The beginning of the lowland agave fields.
We headed out to Tequila on Saturday. Hiring a driver for the day cost us about $80 (with tip)—not bad for a roundtrip drive of three hours, plus a very kind man named Nicasio who drove us out to Herradura, waited patiently for us while we had a tour of the distillery and then drove us on into the town of Tequila for lunch at the mercado.
To get to Tequila from Tlaquepaque, we took the road through Guadalajara. As the traffic crawled to a stop, a 50-something woman, her face painted like a clown, walked by our car juggling the oranges she was selling and whistling in the hot sun. She was still working hard when we returned, maybe six hours later. We passed the Range Rover dealership and a restaurant called the Sirloin Stockade.
Out of the city, the land shifted. Fields of agave started appearing—spiky swaths of that soft eucalyptus grey-blue. As Joe noticed, the beauty of wine country suits wine, whereas this country’s rough and ready landscape looks like its spirit tastes. Tequila country makes you want to wear boots and chew on jerky.
We arrived at Herradura. Founded in 1870, it is located just outside the town of Tequila in the village of Amatitán which has been there since the 1500s. In Mexico fashion, beauty lies behind the walls that you walk past on the street, and Herradura’s hacienda is fat (as in its own ambulance and doctor, soccer field and the master distiller’s beautiful slate-grey vintage Porche parked along the old cobblestones). We bumped along in a golfcart, getting the grand tour of the property.
Felix attacks the agave like a black belt.
As we drove past the huge ovens, they brought out Felix, a jimador, dressed the traditional white garb they used to wear, to give us a little demo of how the agave plant is harvested by hand. He took one of the monstrous succulents and attacked it artfully with a big shovellike tool with a blade on the end called a coa de jima, which, according to our guide, also is called something to the effect of “mother loving tongue”. In seconds, all was left was the piña, or heart of the agave—something that can weigh up to 80 pounds.
The agave piña ready to be steamed in the ovens behind it.
The making of tequila is surprisingly simple: Most basically, the piña is steamed, the pulp is ground up and pressed, and that liquid is distilled in a Willy Wonka-looking contraption. But it’s not until the piña is steamed that you really start to understand the flavor of tequila. The agave goes from having no real taste or aroma at all to turning a deep, burnt orange.
The agave after it's been steamed.
A bite of the soft, fiberous pulp tastes something like quince paste, maybe a little pineapple, sweet potato, banana with an aroma to match. The loud hiss of the steaming ovens releases this smell into the air and suddenly everywhere you turn starts to smell like agave—it sinks into you. I think I smelled it on our sheets that night. I realized I suddenly had a reference point for tequila that I’d never had. It would be like drinking wine without ever having had a grape.
Herradura is massive production, but still done impressively naturally: fermentation takes place due to wild yeast that you can see taking over everything from the cracks in the buildings to the trees. We got to climb up to the second floor grate to look down into the huge stainless tanks of fermenting agave juice. They bubbled and blipped and frothed like a bubble bath of tequila. You could feel the heat radiating from it. It burned my nose.
The tequila is distilled.
The film, the legend.
The end result: four tequilas of different ages ready for tasting.
The final leg of the trip brought us to the original Herradura distillery that’s still on the same grounds. From what I understand it was started by a priest (so much of booze is made in the Catholic tradition). After wandering through the amazingly old facility, our guide brought us to watch a film about the history of the tequila maker with a guy doing a very kitchy, historical reenactment in what looked like a bad wig. Some of his parting words, as he stood by his trusty steed: God is praised. Or, perhaps, in other words, Thank God for tequila.