In distillation you get the heads, hearts and tails. For the distiller the most delicate and hard to achieve compounds are usually in the heads or as they call it in spanish, Puntas. The puntas also contain some undesirable compounds as methanol, so the art is in cutting at the right spot and have a very slow destillation at lower temperature. 

Raicilla is debated to be one of the longest produced spirits in the world. It doesn’t differ all that much from Mezcal, in fact it ones was a Mezcal. Due to restrictions in the law we have today, Mezcal from the state of Jalisco can not legally be called Mezcal, so it was easier to stick to name of the tax-avoiding moonshine it is. Raicilla as a name came about in the late 1700s as a way to avoid sky rocketing taxes on Mezcal. La Venenosa is the first commercially available brand of Raicilla available in Europe. that being said, these batches are very small, and all labels are from different producers.