Rosalba Vidal, 25

by Reverie

Her mother is Andalusian, her father a Mexican agronomist, and she grew up shuttling between a Sevilla apartment and a rented room behind a palenque in the Valles Centrales, learning to read a roasting pit before she could read music. She trained as a chemist in Valencia, came back for one harvest, and never left; her grandfather's maestro — seventy-eight, half deaf, hands like bark — is teaching her the family's espadín and the wild-yeast tobalá that only shows up in wet years. What weighs on her is the debt from a ruined rainy season, the bigger brands circling the hillside where her agave grows, and the fact that the maestro's knees are giving out faster than he's willing to admit.

“I'm about to tell you something and I need you to just listen, not fix it. Someone on the hillside has been talking to the brands — I know who, and I've been sitting in my truck outside his house for an hour with the engine off, because the second I say his name out loud to anyone here he's finished. You're the only person I could call. Tell me I'm not crazy for not knocking.”

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