Boozehound - Jason Wilson [64]
Agave Magic
Before I left for Jalisco, the only region in Mexico where tequila is made, I met David Suro-Piñera, owner of Siembra Azul tequila brand. We tasted his new añejo at his Philadelphia restaurant named, unsurprisingly, Tequila’s. “You’ll see for yourself,” he told me. “If there’s one spirit that we can say has terroir, it’s definitely tequila. If you do a blind tasting between brands, you could swear that you’re drinking entirely different spirits.”
Now, before we get too carried away with an ode to terroir, let me be clear that understanding the basics of tequila, one of the world’s finest spirits, is easier and more straightforward than with wine. To begin, you need to know two geographical areas of Jalisco: the highlands and the lowlands. Then you need to know the three basic tequila types: blanco, reposado, añejo. So talking about tequila’s terroir may seem a little bit of a stretch at first. But Suro-Piñera is pretty dead-on in making the connection to winemaking. Like wine, the spirit begins in the fields, where blue agave, a desert succulent, is the equivalent of the grape.
Seeing row after row of spiky agave in Jalisco’s fields for the first time was exciting, not unlike my thrill at seeing rows of grapevines as a young backpacker in Europe. In the equivalent of a grape stomping, a jimador, or agave farm worker, even gave me his extremely sharp coa so I could hack off the bristly spikes of my own agave—that is, until the jimador, whether worried for my safety or that of his work tool, asked for it back.
Differences among producers begin in the field. They can be geographic: highland agave (used by such brands as El Tesoro de Don Filipe, Milagro, Don Julio, and Patrón) is smaller and considered to be sweeter, while lowland agave (used by Sauza, Cuervo, and Herradura) is larger and considered drier. Other differences can be chalked up to growing techniques. Some producers (including Sauza) start from seed, while others plant the “babies” from established plants. Agave takes a long time—about seven years at a minimum—to mature enough for harvest, though some plants are left in the field as long as ten years. Some producers, such as Patrón, like their agave less ripe. Others, such as El Tesoro, want very ripe agave in which the sugars have turned to red sap that looks like blood. “I love to see my agaves bleeding,” says Carlos Camarena, El Tesoro’s owner.
More differences are created at the distillery. Is the agave cooked whole, or chopped up? Is it steamed, or slow-cooked in an oven? Is it pulverized by a machine, or by the huge, traditional stone wheel called a tahona? Is that tahona run by a machine, or dragged around by donkeys (as they still do at Siete Leguas)? Is the tequila distilled slower at a low temperature and bottled or casked straight away, or distilled at a higher temperature and then diluted with water before bottling?
Finally, there is the issue of aging. Reposado means “rested,” and, by law, reposado tequila must have rested anywhere from two months to just under one year. Some producers let their tequilas rest only a few months; others, such as El Diamante del Cielo, don’t take theirs out of the barrel until the 364th day. Añejo means “aged,” and for those tequilas, which age for one to three years, the variation is even greater. I experienced those differences firsthand on my agave pilgrimage.
A visit to Jalisco begins in a town called—what else—Tequila. After arriving there, I had an afternoon to kill and played tourist. First, I had a blanco and sangrita at one of the small kiosk bars in the town’s colorful main square, poured by a boy of about nine. Then I decided to visit Mundo Cuervo, the distiller’s shiny visitors’ center on the square. The tour itself was not much different from