The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks Read Free Page B

spices, silk, and other luxuries from Asia to the New World, and they carried back Mexican silver for use as currency. The cross-pollination of cultures between Mexico and the Philippines survives even today, with the Filipino still being just one example of the connection between the two regions.
    This simple still consisted of a hollowed-out tree trunk (often Enterolobium cyclocarpum, a tree in the pea family called guanacaste, or elephant ear) perched above an inground oven lined with bricks. The fermented mixture would be placed inside the tree trunk and brought to a boil. A shallow copper basin sat atop the tree trunk so that the liquid could boil and rise to the copper basin, much like steam collecting in the lid of a pot. This distilled liquid would then drip onto a wooden chute placed below the basin and run out of the still by way of a bamboo tube or a rolled agave leaf. More traditional copper Spanish stills, called Arabic stills, were also introduced early on.
    Whenever distillation started in Latin America, the practice was well established by 1621, when a priest in Jalisco, Domingo Lázaro de Arregui, wrote that the roasted agave hearts yielded “a wine by distillation clearer than water and stronger than cane alcohol, and to their liking.”
    MEZCAL or MESCAL?
    While Americans and Europeans may prefer the spelling mescal, Mexicans always spell the name of their spirit mezcal, and that is its legal name under Mexican law.
    THE LUMPERS, THE SPLITTERS, AND HOWARD SCOTT GENTRY
    Perhaps you’ve never wandered the Mexican desert with a field guide , attempting to identify the wild agaves growing there. It’s not nearly as satisfying a pastime as, say, bird-watching: many agave species are nearly impossible to tell apart. Those that do look different might not in fact be so biologically distinct that they deserve to be classified as separate species—they might simply be different varieties. Think about tomatoes, for instance: a cherry and a beefsteak variety might not look or taste alike, but they are both members of the tomato species Solanum lycopersicum.
    The same has happened with agaves. Howard Scott Gentry (1903–93) was the world’s leading authority on agaves. As a plant explorer for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), he collected specimens in twenty-four countries. He believed that taxonomists (who are sometimes called lumpers or splitters for their tendency to either lump too many species together or separate too many varieties into distinct species) had done too much splitting in the case of agave. He argued that the difference between A. tequilana and other species was so insignificant that A. tequilana might not even be a separate species. He favored dividing the agaves by their floral characteristics, even though this would force botanists to wait as long as thirty years to see a specimen in bloom before they could properly identify it.
    His colleagues Ana Valenzuela-Zapata and Gary Paul Nabhan, continuing his work after his death, have argued that a number of species, including A. tequilana, should, from a purely scientific perspective, be rolled into a broader species, A. angustifolia. But they acknowledge that history, culture, and the codification of A. tequilana in Mexican liquor laws make this difficult. Sometimes, tradition still trumps botany—especially in the Mexican desert.
    WHAT ABOUT MESCALINE?
    Mezcal is sometimes confused with mescaline, the psychoactive component of the peyote cactus Lophophora williamsii. In fact, the two are entirely unrelated, although peyote was sold in the nineteenth century as “muscale buttons,” leading to a linguistic misunderstanding that persists today.
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    Over the last few centuries—and until the last decade or so—agave-based spirits were considered to be rough products that in no way compared to a good Scotch or Cognac. In 1897, a Scientific American reporter wrote that “mezcal is described as