The language of mezcal reviews written by today's liquor critics makes me want to throw up on my boots. “Fruity,” “buttery, “a
hint of green apples” and other such descriptions and flowery prose make the
mighty mezcal sound like a wimpy white wine rather than the awe inspiring drink
of dangerous men like Pancho Villa, Doc Holliday and Wes, the cowboy gone bad
in the film Urban Cowboy, which
introduced mezcal to the American public in 1980. If I want a fruity drink,
I’ll have an Orange Crush.
Mezcal Reviews Gone Bad
Why has the language of
mezcal turned so, well, feminine? Could it be that contemporary journalists
follow the lead of the marketing department of major brands and distributors who
are bent on luring the ladies to mezcal in an effort to double their sales?
Nothing wrong with that, but
still no excuse to demean the image of a macho drink that packs a far more
powerful punch than its pale descendant, tequila.
Until recently, “smoky” was
the key word used to describe mezcal; it remains the most accurate adjective.
But the genuine taste of mezcal is danger, the sense that you are about to land
in trouble, big trouble, and you don’t happen to have your lawyer’s phone
number with you. This taste grows stronger after sipping the first shot, and
the second, until you wake up in a drunk tank in a town whose name you cannot
pronounce, or in a gutter along a street without a name.
My Mezcal Reviews
All my work in this field
will focus on the dangerous and mysterious aspects of this powerful liquor,
which I first wrote about in the early Eighties.
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