Tequila

Only blue Weber agave counts, and only agave grown and distilled inside the protected denomination of origin. That area covers the whole state of Jalisco plus listed municipalities in Guanajuato, Michoacan, Nayarit and Tamaulipas. A spirit made from exactly the same plant anywhere else cannot be sold as tequila, whatever it tastes like. The plant itself needs years in the ground before it is ready to harvest, and it is cut by hand, which is why agave supply moves slowly and cannot be turned up within a season. The cooking, fermenting and distilling that follow are quick by comparison.

Blanco goes into the bottle unaged or after only a short rest, and it tastes most directly of cooked agave: peppery, green, a little citrus. Reposado rests in oak for at least two months, anejo for at least a year, and extra anejo beyond three years. Those are minimums, not ranges, and the upper bounds are convention rather than law. Oak softens the edges and adds vanilla, so a reposado is rounder than a blanco, an anejo darker again, and an extra anejo drinks closer to an aged brandy. The scale measures time in oak and nothing else, so it is not a ranking.

Two things are worth finding, and both sit in small type. The first is whether the bottle says one hundred percent agave. If it does not, part of the fermentable sugar came from elsewhere, usually cane sugar, and the spirit is a mixto. The second is the NOM number, a code identifying the registered distillery that produced it. Several brands can share a single NOM, which is useful to know when two bottles that look nothing alike taste oddly similar.

It means every fermentable sugar in the bottle came from the agave itself. The alternative is permitted by the rules: a tequila may be made with a minimum of fifty one percent agave sugars, with the balance made up from other sugars. Both are legally tequila. The distinction sits on the front label, usually near the class, and it is worth checking before anything else.

Salt and lime grew up around harsher mixto tequila, where the ritual covered the spirit rather than complemented it. A well made blanco does not need it, and in a margarita the lime is already doing that job.

Cristalino is an aged tequila filtered clear again, usually through charcoal, which keeps the roundness oak gives while returning the bright character of a blanco. It is a recent style, not one of the five official classes.