Dusty Booze by Aaron Goldfarb

Author:Aaron Goldfarb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams Press
Published: 2024-03-05T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

* Rum nerds had long wondered why the Campari-owned Wray & Nephew refused to offer an aged version of the brand; that was until 2023, when it released, and I got to taste, Appleton Estate 17 Year Old Legend, “a re-creation of the legendary rum crafted by J. Wray & Nephew in the 1940s.” Its retail price was $500.

9

WHY IS THERE SO LITTLE VINTAGE TEQUILA?

“Unlike all the other spirits categories, why is there so little vintage tequila?” I asked Julio Bermejo, perhaps America’s preeminent tequila scholar.

“The arrogant answer,” he told me, “is because people in Mexico actually drank them all.”

I didn’t see that as an arrogant answer at all, because he was sort of right. If America had its bourbon glut, when locals favored drinking anything but their national spirit, that never really happened in Mexico. If anything, Mexicans undersold their beloved local spirit as a bit of a peasant drink, one reason it was ripe for being appropriated and repackaged as luxury by American companies.

There’s also the fact that until the 1980s, 98 percent of tequila consumed in the United States was what is known as “mixto” tequila, a usually vile distillate produced from a minimum of 51 percent blue agave combined with up to another 49 percent other fermentable sugars, often high-fructose corn syrup, along with added coloring and flavorings. While still legally labeled “tequila”—you’ll rarely see “mixto” on any bottle—its harsh taste turns off so many drinkers before they can ever get into this beautiful category. And that’s why few vintage collectors would ever even want dusty tequila from a pre-1980s United States.

But Bermejo isn’t 100 percent right.

There is, in fact, what we would call vintage or dusty tequila in America, and he very well may have been the first to collect it.

Bermejo grew up in a family that owned a Mexican restaurant in San Francisco in those days when they weren’t ubiquitous throughout America. Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant, as it was called, was opened in 1965 by his parents, Tomas and Elmy (and lies just a few miles from Martin Cate’s Smuggler’s Cove today). In the late 1980s, Bermejo was tasked with handling the restaurant’s bar program, and he immediately saw a need to change his customers’ opinions on Mexico’s native spirit. To show them that it wasn’t simply the wince-inducing mixto shot they’d last had in a frat house basement.

Luckily, an industry-changing 100 percent agave tequila had just made it to the country that decade, courtesy of another man who had also spent some time in the Bay Area.

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