We love tequila. It’s causing problems

This is an audio transcript of the FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘We love tequila. It’s causing problems’

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m going to play a song that you may also know and love. It was released in 2009. It’s by the rapper TI and it’s called Whatever You Like.

[WHATEVER YOU LIKE BY TI PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I realised recently that this isn’t just a seminal song that I remember from college. This is an anthem, and it’s an anthem for an entire generation of tequila drinkers.

[WHATEVER YOU LIKE BY TI PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m not sure if you ever analysed the lyrics of this song, but what’s happening here is TI likes a girl, and he tells her he’ll give her whatever she wants. Decks of cash, a private jet, and also Patrón on ice. No, I mean, Patrón is a top-shelf tequila brand that got popular in the early 2000s. It became a status symbol like Cristal or Hennessy. Drake’s sang about Patrón. So did Lil Jon, T-Pain and Rihanna.

[POUR IT UP BY RIHANNA PLAYING]

And what makes this interesting is that without realising it, as we were singing along, we were changing the way Americans thought about tequila.

Ivy Mix
Rap music and Patrón, I think, is how it all started.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I’m talking to Ivy Mix. She’s the author of the award-winning cocktail book Spirits of Latin America. Ivy loves tequila. She owns a bar in New York that specialises in tequila and other Latin American spirits.

Ivy Mix
And Patrón became not something that was tequila. It became a brand that happened to be tequila, that had a lot of status attached to it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
In the decades before, tequila in America was something you took shots of with salt and lime. Tequila was spring break and wet T-shirt contests and horrible hangovers. But all that changed in the 2000. Tequila is now the fastest-growing drink in America. And these days, we want the good stuff. We’re sipping high-end tequila neat, like an aged lowland scotch. And it’s hard to imagine going back. And Ivy is worried about all this hype because the demand for tequila in the US has doubled over the past 20 years, and it’s causing major problems for Mexico. There just isn’t enough tequila to go around.

And when you say what do you what good is going to happen? Like, what happens if we keep going the way we do? Do we have tequila shortages? Does agave just become so expensive?

Ivy Mix
That’s already a thing.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right.

Ivy Mix
Tequila shortages are already a thing or agave shortages are already a thing. So that’s like that’s already happening. Then you have only the big, big, big companies being able to produce tequila, which means that tequila itself and its identity is changing because only a certain number of people are able to solidify the identity of what it is. And so many people are just now learning what it is. And it’s just a dangerous road as it is. It’s dangerous.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Today, Ivy and I talk about it. We’re spending the whole episode on agave spirits, and we’ll get into how to drink it without harming the place that it’s from. We’re also going to Mexico City to learn how one of the world’s best bartenders drinks her tequila. This is FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I first met Ivy a few months ago when I was reporting a story on this topic for the FT Weekend magazine. Her bar, Leyenda, in Brooklyn, is one of the most respected bars in the city that specialises in Latin American spirits like tequila and mezcal. The bar is also informal and welcoming, and it made me feel like Ivy and her team are doing something right. She’s running a business, but she’s also travelling back and forth to Latin America, meeting with producers and really getting to know the spirits she’s serving and the people who make them. That includes the farmers and distillers in the Mexican state that’s really at the heart of tequila production. It’s called Jalisco.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Ivy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Ivy Mix
I’m so happy to be here.

Lilah Raptopoulos
So we are here to talk about tequila. But I think in order to understand what’s going on with tequila, we need to kind of start with the basics, which is what it’s made from. Yeah, so can you tell me some kind of basic facts about the plant it’s made from? What it is? How it grows?

Ivy Mix
Yeah, for sure. I mean, in every thing that we drink, every fermented or distilled product, in their essence, they are an agricultural product. They come from something that is grown. In the case of tequila, it’s made out of an agave. The maguey plant. Traditionally in history, blue agaves would just sprinkle the landscape and now they tend to be cultivated in big, big long rows that are mostly 95 per cent from the state of Jalisco and the plant themselves that they’re pretty remarkable. I mean, I always joke that whoever came up with the idea to actually get into an agave, too, was a pretty smart, intelligent person. Very, very brave.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Brave, yes, scrappy.

Ivy Mix
Because they are, imagine like a pineapple and an artichoke in one, but huge. (laughter) And you have these, like huge spiky leaves coming off of this plant that are truly sharp. Like if you accidentally, like, are in a field and want to take a picture and you reverse backwards into an agave plant, it pokes you in the pie like it’s it’ll break your jeans like it’s tough.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ivy is talking from experience. Her first encounters with agave were back in the late 2000s. She was young, working at a bar that served tequila and mezcal. And the owners invited her to Mexico to see how it was made. The one thing you should know here is that tequila is just one of the traditional Mexican spirits that are made of agave. Mezcal is another. It’s becoming a lot more popular and it’s made in a different region. There’s another one called raicilla, one called bacanora. There are a lot. And they’re all made in different places and also from different strains of agave. Tequila strain, it’s called the blue agave.

Ivy Mix
And lots of crops that we eat or drink, you know, in if you’re drinking whisky that is made out of a grain, that grain grew. You can probably have a couple harvests in a summer or like a growing season. Grapes or fruits, you know, the trees or vines have to grow for a while, but the fruit itself is a year. Agaves, blue agave in particular, those agaves tend to grow between seven, minimum, and 15 years on a maximum. So you’re not just sitting around and, like, waiting a year or like (chuckles) a few months to get your crop. You’re kind of in it for the long haul. So the process of tequila is arduous and extremely long. It is not an efficient spirit.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. I think that was the craziest thing to me about tequila is, like, with wine, you just like you grow the vines and then you can keep reharvesting and reharvesting and with this it’s just like it grows for seven to 10 years. And then you cut it and then it dies. (laughter) And then you have to wait for the soil to regenerate, and then you do it again. It’s a much harder process and takes a lot of expertise from farmers to even harvest it right.

Ivy Mix
Yeah. Which has been passed down for hundreds and thousands of years. You know, there’s cultivation of the agave.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Do you think that like tequila and agave spirits in general, would you say that they’re as complex or more than like whisky or wine or other spirits?

Ivy Mix
I think so. I mean, OK, I’m biased, right? Because I’ve spent my whole life dedicated to these things. But . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, leading question. (laughter)

Ivy Mix
Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. But the way things taste just because of what they are as an identity, and then there’s the way things taste based on where they’re grown. So it’s a concept called terroir is very popular in wine. It’s the reason why I always think Chardonnay from California tastes different from Chardonnay in France. Terroir and agave, if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. These things are growing in, you know, in the case of blue agave, like, say, like 12 years, 10 years, seven years. But like if you get to some other agaves, you’re talking 20 years, sometimes 30 years, it’s a lifetime that they’re just sucking up identity of the soil where they’re from. So the nuance, I guess, to be within them is super-fascinating.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so let me break down how demand got out of control. First came Patrón, which was American-owned, and Patrón successfully built a whole new market for high-end tequila. This high-end tequila, by the way, uses twice as many agaves as the low-end stuff. And then came a man named George Clooney. He and a friend started a brand called Casamigos that made tequila a different kind of sexy. It was a huge hit, and that interested the big conglomerates. In 2017, Clooney sold Casamigos for a billion dollars to Diageo, the multinational spirits company, and then Patrón sold to Bacardi and then it just went into overdrive. The big conglomerates now own the vast majority of the market and the smaller producers are getting squeezed. So when you see these celebrity brands, actually most of them are not small brands. They’re brands owned by these big conglomerates.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So, Ivy, as we’ve sort of mentioned, tequila and mezcal and the whole agave spirit category has changed a lot, at least in the American perception or like sort of the non-Mexican perception. It’s now the fastest-growing spirit in America. It’s supposed to overtake vodka this year as America’s bestselling spirit.

Ivy Mix
Oh, my God. (laughter) Yeah. I mean, that’s just so crazy. I mean, yeah. Continue, and I will give you my thoughts. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Great. Cannot wait.

Ivy Mix
Well, it’s just not sustainable. For starters, this race to make as much tequila as possible to give to the people is cutting so many corners and people are doing so much stuff to try to eke out as much liquid from these plants that in the first place don’t want to give you too much liquid. They’re stubborn and they’re full of fibre, they’re spiky, like they don’t want you to get in there and the people are just like, “I will get what I want from you.” And the result is a really bad tequila. Like there’s so much, so many brands of tequila out there. Most of it is absolute garbage and that’s unfortunate. That’s too bad.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And Ivy, what do you think happened? I mean, it does. I don’t. I can’t believe that Americans just woke up one day and decided, like, “Oh, we’ve fallen in love with the taste of tequila now.”

Ivy Mix
Exactly. It has nothing to do with tequila. It has nothing to do with agave. To me, that’s a real tragedy, is that tequila has started and the agave spirit in general, especially with the influx of celebrity-owned brands and all the rest of it, you start to get these products that are much more about being a brand than it is about being tequila. And that’s really great. If all you want to do is cash, cash, cash. But tequila shouldn’t be cash, cash, cash. I mean, it should be some cash, cash, cash, for sure. But this kind of race to produce as many leaders as possible and like, people are looking at the, “Oh, my gosh, tequila is the going to be the number one selling spirit in the United States. Like, let’s get in here, like make all the money possible.” It’s like, don’t do it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Ivy Mix
This is not the raw ingredient to do that, too, right? Go back to corn. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ivy says that these days most tequila brands buy their plants from farmers on the open market. There are a few small producers that grow their own, but they’re lucky. And if you aren’t one of them, you’re competing with companies that have billions of dollars and can afford to take a hit when the price of agave shoots up. If you’re the little guy, you’re totally priced out. Plus, the big corporations have a budget for things like marketing and international distributors.

Ivy Mix
And you’re like, marketing is a bunch of money. Marketing costs a lot of money. So like, how is this all happening? And who’s not making the money? Who’s not making the money probably is the guy that at the beginning portion of this long, long path to get into your liquor store and into your home and to your mouth, those guys in the beginning are what most certainly the ones not making the money. Fundamentally, tequila should cost way more than it costs. You know, if a tequila or a mezcal came from Scotland, we would be paying thousands of dollars a bottle for it. But it doesn’t. It comes from Mexico. So we think we need to pay less.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. So, Ivy, the tequila boom to me feels entirely out of control. I’m curious what you’re most worried about environmentally.

Ivy Mix
The landscape of Jalisco in particular is being demolished to plant more blue agaves. There are landslides, there’s deforestation, there’s all sorts of bad stuff happening. What you get are, I mean, seriously, as far as the eye can see, all the trees ripped down. All of these agaves put in they’re ruining other agaves that are endemic to Jalisco in particular, just ripping them out, thrown them away, because blue agave is like that’s the one that makes the money. That’s the gold and that’s the gold in the river in California. You know, it’s unfortunate because they’re ruining a lot of biodiversity and not only they’re causing danger to everyone. There’s serious mudslides, serious stuff happening because there’s nothing keeping the world together. (chuckles) So it’s pretty bleak, but it’s true.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. No, totally. Ivy, you know, you’re travelling back and forth to Latin America. I’m curious what you’re seeing there. Like, are people in Mexico concerned about agave being over consumed? Are they happy to see the money coming in?

Ivy Mix
Yeah, I mean, yes, because here’s the thing. I’m here like it’s all doom and gloom and “Oh, no.” But like, the fact of the matter is that it is a huge industry giving a lot of people a lot of jobs. I happen to think that they’re probably not making as much money as they should. But it is a job and it is a lot of money. It’s a lot of money just going in. And this created tourism, this has created like all of this stuff. And you know, there is good stuff out there. There are people doing really good things. And the same token, I go down and work with some big brands, like big brands, and I’ll ask them, I’m like, “What about this stuff?” And everyone is like, it’s kind of global warming. People are like, “Oh, forget about it.” (laughter) It’s like, don’t engage the angry uncle at Thanksgiving. Just like, don’t talk about that guy. And I’m like, We got to talk about like the elephant in the room we got to talk about because what are you going to do when the stuff literally hits the fan? What are you going to do? Because it’s going to happen in one way. This is too precarious, and too delicate.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK. So I’m curious, so I’d like to go back to Leyenda and what you’re doing there, because one thing that really stood out to me is that the bottles behind your bar are not bottles that you’ll see everywhere. They’re often not bottles that you recognise. What criteria are you using to choose . . . 

Ivy Mix
Sure.

Lilah Raptopoulos
. . . that they’re good like a tequila that you believe in and why.

Ivy Mix
Yeah. So I would say the bare minimum is to ask, “Is it 100 per cent blue agave? And are there any additives?” This is very prevalent in the aged tequilas. You know you get things that are it’s aged and it’s not aged. It’s just like full of caramel colouring and glycerine. Try to make sure there are no additives and I really think that and I would love to be proved wrong, but mostly, not a hundred per cent all the time. But mostly if it’s a brand that you see plastered on billboards and everywhere, you might want to have a little bit of pause (laughter) to figure out how they got that money . . .

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Ivy Mix
. . . to do that. So shop small. And that being said, not all small is great, but like smaller producers, which usually, I think, are more worth their salt. And frequently you see a lot of producers now putting all the information on the back of the bottle. So say the town that’s made the distillery, that’s made the guy who made it. And transparency is key because there’s a lot of places to hide in tequila.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. You said to me when we spoke for the piece, I said, like, what should we taste for? If we weren’t taught what to taste for? And you said flavour, tradition, culture and history. (laughter).

Ivy Mix
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, yeah. That’s what you should try that. I truly think that’s why you should go for it. Because if the consumer isn’t demanding the preservation of this really culturally rich spirit, no one’s going to do it because it’s not profitable.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah.

Ivy Mix
So if we demand it, they’ll do it, and it tastes better. It just does. Yeah. (laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ivy, this is so fascinating and always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Ivy Mix
Yeah, of course. So stoked.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Now that we’ve talked about what true tequila is, I want to talk about the right way to drink it. And to do that, I’m going to need a little help.

Gina Barbachano
Hi, everyone. I’m Gina Barbachano, from Mexico City. I’m bar manager and co-owner of Hanky Panky in Mexico City.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Gina Barbachano is a bartender at a speakeasy in Mexico City called Hanky Panky. It’s one of those actually hidden bars behind a secret wall of an old taco shop. And when you go in, it’s dark, wood-panelled, red leather booths. It’s also beloved: it’s rated 13th of the 50 best bars in the world. I was there to speak with Gina because this thing happened when I started learning about agave spirits. I became sort of obsessed, and then my obsession expanded to Mexican culture. So last month, I went to Mexico City with a friend. Gina is an expert specifically in mezcal, but she was first introduced to agave spirits by her family.

Gina Barbachano
Yeah, of course, I think like, for me, for example, it was my dad’s drinks. My dad was he always, always drink tequila. He always drink it as it is.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Gina drinks tequila and mezcal the traditional way: in a small glass, neat, with no ice, and she sips it like cognac or bourbon. She recommends you do that, too. Step one: take a sip.

Gina Barbachano
I will always recommend you just first sip a little bit. So you, for you to know like what it is.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Step two: take another sip.

Gina Barbachano
Then give a second sip. Because that way your mouth like just got used to this harsh feeling of the beginning. And then the second one, you will enjoy it a little bit more.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Step three: maybe enjoy it with an orange slice or one of those green little tomatoes. The tomatillos, with a little bit of chilli and salt.

Gina Barbachano
If you want to eat it with something, eat it afterwards. This way you will see actually the difference and you will see if it’s for you or it’s not for you.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Gina pours us a tip of Caballito Cerero. It’s one of her favourite tequilas and it has a sort of cult following. My friend and I taste it, and we taste citrus and pepper. It’s a hundred per cent agave, no added sugar, but it still tastes kind of sweet.

OK, so what, it’s delicious. And we were both tasting. I thought it was a kind of peppery.

Gina Barbachano
Yeah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
She thought it was kind of sweet.

Gina Barbachano
Kind of sweet? Yeah. For me to be, like, super sweet, Like, to be honest. That’s why . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Gina says if you don’t like one tequila, try another. Because there are tons of flavour profiles. They’re citrusy, dry, spicy, earthy. But what matters most to her is that you respect the spirit.

Gina Barbachano
One of my, like, advices will be don’t stay with the one that you didn’t like. That don’t blame all mezcales or all tequilas for one bad experience that you had. Second, respect a lot the spirit. Of course, there are some times that it’s fun to have a shot like we do it as well. Like, it’s not that it’s forbidden or anything like that. I always respect the spirit, and he will respect you and he won’t kill you the next morning.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Ultimately, tequila is just a drink. You may love it, you may not. If you don’t, maybe that’s better for the blue agave. But if you are going to drink it, treat it like you’d treat a European spirit. Learn about it. Notice the flavour. Explore spirits like it. Maybe ask a bartender you respect about the tequilas they respect. And finally, consider paying a little bit more for it. Especially now, when there’s a lot on the line in the state of Jalisco. I put links to everything mentioned today in the show notes, including my piece, some agave spirits that Gina and Ivy recommend, and Ivy’s book, Spirits of Latin America, which is excellent.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That’s the show this week. Thank you for listening to FT Weekend, the life and arts podcast of the Financial Times. If you’re in the US, the second annual US FT Weekend festival is on Saturday, May 20th, in Washington, DC, and the line-up is impressive. It’s Salman Rushdie, Jamie Lee Curtis, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Alice Waters. There’s a special discount link in the show notes, alongside a link to a deal on an FT subscription. I have finagled our listeners one of the best discounts out there. You can get three months of FT Weekend in print, every Saturday for 20 bucks or £25 or €30. It all depends on where you live, but it’s a great deal. You can use the link in the show notes or go to ft.com/weekendpodcast. Make sure to use that link.

OK, that’s almost everything I’m plugging today. Also, we really love hearing from you. You can email us at ftweekendpodcast@ft.com. The show is on Twitter @ftweekendpod and I’m on Instagram and Twitter, @lilahrap. I post a lot of cultural recommendations and questions for you on my Instagram. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my world-class team: Katya Kumkova is our senior producer, Lulu Smyth is our producer. Molly Nugent is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer, and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Shout out this week to Anakena Paddon, my tequila co-conspirator in Mexico City. Have a wonderful weekend and we’ll find each other again next week.

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