IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
Polanco, the palatial, Beverly Hills-like colonia just north of Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park is a place where opulence and modern design combine into a cosmopolitan expression of Mexico’s high-end aspirations.
In a posh second floor apartment in the flower-lined neighborhood where I meet Dr. Iván Saldaña, that same enticing and tasteful confluence is on full display.
The plant biologist and biochemist — who towers well over six feet — pours me through the history and flavors of a variety of Mexican spirits (many of which he founded and oversees himself) from a private library of bottles. The spacious living room is peppered with old-world artifacts and paintings from modern Mexican artists, bordered by an open kitchen bar at the far end where, upon entering, Saldaña transforms into a sommelier of sorts, guiding me through a round of beverages. The collection is eclectic: a bottle from Saldaña’s mega-successful Montelobos, an artisanal mezcal made from young Tobalá, sits directly above an unlabeled jug of golden tequila, a gift from his uncle that looks like a well-dated heirloom from another era passed across generations, half consumed.
I’ve taken a four-hour bus ride from Veracruz to speak with Saldaña about his latest contribution to this Mexican multiverse of drinks: Almave, the world’s first and only non-alcoholic blue agave distillate. If you want a taste, you may have to join the global waitlist; it’s currently sold out on Almave’s official website.
The fashionable beverage is unlike anything that Saldaña, or any Mexican distiller for that matter, has ever made. The concept for Almave bloomed out of a newfound partnership between Saldaña and seven-time world champion and current Ferrari driver, Sir Lewis Hamilton.
“The person who had the idea of bringing agave into the non-alcoholic world — and the challenges that [it] presented me with — was Lewis,” Saldaña tells me from across the bartop as he pours me a shot of Almave Ámbar. “He is a man who discovered and understood he had a gift, which is this ability to connect time and space. He’s kind of a guesser of the future when he’s driving at maximum speed. But how to get there requires a resilient effort to move through the obstacles.”
Saldaña is admittedly not much of a Formula 1 fan. Prior to meeting Hamilton, he had no way of knowing that the winningest driver of his generation had long been a Mexico City legend (and, covertly, a tequila savant), exerting his will at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez. Throughout his historic career, Hamilton’s annual travels to the Mexican capital for the grand prix have awarded the Brit with a rush of the country’s distinct offerings. He became enamored. And according to Hamilton himself, he’s always had a fondness for the nation’s agave elixirs — namely, tequila. In recent years, the veteran driver set out to find a healthy, tamer alternative of the Mexican spirit (the alcohol-free Almave clocks in with just 5 grams of carbs, less than 1 gram of sugar, and 20 calories per 2-ounce serving). That’s when Hamilton unexpectedly reached out to Saldaña, the visionary Mexican alchemist and author of Anatomy of Mezcal who is, in many ways, a reflection of Hamilton himself: an outsider in his field who went on to dominate his competitors, in spite of the non-believers.
The splashy product officially launched in late October of 2023 as part of the nineteenth-edition of the Mexico City Grand Prix. The big announcement was accompanied with an afterparty in a Mexico City skyscraper around
Halloween and Día de Muertos festivities. Two years prior to the reveal, Hamilton met privately with Saldaña and Saldaña’s business partner Moisés Guindi at Casa Lumbre, the renowned Mexican spirits incubator where Saldaña is a co-owner and chief innovation officer. There, Saldaña delivered an abridged history of the agave plant to Hamilton and presented him with agave in its various forms (raw; cooked; different parts of the plant to smell, to taste, to hold). It was clear to Saldaña that Hamilton was locked in — curious and driven to know more about agave’s possibilities. Hamilton had, after all, specifically asked to speak directly with Saldaña, and no one else.
The two experts quickly found a commonality in their approach to their lives and their crafts — the doctor of botany imparting values about the “10-million-year-old plant who finds a way to survive in the harshest conditions in the middle of the desert,” where “everything is trying to eat you,” while the racer offered his resiliency, vision, and drive. At one point, Hamilton visited Atotonilco el Alto, the ancestral grounds in Jalisco where Almave’s agaves are cultivated and cooked using a time-honored method. Almave had many trial runs after that initial moment, with Saldaña in the lab and Hamilton on the track. Throughout the Formula 1 season, it became a challenge for the two partners to meet. Saldaña followed Hamilton like “his shadow,” racing from podium to podium for collaborative check-ins as the project necessitated. Miami. The Netherlands. Las Vegas. At each stop, they continued the work of creating a first-of-its-kind spirit. Samples. Tastings. Notes. Always pushing forward. After having to reschedule one important meeting near the product’s release, Hamilton invited Saldaña to Monaco. The pair gathered near Hamilton’s plush French Riviera property to review their joint labor for a few hours. Not bad for a raincheck.
We sometimes forget — from the comfort of our couch — that racing at 300 kilometers per hour is, in its most distilled reality, a life-or-death scenario. Not every driver walks away unscathed. Fans and family don’t always get to see a legend’s transformation in real-time. Hamilton has evolved across his 18-year career, and with it, so has his body, his spirit, and his desires.
In 2017, at age 32, Hamilton became fully vegan, despite the warnings of health professionals. In 2023, aged 38, and one night away from the Mexico City Grand Prix qualifiers, the same time as Almave’s scheduled kickoff, the battle-tested virtuoso told Men’s Health how his aging had influenced his daily choices and provoked growth in the unseen margins.
Enter Almave — a way for Hamilton to enjoy his off-days without any alcohol-related repercussions. A portmanteau of “alma” (Spanish for “soul”) and “agave” (the succulent used to make tequila and mezcal), Almave is both an ode to Mexico’s rich ingredients and a sexy entrant into the burgeoning N.A. space.
The drink has been a hit. Some might say they’ve already taken the checkered flag at a race that no one had ever attempted. But even now, Saldaña believes their work is far from done.
“We are learning, and we can improve,” Saldaña says. “One of the things [Lewis and I] shared is that Almave is an evolving project. Just like in races, cars can improve; your car can improve after one year because there’s new science behind it. That’s what we’re doing.”
“We are one of, if not the best non-alcs out there right now, and we are proud of what we have achieved — a product made in Los Altos de Jalisco,” he continues. “But we are early on.”
Making an alcohol-free agave substitute was certainly not on Saldaña’s personal lotería board. Born in Guadalajara, Jalisco — Mexico’s third largest metropolis and the national cradle for popular cultural exports like tequila, mariachis, and the Chivas soccer club — Saldaña was raised by a poet father and psychoanalyst mother. In contrast to the distillers of Tequila, Jalisco, a desert town beyond Guadalajara’s limits where José Cuervo and countless other tequila producers are clustered, Saldaña wasn’t groomed in a family of proud tequileros. Instead, he was raised to “understand the energies of life” and to hear “the subtle forces of the universe” from his parents, a tireless duo of wandering creatives. Growing up, they spent summers visiting nearby Tapalpa, a federally designated Pueblo Mágico in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountain range. Tapalpa is a charmingly quaint town with cobblestoned roads and rental cabins encircled by a sprawling forest of pine, oak, mountainous cacti, and regional flora. It is here that city-raised Saldaña became enamored with Mexico’s biodiversity. He developed an intense yearning to absorb more of his country’s naturalia.
Saldaña does not overvalue his Ph.D in Plant Biology and Biochemistry, and stresses to me that his skillset is different from that of the distiller who learned the generational craft, which he admires. His is both “an artistic mezcal and a historic mezcal” honed through study and travel to honor and advance the ancestral agave lineage. “I’m an external explorer who studied biology and fell in love with this.”
With a professorial bearing, Saldaña is at once grounded and calculated: an expert who tours foreign lands, befriends international gourmands, and is sought after by the likes of rockstars and racing titans. After earning his doctorate with an emphasis on agaves in 2006 from the University of Sussex, Saldaña made a hairpin turn into the highly competitive global alcohol industry as a research and development manager with Pernod Ricard. It was at the spirits distributing powerhouse where he first learned the art of distillation.
Since then, Saldaña has helped to catalyze a renaissance in the world of Mexican spirits. His imprint is evident across more than 60 brands, many of which are considered to be class-leading in their categories and regions. From 2011 onward, Saldaña has introduced the likes of artisanal mezcal (Montelobos), a spicy liqueur made from poblano chiles macerated in flavorless sugarcane (Ancho Reyes), a copper-distilled, white Cacahuazintle corn whiskey (Abasolo), a corn liqueur made with maize sourced from the volcanic Nevado de Toluca region (Nixta), a gin concocted from wild juniper that Saldaña spent five years hunting for across both sides of California’s border (Gin de las Californias), and a Chihuahuan desert sotol backed by Lenny Kravitz (Nocheluna). Shortly after I left, Saldaña prepared for his flight to Turin as a guest and de facto Mexican ambassador for “The World’s 50 Best Restaurants” celebration in the Northern Italian Alps.
Saldaña’s efforts are an enduring reminder that Mexico is, and has always been, a terrain where constant reinvention happens in real-time. There are many versions of Mexico and its vastness — a blurry cosmos of people, bakeries, art galleries, rifle-wielding police, museums, Michelin-starred eateries, lush parks, pulquerías, tianguis, smog, high-rises, universities, paleteros, filmmakers, corruption, and exorbitant wealth. The energy of the country is evolving and unrelenting, a nation at times stuck in the past, while always carrying a vibrancy that hovers eons ahead of itself — an alternate dimension of sorts. Saldaña is present in its vortex, daily.
At the National Anthropology Museum, not far from his home, a sprawling collection of the world’s largest Mesoamerican artifacts are housed. The vault houses incomprehensible truths and mysteries dating back to 400 BCE. In the opposite direction, Mexico’s densest concentration of upscale shopping glimmers. To the north, on the edge of Polanco, Carlos Slim — the wealthiest man in Latin America, and a significant Formula 1 sponsor for Sergio Pérez — founded Museo Soumaya, a collection of international art and sculptures entirely funded by Slim and free to the public. It all provides a picturesque glimpse into Mexico’s nuance, innovation, and refinement, but also of its diversity, its boldness, and its spiraling journey across time.
We escape Saldaña’s apartment for an afternoon stroll, and the luxurious avenues await — extensive, elegant, historic. They sprawl in every direction, each promising a kind of discovery. Saldaña, ever the teacher, delivers a pocket history of Mexico’s last half millennium of globalization: how the Spanish arrived and then brought Nueva España and indigenous Méxica with them to Asia, and how the crops and cultures mixed and spread across the continents. He explains that Veracruz, where I now live, became a departure point back to Spain, and how that created a flow of sugar, coconuts, cinnamon, black pepper, and cloves. “Think of mole,” he tells me. “That’s a merger of the world, a sauce of globalized exquisiteness.”
As he speaks, it becomes clear that Saldaña’s commitment to distilling Mexico’s complex essence into liquid form is all-consuming. He’s a distiller and a doctor, a rover and a historian.
His goal is to capture the spirit of Mexico — where “everything exists in a gray area,” where things are “fluid,” where it’s impossible to reduce a country to “clichés” — inside a bottle. Almave is his latest attempt.
