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WE ALL HAVE CRAZY IDEAS. BUT SOME OF US ALSO HAVE FOLLOW THROUGH. Ron Cooper is one such cat, to use his bohemian vernacular. In 1970 in a blur of tequila he and his friends had the idea that the Pan American Highway may not actually exist. The next morning Cooper didn’t, as is customary when hungover, dismiss the frolics of the night before. No, two weeks later he, a fellow artist and a surfboard shaper, set off in their VW camper van on a four-month journey to find, and travel down, the Pan American Highway.

Thankfully it existed. Because the drinks industry would be a different place right now without Cooper’s experiences in Oaxaca, not least the ritualistic spirit of mezcal he discovered. Before Cooper, the wider world had little idea this crafted, organic, 100% agave product existed.

But the story of Mr Mezcal was a few years in the making. Make that decades.

Cooper, after all, is not a capitalist, he is an artist. He was part of the 1960s Light and Space movement – a band of avant gardes from California that tore up the art world with minimal, perceptual work. “I didn’t want to be like other artists,” he says. “Our work wasn’t understood at first. New Yorkers hated us but we didn’t give a fuck.”

New Yorkers eventually would. Cooper’s work has been shown in the top galleries in the country, including the Guggenheim. “Every piece was like the launch of a new Mercedes Benz – people were waiting for them. It felt very capitalist – people wanting this commodity. So I dropped out and moved to New Mexico.”

Cooper was probably one of the trailblazers of upping sticks to ‘find himself’. Was he a hippy? “I had long hair and a moustache,” he says. He spent a whole year in the American hinterland “building fires and watching the milky way” before moving back to his home state of California to help set up a studio.

This was 1965 Los Angeles. Cooper loves cities as “places where people share ideas” but perhaps it was too hectic for a man who had spent a year growing his hair and staring up at the big black. The “working, please call back” sign rarely left the studio door and when he “fell in love and had a child”, the tranquillity of New Mexico once again came calling.

But there followed an “emotional crash” and split from his family. More than ever Cooper immersed himself in his work. The emphasis shifted to photography and what can be simplistically called drawing with light. “I hadgone through a break up. But I had artistic licence. I felt I could do what I wanted to do. I could have a sense of humour with my work.” Besides, Cooper was a successful artist. He had, as he puts it, “fuck you money”, which is a neat way of saying he had the money to say no to work he didn’t fancy. Five years spent in dark rooms can incubate a sense of adventure. He had had his first taste of the Zapotec villages of Oaxaca a few years before journeying down the Pan American Highway, but somehow knew he had to return.

Ever since growing up in the valleys of Ojoi, California, close to the Chumash people, Cooper had been drawn to indigenous people. In Oaxaca he was fascinated by the weavers and indigenous art and made a lot of deep friendships. Cooper is now godfather to “six, seven, or eight children” – so many it’s hard to count.

But above all it was the mezcal. “I spent days asking Indians where the best mezcal was. I couldn’t under- stand a word but I could follow their hands. I would drive for 12 hours. I began to understand the ritual of mezcal. Bringing it to the world was like bringing a cultural ritual. It wasn’t a business it was an art project.” Back then the Palenqueros stored their elixir in whatever they could get hold of, often gas canisters. Bottles were certainly in short supply. Cooper would return to the US with plastic water bottles of his favourite mezcal for his friends. Indeed, to this day, if you see Cooper with a water bottle, don’t think it’s for hydration.

One day in 1990 his benevolent smuggling came a cropper. “What is that shit,” the presumably ignorant border official asked him before demanding he poured the five-gallon jug away. “I decided right there no one would tell me I couldn’t bring mezcal into the US. So I got a licence.”

Cooper has more artistic than logistical instincts. For years it had just been about “making the good shit available to friends”, Fedexing meczal across the border. By 1995 he formed Del Maguey, but it was still about “liquid art”, not making money. Amazingly he acquired the domain mezcal.com, which he owned until donating it recently to the Mezcal Consejo Regulador. Cooper was also the first to market single varietal mezcal which, along with single village (terroir-led), became his signature style.

In 2011 Cooper signed Sazerac as Del Maguey’s importer. The brand has proliferated and ignited the category. Bringing mezcal to the world was Cooper’s aim, yet not his greatest success. “When I arrived [in the Zapotec villages] everyone slept on the floor – kids and grandparents together. Now they have beds and toilets and show- ers. I provided them a dependable income. I paid what producers thought their mezcal was worth. One 80-year- old producer gets 20 times what the others get. I just average the cost out. I’ve changed so many lives in Oaxaca. This is my greatest success – without even trying.”

Cooper’s impact has been significant. Just consider that mezcal production had been in a slump since the 1950s. Agave takes seven years to grow and mezcal is labour intensive to produce so had largely been replaced in Mexico by cheaper Guatemalan aguardente. Mezcal’s foe, as its saviour, had come via the Pan American Highway.