Tequila

Distilling agave is a colonial-era development: the Mexica had long fermented agave sap into pulque, but turning it into a clear spirit required the still, introduced after the Spanish conquest of 1521. The drink takes its name from the town of Tequila in Jalisco, where blue agave thrives in the iron-rich volcanic soil of the surrounding lowlands and the Los Altos highlands. In 1974 Mexico granted tequila a denomination of origin — the country's first — and in 1978 registered it internationally under the Lisbon Agreement; production is confined to the state of Jalisco plus listed municipalities in Guanajuato, Michoacán, Nayarit and Tamaulipas. Since 1994 the Consejo Regulador del Tequila has enforced the standard (NOM-006), which sets the spirit at 35 to 55 percent alcohol and requires it be made wholly or chiefly from blue Weber agave.

Pour a 100-percent-agave blanco into a caballito and the nose is bright — cooked agave, green herb, white pepper, a wisp of citrus. The first sip is sharp with alcohol, then the agave's vegetal sweetness opens across the tongue and the finish turns peppery and warm. A reposado, rested in oak, softens that edge with vanilla and a pale gold color; an añejo goes amber, rounder, almost whiskey-like. Good tequila warms the chest rather than scorching the throat. Mixto bottles cut with cane sugar taste rougher and hotter — the agave gets buried.

The defining choice is steam-cooking rather than pit-roasting. Agave stores its carbohydrate as inulin, a long fructose chain the body cannot taste as sweet; slow cooking in masonry ovens or autoclaves hydrolyses the inulin into fermentable fructose, and because there is no wood smoke, the result is a clean, citrus-vegetal spirit instead of mezcal's phenolic, guaiacol-laden smoke. The cooked agave is crushed, the juice fermented by yeast into a low-alcohol mosto, then twice-distilled in copper or steel pot stills to concentrate the alcohol and aroma. Blanco is bottled unaged; reposado and añejo gain color and vanillin from months or years in oak. The legal floor of 51 percent agave is what separates pure tequila from the harsher, sugar-extended mixto.