Latest features Charge your glasses with tequila

Date Published:

02/11/2007

Salt, slam, suck. Our drinks expert, Stuart Walton tells us how to drink tequila and other Mexican drinks

Think of drinking in Mexico and you will automatically think of tequila. There are two main ways of downing the country's staple spirit. The Mexican way involves licking salt and squeezed lime juice off the back of your hand to season the drink, as you hurtle back one after another. This can be messy.

Slammers

But no more messy than the cocktail-bar performance of slamming. Into a small glass, pour equal measures of ice-cold silver tequila and something equally chilly but fizzy. It can be lemonade, soda water, or even champagne.

Cover the top of the glass with the nearest thing to hand. Slam-bang the glass down twice on the tabletop, then uncover it. As the fizz will have gushed up, you now have something less than a second to get it down your throat. In one.

The big brands of tequila – Jose Cuervo, Sauza, Montezuma – are decent products. They all have a faint aroma of petrol and slightly earthy taste, which to my mind is crying out to be masked productively with something else. A fistful of ice, pressed orange juice and a teaspoon of grenadine, trickled slowly into the centre of the drink, were the additions in that 1970s cocktail classic, the Tequila Sunrise. Premium tequilas are aged in cask, taking on a pale tawny colour. Reposado tequilas have been given the longest ageing, often for several years.

Mescal

The slightly less classy cousin of tequila is mescal, also produced from the agave plant, and often sold with a pickled white worm in the bottle. The worm is genuine, but the idea that it will send you on something like an acid trip if you eat it, as recommended, is an urban legend. All you're doing is demonstrating you've got the cojones to eat a worm.