Lone Mountain Wagyu

Lone Mountain Wagyu sells from a working ranch rather than from a catalogue of other people's cattle, which is an unusual thing in this pillar and changes what the label is worth. The land is 27,000 acres at Golden, New Mexico, in the valley between the Ortiz and San Pedro ranges, bought by Marion and Glen Lloyd in 1965 and run then as a commercial cattle operation.

The Wagyu began in 2004, when their daughter Mary Lloyd and her husband Bob Estrin had taken over the ranch and Estrin, by his own account, tried Wagyu at a restaurant in Santa Monica and bought two pedigreed bulls on the strength of it. Estrin came to this from film editing rather than cattle, and has since served as president of the American Wagyu Association.

The company describes itself as one of the only producers of fullblood Wagyu beef in the United States. Fullblood is a precise term and worth separating from its neighbours: it means cattle whose ancestry traces entirely to Japanese Wagyu with no crossbreeding, as distinct from purebred, which is a percentage threshold, and from F1, which is one Wagyu parent crossed with another breed, usually Angus.

Most American Wagyu on sale is F1, and that is not a criticism of it. It is a different product that eats differently and costs less, and the reason the distinction is worth holding is that all three are sold under the single word Wagyu. A producer that states which of the three it is has told you the most useful thing on the label.

The company's own explainer says, of the term American Kobe, that there is no such thing and that it is nonsense. It is worth noticing who is saying it. Kobe is the most valuable word available to anyone selling Wagyu in America, and a fullblood producer with Tajima-descended genetics could reach for it more plausibly than most.

Its explanation is the correct one and the same one this directory applies: Kobe is Tajima cattle raised and slaughtered in Hyogo Prefecture under that region's rules, so all Kobe is Wagyu but very little Wagyu is Kobe, and no cattle raised in New Mexico can be. A seller that turns down the most lucrative claim on the shelf is giving you a reason to believe the claims it does make.