California Agave Symposium’s Santa Barbara Debut 

More than 250 agave growers, distillers, and enthusiasts from around the world gathered this week in Santa Barbara for the fourth annual California Agave Symposium, marking the first time that the event was not held at UC Davis. Sunday’s private ranch tours, distillery visits, and welcoming party led into the day-long conference on Monday at the Hilton Santa Barbara Beachfront, concluding with a small dinner of experts from Italy, Israel, Australia, Maui, Florida, and elsewhere at Convivo on Cabrillo Boulevard. 

The shift to Santa Barbara recognized this region’s considerable impact on the statewide movement to grow agave. The plant is most popularly made into tequila and mezcal in Mexico, although there are many other products, like biofuel, fiber, and surfboards, being produced in other places as well. 

Kicking off the Monday symposium was California Agave Council president Stuart Woolf, a prominent farmer of almonds, tomatoes, cotton, and more from Fresno County who is now growing more than 600,000 agave plants near Interstate 5. 

“We are not trying to replicate tequila and mezcal — those enjoy a rich heritage with our friends south of the border, and it’s something they own,” he said. “What we’re trying to do here is create our own identity with our own latitudes, with our own soils and elevations, our own terroir, and create spirits that are something uniquely different and unique to California. This is our opportunity, and this is what we’re kind of all about.”

The morning continued with panels on growing, distilling, and marketing, with the resounding message that everyone in California — where commercial agave growing is only a dozen years old — is learning how to do everything all at once in real time. 

“This is all a really big experiment, and we’re all on the ground floor of this experiment,” said Jordie Ricigliano of Los Hijuelos, which manages about 5,000 plants of 18 different agave varieties in Goleta, Carpinteria, and the Santa Ynez Valley. “Is there another chapter in the agave story that is yet to be told?”

During the keynote talk, featuring Madre Mezcal’s Chris Peterson and Davide Berruto and Agave Matchmaker’s Grover Sanschagrin, emphasis was placed on California’s ability to build this industry in a mindful manner. 

“There is incredible potential to do things right from the beginning,” said Berruto, who said the current unsustainable state of Mexico’s tequila industry is hard to watch, “because you have the opportunity to start from scratch, focus on quality rather than focusing on volume and cost.” 

The tension between small, artisanal projects and larger-scale dreams for the industry was a recurrent topic, although the general consensus was that both are needed to build a healthy market in California. There was also grumbling over the name “California agave spirit,” which was codified a few years ago.  

“Agave spirits as a name isn’t sexy,” said Sanschagrin. “But I kind of like it because it can’t be owned.” He said the state’s focus should be on freedom — since it’s not beholden to the rules that exist in Mexico — and diversity. “Oh my god, the amount of microclimates you have!” he said.

The afternoon broke out into smaller rooms featuring panels that explored lessons learned by farmers, the latest scientific research, the challenges of converting the plants to alcohol, and what other applications exist, including aviation fuel, culinary syrups like Respeto, and pellets like Quiote to fuel your smoker. 

Perhaps the most ambitious project discussed was from Down Under, where Jen Wainwright of Agave Resources Australia is raising investment around turning agave into a significant source of biofuel. The potential to rival more combustible power sources is exciting.  

“We’re just shipping syrup,” she explained. “It’s not volatile, it doesn’t blow up, and it lasts a very long time.”

Plans for the 2027 California Agave Symposium are not yet known, though returning to the Central Coast will certainly be part of the discussion.