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URBAN GUIDE

Looking for good ideas and places? With exhibitions, festivals, concerts, shops, capsule collections, restaurants, bars and more, our Urban Guide pages tell you what's on and what's just opened. A great way to discover all the richness and diversity of the Provence culture, shopping, food and drink, from. Local creators also have their say in these pages.

February 2022

Josiane, le joli (pré)nom du mezcal marseillais

  • Ecology, craft skills and design have come together in Marseille to bring us Josiane – mezcal made in Marseille from start to finish.
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Axel Schindlbeck arrachant les agaves. © Lorraine Hellwig

The agaves that used to grow on the Îles du Frioul, just off Marseille, were being uprooted as invasive species and were destined to be burnt or composted. Agaves first arrived in the Mediterranean basin in the 16th century. They spread rapidly, displacing slower-growing local seashore species such as Plantago subulata and Astragalus tragacantha, an endemic milkvetch. But in Mexico agave is considered a precious asset: distil it and you get mezcal. When Justine Batteux and Axel Schindlbeck saw heaps of uprooted agaves they instantly thought of mezcal. So they contacted distiller Martial Berthaud (Atelier du Bouilleur) with a view to making Marseille mezcal. The idea of this unique product delighted the people at the Calanques nature park, who were looking for ways to upcycle the waste. And as this crystal-clear nectar deserved a fitting name, it’s called Josiane after a well-known and ever-renewed tag on a rock at Plage du Prophète. The sleekly minimalist bottle is an added asset. Wanting to go further, the lads have formed a non-profit laboratory called Reveeal to explore other innovative, sustainable ways to upcycle waste. One hundred bottles in 2021 is far from industrial-scale output, and production will only last until all the local agaves are gone (there’s obviously no question of planting more!). Even so, Reveeal has shown that a social and circular economy can be a viable alternative to business as usual.

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Un flacon au design épuré pour Josiane. © Reveeal

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