Mundo Mezcal 2026 draws over 250 brands to Mexico City

Mundo Mezcal 2026 drew more than 250 agave-spirit brands to Mexico City this past weekend, filling over 10,000 square metres of the Campo Marte gardens for the festival's second edition, from 16 to 18 October.

The lineup spanned eight states: hosts Aguascalientes, Campeche, Mexico City, the State of Mexico, Guanajuato, Michoacán and Sonora, plus guest of honour Tamaulipas, which sent a delegation of around 40 producers and officials from 11 municipalities. The programme ran 28 tastings and pairings alongside 20 restaurants and 19 traditional cooks serving food built around mezcal rather than just beside it.

Marisol Rumayor, the festival's general coordinator, has described the event's purpose as working "to protect, learn, and strengthen the category of Mexican artisanal agave spirits," a line she first used for the 2025 edition and one organisers repeated heading into this year's run.

A festival built around small producers says as much about mezcal's future as any single bottle on the table.

A festival still chasing its own record

The 2025 edition, also at Campo Marte, drew more than 8,000 attendees and close to 400 exhibitors, and set a Guinness World Record for the most varieties of mezcal on display at once, with 457 different labels. Organisers put that edition's economic impact at around 50 million pesos and said they were aiming to beat both the attendance and the exhibitor count this year, though final 2026 numbers were not yet published at the time of writing.

Banco Azteca returned as presenting sponsor for a second year, offering small producers access to its Mi Negocio Cash Loan line, with amounts up to 200,000 pesos, aimed at agave growers and distillers who rarely qualify for conventional business credit.

Agave spirits beyond the big brands

Mundo Mezcal's format keeps the focus on small, often family-run producers rather than the handful of internationally distributed mezcal labels that dominate export markets. For a broader look at the city's dining scene around events like this one, AMUSE's what to eat in Mexico City guide covers where Mexico City eats beyond the festival tent, and Mexico's wine grape harvest tracks how the country's wider beverage-crop output has moved in the same period.

A third edition, if the pattern holds, would likely return to Campo Marte next October with a new guest state in the spotlight.