Mezcal by Women, and for Women’s Wallets

Yola Jimenez’s all-women mezcal business began with her grandfather. In the late 1960s, he bought a farm in Oaxaca near his home in San Juan Del Río, Mexico, and began experimenting with agave cultivation. It was a passion project that grew; eventually he spent more time making mezcal than he did at his day job.
“My grandfather was progressive and was illiterate until he went to college and became an engineer,” Ms. Jimenez said recently from her company’s headquarters, in a house in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. “He only made it for his friends and family. He made it for the love of mezcal.”
That love spread to Ms. Jimenez, 35, who was born and raised in Mexico City. She opened a mezcal bar there in 2008, where she served versions of her grandfather’s liquor along with other unique and obscure varieties. As the bar grew in popularity, the idea of taking on her family’s mezcal farm — and hiring only women to distill, bottle and sell the product — became a reality. “Some of them are the granddaughters of the distillery’s original workers,” Ms. Jimenez said.