The $50 jump

Mezcal pricing is not linear. Below $40, you are buying a bar mezcal – something dependable, dilute, and built for cocktails. Above $50, the relationship between what you pay and what you taste steepens sharply, but only for about twenty dollars, after which it flattens again until the next step up at around $120.

The $50–$70 band is where mezcal becomes interesting as a drink rather than a mixer. Proof rises. Origin narrows. The maestro's name appears on the label. Bottles in this range will reward slow sipping in a way that a $35 espadín simply cannot – the aromatics haven't been diluted out, and the production choices (stills, fermentation vessels, resting time) leave legible traces.

Above $120, you are mostly paying for scarcity. Wild-harvested agaves – tepeztate, madrecuishe, tobalá – take twenty or more years to mature and cannot be replanted at commercial pace. The bottles are excellent; the marginal dollar is buying agronomy, not craft. A $140 tepeztate is not 'four times as good' as a $35 espadín. It is simply an entirely different thing.

The sweet spot, for most drinkers, is the $50–$70 band. Nuestra Soledad's village expressions, Koch's Olla de Barro, and Fidencio's better releases all live here. None of them are reference bottles, and all of them are better drinking than most of what's above them until you get to the $120 tier and above.