Life revolves around Plaza del Jamón, or “Ham Square,” in Andalusia, where Cinco Jotas began producing Iberian ham in 1879.

Many of the company’s practices in Jabugo, a village of roughly 2,300 inhabitants, are still 19th-century. It smokes chorizo in a room full of oak fires spilling smoke upon a ceiling full of hanging sausages. It cures hams in a cellar that employees climate-control by manually opening and closing windows.

One aspect of Cinco Jotas’ quality control beats its other Old World habits by a nose: a cadre of six sniffers whose job is to poke each pork loin in four specific places with probes made of cow bone and take evaluative whiffs. The probe is called a cala, and a sniffer’s formal title is calador.