Boozehound (23 page)

“So you never drink cocktails?” I asked.

“No, never. To do so would be to destroy a good spirit. Cocktails destroy good spirits.”

Karlsson added, “This way of drinking vodka is an American idea.” That comment, of course, represents the familiar European whine about how Americans ruin what is good and pure in the world. Which is sometimes true, but not always. So I was pleased when one of Karlsson’s Swedish colleagues pointed out the ridiculousness of that position by asking, “What about Absolut?” Yes, I told Karlsson, I think we Americans can take the blame for a lot of things, but not for, say, vodkas called Absolut Bling-Bling or Absolut Disco.

I had to agree with him about one thing. Karlsson’s Gold, beautiful as it is, is not really a vodka to be mixed in a cocktail; rather, it should be chilled and sipped by itself. Or perhaps with a little cracked black pepper, or maybe a little club soda or ginger beer (though never tonic). The subtle flavors and the creaminess were lost in most of the cocktails I tried. Of course, I also really liked the kaffegok that I’d drunk with the potato farmer. According to one of the Karlsson’s people,
gok
“either means ‘a bird’ or ‘having sex’ ” in Swedish. Now, there’s a real philosophical puzzle to ponder.

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 those in the half dozen other distilleries I’d visit. We wore headgear (hairnets in this case, while at other spots I was given a hard hat). The fussy young woman leading the tour complained that the hairnet was messing up her do. We were shown how the agave comes in from the fields (in huge chunks that can weigh from 50 to 150 pounds) and how it’s cooked. We sampled the agave pulp, which tasted an awful lot like caramelized pumpkin. We learned how the pulp fermented and how the juice was distilled twice. We tasted the blanco right out of the still at full strength, a bracing experience with the full spicy, grassy blast of agave.

At tour’s end, however, we were ushered into a bar, and our tour guide said, “Now you will taste a real margarita.” I watched the bartender grab a bottle of Jose Cuervo Gold, meaning that, even though Cuervo makes premium 100 percent agave spirits, I was about to be served a mixto, a tequila made of only 51 percent agave, with 49 percent additives such as sugar or neutral spirits. To add to the insult, the bartender then grabbed a bottle of Jose Cuervo’s premade, Day-Glo-colored margarita mix. He poured both into a blender and pushed the button. Yes, my pilgrimage to the seminal town of Tequila was rewarded with a margarita that could easily have been made by the lunchtime bartender at a suburban Applebee’s back home. No wonder—as I later learned—no one in the state of Jalisco drinks margaritas.

Now, I might be accused of harping on the worst stop of my trip, but that margarita at Mundo Cuervo highlighted the main reason tequila has not yet won the hearts and minds of the average drinker in the United States. Sure, we keep hearing reports about tequila’s rise, and we see the sales of premium tequila grow every year; according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States, tequila imports grew more than 50 percent between 2002 and 2010. But that growth is driven mainly by enthusiasts like me, people who see the value in spending forty dollars or more for a spirit made with 100 percent blue agave. When I offer most acquaintances a shot of tequila, a large majority of them say something like, “Ugh, tequila. I just can’t drink that. Not since this one bad night in college.” I have that story, too. It is the last night of my freshman year in Boston, and I will be transferring to Vermont in the fall. My girlfriend, J. (who is staying in Boston), and I are celebrating our very last night together, our last hurrah. We decide to split a bottle of Cuervo Gold. In the morning, we awaken with matching trash cans on either side of the bed. Good times! Frankly, I am tired of hearing about people’s bad night in college. I am also tired of people kidding themselves that it doesn’t matter whether you use a low- or high-quality spirit in a cocktail.

A plea to Mexico’s Tequila Regulatory Council: Can we just stop with the mixto tequila already? If the tequila industry truly wants to improve the image of its product, then it ought to ban mixto altogether. I’ve heard a lot of talk about the importance of changing consumer perceptions: that tequila is not just a frat-party shot; that good tequila doesn’t give you hangovers; that tequila truly exists on the level of a fine, aged whiskey or brandy. All of that is true, as is the fact that fine tequilas are not cheap and that you can even splurge, as with Scotch or cognac, on high-end choices such as Gran Patrón Platinum ($189), El Tesoro Paradiso extra-añejo ($121) and Siete Leguas five-year D’Antaño (about $200, if you can even find it domestically).

But the average consumer is still not getting the message. Worse, too many people maintain an irrational fear of the spirit. Why? Because all of the nice premium brands are sitting on shelves in liquor stores next to god-awful, headache-inducing mixtos that cost a fraction of what real tequila costs. “To me, mixtos are nonsense,” said El Tesoro’s Camarena. “Have you ever heard of cognac made with 51 percent cognac and 49 percent sugar?” And let’s not even get into Sauza’s ready-to-drink Margarita-in-a-Box that was launched in 2009.

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 scientific look at this,” he said. “We should take the best tequila, rum, bourbon, and cognac, and see what the taste difference is. Maybe at this point, what we’re all chasing is a similar luxury spirit.” Ah yes, luxury. The underlying point of all this nonsense, right? Most of us, sadly, are not Renaissance dukes. We’re not even counts or barons—we’d be lucky if we were the accordion player in the court mariachi band. But Patrón, let’s remember, is “affordable” luxury. Its añejo sells for fifty dollars a bottle … just about in reach on payday. It’s fascinating to me that the only place you can buy Patrón in Mexico is in an airport duty-free shop. Somebody’s gotta pay for that house magician, right?