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.
She knew the project was important. “This model can provide jobs and incomes, which, some studies show, can have larger impacts on communities,” Ms. Jimenez said.
But she couldn’t have predicted how popular mezcal would become in the last few years. Now that sales of the smoky liquor have skyrocketed in American cities, there’s an allure to the alcoholic beverage that is relatively new in many places.
Ms. Jimenez was introduced to the Swedish-born singer-songwriter Lykke Li, 33, and Gina Correll Aglietti, 37, in Mexico City on separate occasions, and after several years of friendship, they became partners in her business. The three — all mezcal lovers — would get together and try different brands, and tweak Ms. Jimenez’s recipes. Yola Mezcal was born. (The flavor comes from a combination of a common agave known as espadín and a rare agave known as madrecuixe.)
The brand is growing, with Ms. Jimenez overseeing operations in Mexico, Lykke Li managing the creative direction and Ms. Aglietti, who previously worked as a stylist and producer, handling most of the day-to-day business operations as the C.E.O. They are still hiring mostly women — now on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The company’s headquarters are a modernist house in Silver Lake, designed by R.M. Schindler and owned by the ceramist Noel Osheroff. (It doubles as Ms. Aglietti’s home.) This is where the women of Yola Mezcal host weekly dinners and where many of the ideas for Yola Mezcal first emerge. The three friends used to smuggle their bottles into Hollywood events and nightclubs like Chateau Marmont as a form of guerrilla distribution. Now, Chateau Marmont has Yola Mezcal behind the bar, officially.
“We had a product that was real and it was really good mezcal,” said Ms. Aglietti. “We didn’t have a strategy for sales or for the company. We brought it up in an informal way, we brought it up as a family.”
The women have continued to expand the brand’s reach with music festivals and philanthropic initiatives. In August, they held their first ever “Yola Día,” a music festival with an all-female lineup that included Courtney Love, Megan Thee Stallion, Empress Of, Cat Power and, of course, Lykke Li. Held in Los Angeles Historic State Park, the festival was predominantly staffed and organized by women; women also led the security teams for the sold-out event. A dollar from every ticket sold was donated to the Downtown Women’s Center. (Men were very welcome to attend.)
“It was time for something like this,” said Lykke Li, of the festival. “It wasn’t about excluding men. It’s really about creating a future and to trying to understand what it means to be women and men and learning and living together.”
