Almare Isla Mujeres Video Tour and Premium Mezcal

We recently posted a detailed review of the newest resort to open on Isla Mujeres: Almare Luxury Collection, an adult all-inclusive hotel on the beach. If you’d prefer to take a look around without leaving your home though, we also put up a video tour on our channel.

In this tour we take you from the boat trip over to start with, on the resort’s private yacht from Puerto Cancun, to the walk down their private pier, to what you’ll find once you get there.

Almare is a new kind of resort for the Luxury Collection brand by Marriott. Their previous versions, mostly built or taken over when they were part of the Starwood company that Marriott acquired, were city properties or a la carte offerings. They’re dipping their toe into the upscale all-inclusive part of the market though and this is the first version in Latin America.

I think it’s a smart move for them because they’re missing out on a lot of customers who prefer this kind of “one bill and I’m done” offering. Hyatt has a zillion of them now since taking over the Secrets brand and on this coast you’ve got luxury all-inclusive offerings from Xcaret (La Casa de la Playa), Palace Resorts (Le Blanc), Travelty (Live Aqua), SLS, Hilton, and more.

Almare Resort on Isla Mujeres is not some sprawling mega-hotel where you’ll get lost on the way to your room, however. You can expect a much higher level of service than you’d find in the giant ones in the Riviera Maya with several hundred rooms. This adult all-inclusive resort barely tops 100 rooms, so you won’t have any trouble getting the bartender’s attention or talking directly to the activities director.

Almare Luxury Collection also has a lot going on each day if you are looking for more to do than just hang out in a lounge chair or sip cocktails at the swim-up bar. I was only there for two full days, but I went out kayaking one morning, attended a coffee tasting workshop, and got to experience a premium mezcal tasting with some brands I’d never seen.

Mexican Mezcal From Oaxaca, Guerrero, and Durango

My bartender Amaury mixed up some interesting cocktails while I was staying at Almare Isla Mujeres, plus he ran a mezcal tasting where we got to try four very different bottles.

The first was my least favorite, Contraluz made from Espadin agave then aged in barrels for six months. If it ended there I’d be happy, but this brand has followed the inexplicably popular craze that hit the tequila world a few years ago of bleaching all the color out after. In this case they do it through charcoal filters that remove all the color, apparently to make it better for clear cocktails for the cool kids, but that filtering and alteration just seems to make it more blah and a little off.

The Contraluz brand has some celebrity cachet though. The co-owner and face of the brand is Colombian singer Maluma (Juan Luis Londoño Arias). So people will buy it in bars whether it’s great or not, but the two others we tasted were more interesting.

Next up was Cicatriz from Guerrero state. I don’t think I’ve ever had mezcal from there and this one was worth returning to. It is an unaged mezcal made from cupreata agave, which you don’t see very often. It’s 42% alcohol and is a good one to try if you’re looking for a different taste profile from this spirit that has more variation than tequila does. Their website is in English but none of the buttons on the site take you anywhere, so there’s not much to see.

The third mezcal we tried was Mezcal Burrito Fiestero, which refers to the original meaning of a small donkey, not the tubular menu item. Donkeys have long carried the agave fruits themselves and then the finished product, so this is an homage to them. This was my favorite of the bunch, with more spice and citrus notes than in the others and far more complexity than you’ll find in the neutered Contraluz.

Mezcal Burrito is from Durango, a state that has a few different mezcal distilleries doing interesting work. The company making this one put their 46% alcohol liquor in a fun bottle too, something sure to get a smile when you pull it out from your home bar. Different agave strains have different colors on the bottle. You can find it in the USA for around the $40 to $45 mark.

The last one was kind of a novelty bonus that the bartender pulled out at the end: Perro de San Juan Grana Cochinilla mezcal. You know how some mezcal brands used to have a worm in the bottle? Well this one actually integrates a bug in the process, giving it a different color.

Cochinilla is an insect that has been used since ancient times as a colorant. In the case of this mezcal process, the bugs are dried, sterilized, ground into a powder, and used in the distillation process. It’s kind of a novelty really, adding instead of extracting to make a more colorful mezcal, but in this case the final taste isn’t altered much. This is a lively and interesting mezcal from Oaxaca on its own, so if you want you can skip the coloring and buy one of their three clear versions made from different kinds of agave.

See more information on this Isla Mujeres luxury resort at our online magazine site.