… you’re cleaning the kitchen, and decide that now would be a great time to pull out your collection of gourmet tequilas and have an impromptu taste off. To be quite honest, the only thing puzzling me is why on earth I didn’t come up with this idea before.
Wine connoisseurs will sneer at me, because this has to be the most poorly organised tasting ever. First off the bat, it’s neither ‘vertical’ nor ‘horizontal’. In a vertical tasting, you try several vintages of the same wine. Well, fair enough, that doesn’t really apply to spirits like tequila. Horizontal tastings compare several wines, often from the same region, all from the same year. In other words, the aim is to compare like with like. And that’s where my little tequila party falls down.
See, for those of you who still think tequila is Jose Cuervo slammers at a student party, posh tequila comes in several different varieties. They have one thing in common, though. They are all made from 100% agave. The agave plant looks like a giant aloe vera, and it’s the mashed up pulp that becomes the starting point for the distillation.
Well, my own little collection, assembled haphazardly over several years, has representatives of various styles, from the unaged spirit (blanco or silver) through Reposado (partially aged) to Anejo (several years of aging in wooden casks). But it’s a small collection, and not exactly systematic.
Anyway, caveats aside, I lined ’em up, and started tippling. And here are my un-expurgated tasting notes:
Corralejo reposado: hard hitting, acidity, clean, slightly chemically, in a good way
Don Julio reposado: really smooth (too smooth?) and oaky
El Tesoro de Don Felipe anejo: easily the most vegetal, an exotic and punchy taste.
Patron silver: smooth, yet with a raw vegetal quality.
The surprise here for me was the fact that I came out of this not really feeling great about the Don Julio Reposado. The Don Julio brand is a high quality, modern one, and they do everything right, to the extent that they’re very popular with tequila enthusiasts. On the other hand, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed the Corralejo. Now, this is a distillery with history – it’s one of the oldest in Mexico, having been established in the seventeenth century. But for years, they produced a bastardised, non 100% agave product, and their tequilas are regularly criticised for having too strong a flavour of alcohol, and an almost chemical edge.
But what I realised is that tequila is, perhaps more than any other spirit, in the eye of the beholder. The tequila renaissance has been fired by being aimed squarely at the US market – in other words, at drinkers who have been educated to prefer quality bourbons. But tequila can run the gamut from tasting purely vegetal, through a rum-like sugar flavour, through to the smoothness that you get from ageing in oak barrels. For me, the Don Julio is just far too well behaved. It tastes like a bourbon. The Corralejo, on the other hand, while it tasted more punchy with alcohol, had a lot more vegetal character. I think that of all the tequilas here, it would be by far the best mixer. The blanco Patron I found too rough in comparison.
My fave, though, easily, was El Tesoro. But that’s because although it was aged, it still had bags of vegetal character. And for me, that’s what tequila’s all about. Now I guess I’d better get back to cleaning the kitchen…
medievalcurator 