Boozehound - Jason Wilson [66]
El Tesoro is my favorite tequila, and my experience of the distillery was the opposite of my tour of Cuervo’s. The owner himself gave me the tour, chain-smoking as we passed a half dozen signs that read “Prohibido fumar.” Camarena spoke of the importance of eschewing traditional yeast during the fermentation of the agave and instead letting the microflora in the open air do the work. That is how unique flavor is created, he said: “It’s where the magic happens.” The magic also happens in the barrel room, where Camarena experiments wildly with different wood finishes and barrel sizes. In 2010, he launched a tequila, in partnership with French distillers, that is aged in both Sauternes and cognac casks. He’s lately been pushing the limit on extra-añejos, which usually age around three years, by letting some barrels age five years or more. Searching for one of his experimental barrels, Camarena flicked on his cigarette lighter. I gasped. The air in the barrel room was so redolent with evaporating tequila, I assumed we’d be blown to bits. But no. “Don’t worry,” he said.
Even smaller than El Tesoro, and more traditional, is Siete Leguas. There, with little fanfare, we tasted our tequila while sitting on folding chairs in a dark room, the glasses set on a paper towel. Sipping Siete Leguas’s añejo was a revelation: it was smooth and floral with hints of caramel, while still retaining the essence of the spicy, herbal agave from which it was made.
You hear a lot of aficionados declare young, unaged blancos to be the purest expression of the spirit and criticize añejos as taking on too much wood and losing the sense of the agave. The tasting at Siete Leguas convinced me that this is not always the case. “If you have a very good blanco, you’ll have a good añejo,” said Lucrecia González, whose family owns Siete Leguas. Now, the average tequila drinker in the States may not know the brand name Siete Leguas. But if you’ve been drinking premium tequila for a while, you probably know the liquid. Until about 2003, if you drank Patrón, you were drinking Siete Leguas. Eventually, Patrón got too big, and they built a brand-new, state-of-the-art distillery and headquarters called Hacienda Patrón. And they hired away Siete Leguas’s master distiller, Francisco Alcaráz. They never got Siete Leguas’s recipe, though.
When I visited the distillery at Hacienda Patrón, I sipped tequila with Alcaráz on the Hacienda veranda. Alcaráz is called El Diablo by some in the tequila business (particularly at rival distillers like Siete Leguas), mostly because of his excellent silent movie–villain mustache. He, like almost everyone else I met in Mexico, expressed his preference for blancos (“I like the flavor of tequila”) and asserted that tequila becomes “very woody after three or four years in a barrel. It loses a lot of character.”
After our tasting, Alcaráz invited me to have lunch at the hacienda. A mariachi band started setting up on the veranda, and I asked, “Is that our lunchtime entertainment?”
“Oh no,” Alcaráz said, “that’s just the background music.” The lunchtime entertainment, actually, turned out to be a magician. Yes, a magician performed for me and a half dozen Patrón executives. Card tricks, flames shooting out of his hands, never-ending handkerchiefs billowing out of his pockets, disappearing pesos—even a couple of tricks that were really just jokes about penis size and that caused El Diablo to double over in laughter. Copious amounts of wine and tequila were poured, and for the first time in my life I felt like some kind of Renaissance duke. I imagined that, at the clap of my hands, I could both have my tequila glass filled and have this magician beheaded. “Magician! Amuse me!” Clap. “Magician, I am no longer amused!” Clap. “Be off with you!”
Thankfully, the decadent lunch came to a close with no incident. But as we sipped añejos after lunch, Alcaráz pondered whether it was a bad thing that many of the oldest tequilas take on the complex characteristics of brandy or whiskey in the barrel. “Maybe we need to take a