WHISKEY MAIZ NATION was founded by Maestro Destilador Jonathan Barbieri and Yira Vallejo. Maíz Nation is a tribute to the native communities of the Central Valleys, Chinantla, the Sierra Mixteca and the Oaxacan Coast who, with care and patience, have conserved and selected their corn throughout countless generations. The rich terroir evoked by this bottle transcends all notions of altitude, climate, soil or biological intersection. As important as each of these factors are, for us the most valuable things are the families, the communities, their history and their culture.
SOLCRAFT DISTILLERY is a truly off grid and environmentally ideal facility. It is completely powered by solar energy and uses only rainwater for production, collected and stored in underground cisterns. And finally, processing all the stillage back to clean water through pH balancing, microbial treatment and rhizome filtration.
NATIVE CORN, which was developed in Mesoamerican fields by Indigenous scientists about 6,500 years ago, has been coaxed and shepherded through 350 generations into the Twenty-first Century in harmony with the environment and humanity. Along the way, it fueled the rise of several major civilizations. To this day, the cultivation of Native corn is an act of reverence that links present day farmers directly to their ancestors. Native corn is typically planted in milpas, or garden-parcels resembling small, forest-like ecosystems, where beans, squash and corn co-exist with edible and medicinal plants and mushrooms. In the milpa there are no chemicals used and the soil remains healthy and nitrogen-rich from harvest to harvest. Native corn belongs to the people in the communities where it is cultivated and consumed. Native corn is sacred!
WHY IS NATIVE CORN SO SPECIAL? Commodity corn, commonly known as GMO corn, was created in the laboratory fifty years ago. Its current iterations are frozen in time back in the 1980s. With no natural defenses of its own, GMO corn cannot survive in the field without massive amounts of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, indiscriminate insecticides and carcinogenic herbicides. As a consequence, the world has been left with widespread and severe soil degradation, hundred-mile dead zones in the mouths of most of the world’s major rivers, forever chemicals, massive annual carbon emissions and accelerated global warming. It forces the question, can anything be hand crafted if sourced from commodity anything!?
