Tequila: the beginning of a journey

I think it was only about a year ago that I discovered that I liked tequila (Wiki) a lot. Well, ok, let's be honest. It wasn't just that; but that I like it much, much more than whisky, which was until this point my late-night like-to-pretend-I'm-a-classy-fucker drink. In fact, it's worse than even that. I think I'm in love.

I love the lush bouquet of tequila, and the complex, aromatic, almost botanical notes that drift across your tongue as you hold a mouthful. I like the lack of bite'n'burn as it hits your throat, and the lack of acidity as it traverses your gullet. I adore the absence of any of the cloying saccharin of whisky; instead the delightful promise of sweetness on the nose is delivered in a measured, flat, dry way just like the best Martini. I actually love that it is brewed from a specially grown, tended, and harvested cactus in the arid desert-heat of Mexico, instead of from mashed-up bird seed in some god-awful rainy bog in Scotland.

Up until this point, my conception of tequila was some shitty drink which you consumed with the direct aim of getting wasted. And that in order to be able to actually just accept the stuff in your mouth, you needed salt and lemon juice. And you gagged when you swallowed it. And sometimes you climbed up on the bar and let someone pour it down your throat. And you invariably drank far too much of it and did stupid things and got yourself into compromising situations (Tequila Suicide here). And let's not for a minute pretend that that is not still true of low-cost muck like Jose Cuervo*.

Occasionally you meet somebody who changes your life; sometimes you have sex with them, sometimes you don't, sometimes you spend years wishing you had, or hadn't, or whatever. Sometimes you just talk to them for an hour or two. Most recently it was the Turkish guy who kept laughing uproariously and saying "You New Zealanders, you're crazy! You invaded my country! What were you thinking?" over and over.

But I digress. It was Carlo the Mexican who set me on the righteous path of true tequila appreciation. One drunken night he suddenly turned to me and with a grin said something along the lines of "you New Zealanders, you don't know anything about tequila". He produced a bottle of Herradura (mythology), furnished me with a measure, and that was me. Done. Sold to the gentleman trying not to spill his Negroni, trying not to slide off The Sifter's chaise lounge.


We will continue my Tequila Odyssey soon.


* and the exact same could be said of a poor-quality blended Scotch like Clan MacGregor, or Grants.

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NP: Sleep - Dopesmoker (allmusic)