Guelavila," etc. Terroir information is often more useful than the state name alone.
• Agave species: Latin binomial is the gold standard (e.g., Agave karwinskii). Common names alone can be ambiguous within the Karwinskii family.
• Still type: "Olla de barro" or "distilled in clay" indicates ancestral method regardless of category label.

For readers building a working knowledge of the category, NOM-070 is the underlying document that every other decision references. Read the actual norm text if you want the full picture — it is publicly available at the Diario Oficial de la Federación.