TEQUILA (dpa) – Enrique Mendez seems happy. Just four years ago this 51-year-old peasant from the village of Amatitan, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, about 600 kilometres west of Mexico City, had no idea how he was going to survive or to feed his family by relying on his corn and agave crops.
Now, Mendez has recently been able to buy a livestock ranch and owns five vehicles. Mendez is a winner in the tequila boom. Tequila is Mexico’s national alcoholic beverage and owes its name to the small town of Tequila, where it was first made, near Amatitan.
Starting in the mid-1990s tequila sales both in Mexico and abroad shot up spectacularly, and the price of the blue agave plant, the beverage’s main ingredient, skyrocketed.
While tequila distillers in 1997 paid Mendez and other agave growers 50 peso cents (0.05 dollars) for a kilo of agave, they now offer 15 pesos (1.60 dollars) per kilo. Supply does not match demand, and it cannot be increased rapidly because “Agave Tequilana Weber”, the scientific name given to blue agave, needs seven years to mature.
But what fills agave growers with joy, gives tequila distillers a big headache.
“There are companies that are ruined, there are companies with grave problems, and companies with problems, but there is no company without problems,” says Ramon Yanez Mutio, the vice president of the National Chamber of the Tequila Industry.
Due to the agave shortage, Yanez adds, about 40 out of 90 tequila companies in Mexico have had to suspend activity. This year, compared to 2000, tequila production in Mexico has dropped 25 per cent, Yanez says.
According to Tequila Chamber figures, tequila production between 1994 and 1999 had more than doubled. “No one in the world had a crystal ball to be able to foretell this,” Yanez says, explaining that agave being grown now will only be able to be harvested in seven years’ time.
After a record 190.6 million litres of tequila produced in 1999, production dropped slightly in 2000 to 181.6 million litres. Of this, more than half, that is to say 98.8 million litres of the liquor, went to exports, with the United States, the largest consumer of tequila, taking the lion’s share and importing 81.9 million litres.
One tequila distilling firm that is still producing the drink is Jose Cuervo, located right in the town of Tequila. Jose Cuervo is Mexico’s oldest tequila firm and began producing the liquor in 1795, when Spanish viceroys still ruled.
In the distiller’s yard, large trucks can be seen bringing in loads of huge agave “cones”, that are the fruit of the plant and each weigh between 30 and 50 kilograms.
The distilling company workers place the agave “cones” inside enormous ovens to be baked for 40 hours. Then, the fruit is mashed in special mills producing a liquid, that, fermented and twice distilled, will become tequila. The juice is placed in fermentation tanks, and then for distillation, in copper stills.
Once tequila has been double-distilled it can be sold on the market as “white tequila”. However, large quantities of this first alcoholic product are deposited inside barrels made out of oak to permit the tequila to age.
After between two and 10 months, tequila stored in oak barrels is known as “reposado” (literally “rested”) tequila, and, after another year, it becomes “aged” tequila and acquires a dark golden colour.
“Since agave is very expensive, the tendency is to produce finer tequilas. A finer product justifies a higher price,” says Benjamin Garcia Duran, manager at the Jose Cuervo plant in Tequila.
According to ancient chronicles, tequila was already being made in Mexico in the XVIIth century, although a precise date for when this occurred is not known.
Pre-Hispanic peoples in Mexico fermented agave or “maguey” plant juice to make the alcoholic drink known as pulque. The indigenous people believed in a maguey goddess called “Mayahuel”.
This Mayahuel goddess had 400 breasts with which she nursed the “Centzon totochtin”, 400 (or countless, since the number 400 meant innumerable) rabbits, the spirits of drunkenness that plagued those men who failed to drink pulque in moderation.
It was the Spanish conquistadors who brought distilling technology from Europe to Mexican territory.
In the 20th century tequila drinking was made popular in movies in Mexico in the so-called “Golden Era” of Mexican film. Such immortal film stars as Jorge Negrete (1911-1953) and Pedro Infante (1917- 1957), by downing small glasses of the distilled spirit in the roles the portrayed on the screen, propelled drinking tequila to new heights. A few physicians even began to prescribe tequila as a cure against “Spanish flu”.
However, tequila, the nation’s alchoholic drink par excellence, is today almost out of reach for working class Mexicans. It is difficult to find a bottle of tequila selling for less than 100 pesos (11 U.S. dollars) which is the equivalent of two-and-a-half days’ wages for a worker receiving minimum wage.
While agave growers are probably Mexico’s only farmers who currently are faring well, tequila distillers hope that in some years there will once again be excess offer.
For the time being, Mendez, the agave grower, is happy that tequila firm owners do not treat growers with the arrogance they showed some years back.
“Now we all want to have mature agave, but one cannot speed up its growth. It’s like a girl that cannot be married off when she’s 10 years old,” he says.
But just in case the agave market were to plummet, like high-technology industry stock can do at times, Mendez has taken precautions. From his profits he has bought 95 head of cattle that will allow him to be a breeder once the agave boom is over.
