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[Music] tequila's history and culture is deeply rooted in Mexican heritage. nestled deep within the state of Jalisco in central Mexico lies a small, magical town that is the birthplace of the drink that bears its name. red volcanic soil will agave fields around the city with cobblestone streets guiding around colorful shops and famous tequila distilleries. this is where it gobby enthusiasts come to explain to you.
if you want to taste a wide range of tequila's, then look no further than the tasting room of Licata. the team here is well-versed in tradition, history, and all aspects of agave spirits. I'm excited to introduce you to Kelowna public Asha, my mentor, Clayton, who teaches me all about the different types of tequila. I'm Jeff. I just retired from the military, sold everything I own, and now I'm traveling around the world to learn from Raghu's winemakers, distillers, and tell their story. this is my journey, wine and spirits. [Applause]
I had been coming to Mexico since about 1995. really fell in love with the language and the culture as a teenager and was living in a different part of Mexico, over on the Gulf Coast. I started getting really interested in the beverage, started trying a lot of different tequila's, noticed how different they could be, noticed how some were exquisite and some were really, really bad, and got curious about why that was. how, how something that nominally on the label seemed to be the same could be so wildly different. so after living that a cruise for about a year, I had read everything I could get my hands on about tequila, both in Spanish and in English. and it just seemed bizarre. this plant, this weird, spiky plant that doesn't need water for most of the year, that can go through long droughts and survive, that takes seven or eight years to reach maturity, and then it's killed to make this booze. it seemed otherworldly. it seemed just fantastical to me, and I wanted to come see it for myself. I came for the town of tequila, Jalisco, the first time, I think in about 2007, and just fell in love with the town and knew I wanted to come back and knew I wanted to expose what I had seen here to other people, to people from the United States and outside of Mexico. and the, the idea of doing educational tours was born then. I started bringing people down in 2008, and we opened Licata in 2017. so it's, it's been a lot of learning in a short period of time. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]
since I've been here, I feel that there's a lack of education when it comes to tequila, not only nice but globally. yeah, I mean, all we're learning to do is basically, hey, shot, you know, like the salt, drink the line, lemon, wherever you're right, yeah. and that's basically. I thought since being here, I found that, you know, there's some complexity to this and some respectability to how it's produced, and that's totally fascinating for me, and that's why I'm glad I found you because you can explain all of this to not only myself but to our viewers. so please explain to me, yeah, the types.
well, absolutely. so the first thing you want to know about tequila is that there are two categories, and if you're serious enough to be watching Jeff's show, you want to be sticking to one category, which is 100% agave tequila. as everybody watching this knows, all alcohol comes from sugar. we classify different types of alcohols based on what that sugar came from. 100% agave tequila means that 100% of the alcohol in there came from sugar of the blue agave and nothing else. if it doesn't say 100% agave tequila on the label, it just says tequila, that means that up to 49% of that alcohol was derived from non-agave sugars, up to and including high fructose corn syrup. so we avoid that here. anything you'll see in my bar or around me generally will be 100% agave tequila.
within that, we have five classes of tequila here. we have the four most common. we have Blanco or Plata, also called silver in English. these tequila's are the truest expression of both the agave and the distiller's craft. purists like myself tend to prefer Blancos. for people newer to tequila or newer to spirits in general, they might be a little aggressive or a little harsh. if you come from North America or Anglo societies in general, you're more used to brown spirits, so the barrel-aged stuff will be a little friendlier. but the Blanco is, is really the way tequila was born, and it's really where you get the true essence of the agave. it's also difficult to impossible to hide flaws in a Blanco, so you really know what you're they're. these spirits are generally completely unaged. generally will have no contact with wood per the tequila norm. they can be in contact with wood for up to 60 days. most Blancos and certainly traditional Blancos will not have any contact with wood, so they're true white spirits. in the world of white spirits, agave spirits are the most aromatically and chemically complex white spirits in the world. so you can stand this up next to any way, any unaged whiskey, any unaged rum, any vodka, gin, and you're gonna find a much wider array of aromas and flavors, you know, in a white tequila.
if we take those tequila's and put them in oak for over two months, we have what we can call a reposado, an aged tequila. these tequila's are very, very popular in Mexico. they're pretty popular in the United States. in my opinion, this is just opinion, but this is the hardest class of tequila to really, really do well because it's all about balance. it's all about moderation. you generally want some of that freshness and spiciness and herbality of the Blanco to come through, but you want a little bit of that softer touch and sweetness from the oak to balance that out. it should be neither too far in one direction or the other. so reposados, I think, are a very difficult class of tequila to master, but can be very, very nice.
if a tequila is in an oak barrel of no larger than 600 liters for a minimum of a year, we can call it an AƱejo, which is a one-year-old tequila. now we're getting deeper into the world of oak. can be American oak. typically for both reposados and AƱejos, they're gonna be used American whiskey barrels, but it can be new American, new French, used French, Hungarian, Canadian, any kind of oak you got. if the barrel is no larger than 600 liters and it's been in there for a year, you can call that an AƱejo. they are gonna be starting to get darker, take on more chocolate, vanilla, perhaps coffee and hazelnut, cinnamon tones from the barrel. if it's American oak, they're gonna start to drink a little bit more like a whiskey. if it's French oak, it's gonna start to drink a little bit more like a French brandy or cognac.
we're aging in that same maximum size barrel at a minimum of three years, we have Extra AƱejos. and you can see even just on the color alone, we're now very much into the world of the barrel, to the world of oak. these are gonna stand up in the best cases against, you know, your finest whiskies or your finest cognacs or rum.
in the axe you have in your hand there, that's what I. so that's in new French oak barrels for a minimum of three years and will have a lot in common with a cognac. when they're well-aged, it will still definitely speak to you as a tequila, but with a heavy, heavy touch of the barrel. yeah.
I'm a connoisseur. I'm new to tequila. I buy, let's say, three or four bottles, different ranges. how should one store the tequila?
well, it's, it's much less sensitive than wine. it's much less volatile than y. you don't have to worry about it being open. ideally, you want it in a cool, darker place, like a kitchen cabinet or something like that. if you're tasting tequila, you want it to be in nice glassware, preferably stemware, and you want it to be at room temperature. if you've already evaluated that tequila, you've already tasted it, you know what you feel about it, you like it, you want to drink it. if you're drinking for pleasure as opposed to tasting to evaluate, if you want to cool it off in the refrigerator, if you want to throw an ice cube in there. I'm, you know, quite a, quite a snob when it comes to tequila, but I see no problem with any of that because you're now at that point, drinking for pleasure. it's your liquid. you should do with it what's going to give you the most pleasure out of it. so in terms of tasting, you want it always at room temperature. in terms of drinking, however you like it. storage, cool, dark place. I would say that when the bottle gets lower than halfway, this is a rule of thumb. there. I don't know the, you know, that this is the scientific gospel, but in my experience, especially with aged tequila's, when it gets lower than half, you have that much oxygen in there. it's gonna start oxidizing, just like anything else will. it's gonna start evaporating alcohol faster. it's gonna start losing flavor. so my rule of thumb is when it gets halfway, it's time to drink it. have some friends over, kill the bottle. you know, you can, if it's something special, you can nurse it about halfway down, but once you get to halfway, you're gonna need to put it into a smaller container, which kills a little bit of the romance of the label. so when I get, when I get to about halfway, I just have some friends over and finish the bottle because otherwise, you hang on to it for too long, it's gonna turn to what we sometimes call agave water, where you've lost the alcohol, you've lost the backbone, and it's a very, very mild in flavor.
my biggest thing is, is when I go and shop for tequila's, you know, you see a huge range product line. I'm looking at. I see, you know, $20 and I see your range up to, you know, 50, 60, $70. my understanding is now from this week and working with a lot of the distilleries, there's a lot that goes into making my Kela. talk to me about, you know, some of these these misconceptions you have about spending quality money on a quality product, particular.
yeah, there's definitely a persistent idea that tequila should be cheap. that's only for parties, for shooters, for four basic pre-batch cocktails. the fact is, as you've seen, is that it's an extremely labor-intensive process, and the raw material in the form of the blue agave takes a minimum of five or six years to mature. so that's an investment in land that you've got to take care of, that you've got to weed, that you've got to fertilize. and right now, in 2019, we're at a historic peak for the price of agave. agave has never been more expensive than it is right now. it's about 25 to 27 pesos per kilo. which gave you some context for that, about 10 years ago, it was 50 Mexican cents a kilo. so we're talking about a 50x price swing. and the raw material, obviously, you can't increase the bottle price by 50 times, or no one would buy it. so there's a real squeeze on the producers, which is a real squeeze on the farmers. when, when the price gets low, when the price is high, the farmers are doing well, but the producers have a real squeeze because they can't raise the prices that much.
I would encourage everybody when they look at a bottle of tequila to think about a couple of things. one is, even the quote-unquote worst tequila, even the cheapest tequila that you or I might not find sip-able or truly enjoyable, that tequila also started with a lot of work in the fields. that of tequila was also made with a plant that took maybe six or seven years to reach maturity, was planted by hand, it was tended by hand, it was harvested by hand. so to me, all tequila deserves our respect for that reason. all things being equal, it's gonna be more expensive to produce a liquor from an agave, a semi-arid plant that takes these many years to produce, whereas your finest whiskey, your finest cognac is made from a grain or a fruit that took one year to produce. not to take anything away from that, but your basic raw material cost is just exponentially different in the case of tequila.
when we start to get concerned with with social issues of, you know, how well are the growers being paid, is this a family-owned brand, how much labor is involved versus is it an entirely industrialized process? even though salaries are pretty low in Mexico, if you have a handmade product where maybe 30 or 40 different people are involved in the process of making it versus a very industrial product where maybe two or three pairs of hands are on that from the beginning to the end, give a big bump in cost.
when you get into the reposado and AƱejo, extra AƱejos, if we like these aged versions of the spirits, it's important to keep in mind, especially when you get to the extreme of AƱejo and Extra AƱejo, that in a place like Jalisco, where most tequila is from, it's a very, very dry, arid environment. so even in a good barrel house, we're gonna have a much higher angel share than in most whiskeys. so it's not out of the question here to lose 10% of volume a year from a barrel. so if we're drinking an Extra AƱejo that's a minimum of three years, it's entirely possible that a third of that barrel is gone. so you and I, as lovers of Extra AƱejo, say we're not only paying for the tequila that's in the bottle, we're paying for the tequila that's gone also. so that's why you're gonna see those price jumps. and I would encourage people to recognize that because of the raw material and because of the intense amount of labor involved, all things being equal, tequila should be a relatively expensive product compared to other spirit categories. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
all right, so last question. yeah, talk to me again, new tequila, looking at labels on this. you did a great job explaining, you know, the different varieties. what else should I be mindful of? yeah, when I'm looking at the labels here on tequila.
I'm gonna assume that most people watching the show are in a market where they're not gonna be dealing with a lot of pirate products or pseudo tequila's or things like that, but just in case, and unfortunately, it does happen a lot down here in Mexico, you want to look and see. every bottle of tequila, somewhere on the label, sometimes it's very prominent, sometimes it's very small, you're gonna see this acronym N.O.M. for Norma Oficial Mexicana. that acronym is going to be on almost any product made in Mexico, from from engine blocks to washers and dryers to tequila. then you're gonna see a four-digit number, then here to see another three three-letter acronyms, C.R.T. for Consejo Regulador de Tequila, the Tequila Regulatory Council. those three things together, in that font, tell us that this is a legitimate bottle of tequila.
now, the CRT is the watchdog of the industry. it's an independent agency authorized by the Mexican state and funded by the tequila industry to enforce and interpret the norm. the norm are the rules about tequila. so they're the tequila police, but they're also the tequila Supreme Court. they they interpret the law, they enforce the law, and they do quite a good job with this. and what this tells us, it doesn't tell us what's in the bottle is good. that's a matter of taste, but what it tells us is that everything on the label is correct. it tells us that this is a tequila, this is 100% agave tequila, it's in the Blanco class, and that the norm of this number. yeah, every, every bottle is going to have a four-digit NOM number which identifies for us what producer is responsible for the tequila in that bottle. so the CRT is guaranteeing to me that this is 100% agave tequila Blanco, and the gentleman at symbol law are responsible for what's in this.
so knowing those NOM numbers, now some dorks like me, they'll be numbers that we know off the top of our head because they're our favorites, or they're maybe sometimes ones we like to avoid. but you know that there's a really great tool that our friends at Tequila Matchmaker have developed, the Tequila Matchmaker app. and the most basic function of that app is to use to identify tequila's based on that NOM number. so you know where it came from, what other brands they make there. so if you really like this one, but you can't find it, maybe you can hunt for something from the same NOM that may be of a similar quality or similar profile. yeah.
awesome. well, another life. thank you, Clayton, so much.
no, thank you, Jeff. explaining the different varieties. I learned so much. I hope you guys enjoy and learn just as much as I did about tequila. Clayton, again, thank you. [Music] you