With the sun setting on our first day’s drive inland towards Guadalajara, we arrived in Tequila. Parked up for the night outside one of the many breweries and strolled into town to sample the atmosphere, the tacos and the alcohol. In the end we decided against purchasing anything more than a few postcards – most of the liquor looked like it had come from the nearest cash-and-carry wholesalers to be honest. On the way out of town in the morning, we stopped to shoot some video, and otherwise annoy, a team of workers hacking their way through a field of blue agave, piling the heavy cores high into trucks. We’d seen loads of these trucks around and while the chemistry of distillation and the well-advertised brewery tours held little attraction, the sight of these weird-looking, alien egg things certainly intrigued us. I remember reading somewhere that there was a shortage of mature, ten year old, blue agave plants leading to a possible world shortage of tequila and, as it turned out, talking to the plantation owner, they were now being brought to the bottle after six years. Does this mean inferior tequila is being produced these days? He wouldn’t say…
