From mezcal to sotól, the agave plant delivers a bounty of styles and flavours to explore “We were amazed,” wrote the Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo as he beheld the extent of the Aztec empire in 1521. “Some of our soldiers even asked whether the things that we saw were not a dream.” I remember feeling a similar vertigo when I first saw the wall of agave spirits at the long-since-closed Los Angeles mezcaleria Petty Cash more than a decade ago. Agave spirits are distilled from the fermented heart (or piña ) of the agave plant – not a cactus, but a succulent, like aloe vera or that thing dying on your windowsill. Tequila, from Jalisco, is the most famous kind, but it’s far from the only one, much as burgundy is just one way the French make wine. And here was an entire continent to (respectfully) explore: not only refined tequilas, but hundreds of mezcals from wild, untamable agaves: madrecuixe , arroqueño , tobalá and pulquero , some of which take 25 years to reach maturity. Beyond these foothills were spirits that had barely penetrated European bartending consciousness: sotól and raicilla , bacanora and pox (“posh”) made from maize, as well as pechuga , whose ingredients include, yum, poultry breasts. And all this at a time when a lot of tequila sold in Britain came topped with red plastic sombreros. Continue reading...