Sauza Tequila Blanco – It can’t be as bad as all that, can it?

I certainly wasn’t intending to buy tequila that day, but there I was, in the booze aisle at Morrison’s, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a supermarket tequila that wasn’t Jose Cuervo or Sierra. I’ve got twenty quid. I’m out of tequila. I’m on it.

Now, at £19.99 for 50cl this is poor value for a tequila that isn’t even 100% agave – especially when it’s from a supermarket. 70cl of el Jimador was only just over £20 from Carrington’s, and soon after this purchase of Sauza I happened to be looking online, and saw that Waitrose were selling the el Jimador Reposado (gold) for £20… it just gets worse.

I’m not even kidding because then, I started looking for reviews of Sauza (38% ABV) and it looks like it is probably the worst tequila ever. Here’s some direct quotations:

From tequila.net

“Skip this one. It's not even passable as a mixer.”

From Cracked.com

“Cheap, but really they should be paying you to drink it.” Frankly, the page this one is culled from is negative about all tequila, so perhaps take with a pinch of salt… and lime.

“Sauza is what the parents of other tequila brands use as a boogeyman to scare their children into being tasty. Sauza's a salty mix of hot garbage and all of your nightmares. If hate was a liquid that you could drink, you would use it as a chaser for Sauza.” Someone thinks they’re funny.

“Sauza Tequila doesn't go through the traditional distillation process that most brands go through. Instead, the bottlers wait for someone to get drunk on different Tequila, and then simply bottle that person's vomit and slap a Sauza label on it.”

It’s not all bad actually:

From Amazon

“The finest tequila I have ever found -- I have purchased only this one for decades.” So how do you know it’s the finest?

The general consensus though is that this is bad. But can anything actually be as bad as that? Let’s find out.

Firsly, let’s just be sensible ok? Nothing can be as bad as all that. This is the internet, and if you want people to read your work and enjoy it, you are maybe going to exaggerate a little. The point is that this is supposed to be particularly bad tequila. I suppose I’m saying that as a reminder to myself  - to maintain some perspective before I start over-analysing.

So what happened at fulfilment time?

I opened the bottle, poured a little and went to the next room to get my camera. A few seconds later when I returned, the smell of alcohol had escaped, and I found that pleasing. Off to the living room, bottle and all where I think we were watching a documentary about former chess champion Bobby Fischer.

I followed the procedure of sip one, neck a couple, sip one to get a full impression of what it’s like neat and what I found was that, while it’s not that bad, it certainly isn’t good and it doesn’t even taste like tequila. I can’t detect any agave in there and there is little to enjoy – perhaps a slight citrus element, but mostly aniseed. It’s grainy and watery, and it’s certainly not something that is likely to replace my Stoli Blue (which, at time of writing was sadly on its way out and is now long gone) as an early evening mood enhancer.

Since it’s not a sipper (or even a shooter), that meant I would have to try two more tests – with lime and tequila sunrise. This would be something Mrs Cake could get involved in.

With lime

Yes, I can find a use for Sauza if I squeeze a little lime juice into it, but that’s not what I buy tequila for. You can squeeze lime juice into pretty much any bad spirit and make it palatable. What I’m looking for is something I can sip on its own and marvel at how horrible but how great it is at the same time. Sauza just tastes… dirty.

True enough, I do need something I can just throw down my throat before I head out the door in the morning… just kidding, I mean before I go on a heavy night out sometimes, but even then, there are so many more and better alternatives than this one.

Tequila Sunrise

Sorry, I didn’t even get around to trying it with the old orange juice and grenadine. That’s not really the point though, is it? If it was the cheapest tequila, and you wanted to mix it, then fine, but this isn’t even the cheapest tequila. There’s better, there’s better for drinking straight and there’s cheaper for if you just want to mix it.

Is it as bad as all that?

No. Not quite. But it’s not that much better than all that. Some people don’t like tequila anyway, but I do and this almost makes me forget why. So there you have it. If you’ve got £20 to spend on tequila, you can get the 100% agave Jose Cuervo Tradicional (which I’ll be looking at another time) or el Jimador. If you don’t even have that much, maybe just don’t bother. Eh? There’s a good lad.

Now, I’m off to Florida this weekend (don’t rob my house while I’m gone, will you?) where I’ll be visiting NASA, swimming with manatees and then feigning extreme enthusiasm (hopefully while suitably “merry”) all the way around Disney World. More importantly, I’ll be using the experience to pick up some bourbon brands that I might not be able to get at home. It does mean that there won’t be a post next week, but don’t worry. I’ll be back the week after that, and at the moment it looks like I’ll be looking at the Grant’s Sherry Cask Edition. Join me then. See you later.

732 Words on Tequila, and then a few more

I’ve been amazed at the things I’ve learned (and found interesting) since applying myself to writing a blog about booze and, more importantly, taking an active interest in experimenting and investigating the delights it can bring. The most recent thing I have become interested in is tequila. I know, I’ve written posts on tequila before here, here and even here, but it has come to my notice that frankly, I have barely even scratched the surface because tequila is surprisingly underappreciated here in the UK.

this tequila wears a sombrero

It started innocuously enough; I thought that since I’d offloaded the last dregs of my Jose Cuervo Gold recently, I could see my way to getting a new bottle. The only brands you ever see in supermarkets are Jose Cuervo and Sierra, so I took a look at The Whisky Exchange, and found that there is actually a whole smorgasbord of different brands available – many for under £20 (plus P&P).

It was time to start working my way through. I had learned some time in the past that tequila is made by fermenting sugars found in the blue agave plant that grows above a certain altitude in Mexico (1500m), and then distilling the resulting wort twice (and sometimes a third time).

Ok, that’s not that interesting. In fact, a ten years younger me would have said, “boor-ring!”, like I did at that party 10 years ago when someone started telling me that whisky gets its colour from the barrels it is aged in. Actually, I didn’t say that out loud, I just found it really boring. No, what’s interesting to me is that cheaper tequilas like your standard Jose Cuervos only use 51% agave, and the rest of their spirit is distilled from cheaper things like molasses. I decided that it would be interesting to see what the real thing tasted like, so this time I would be more discerning, and get something that was 100% agave. To make choosing easier, I’d get the cheapest thing I could find that was 100% agave. All I needed was an excuse to get to a proper booze shop.

And that chance came one Saturday when frankly, I wasn’t feeling on top of the world, and the wife and I had a few jobs to do. I needed some cheering up, and decided we’d call off at Carrington’s in Didsbury on our way to one of our errands in Stretford.

Unfortunately, Carrington’s is more of a wine shop really, but they are still better stocked with spirits than any of your supermarkets. It’s a shame though, that they keep them all out of reach, behind the counter. I approached, and making plain my requirements found they had three bottles that fit the bill. I’d allocated myself a budget of £30 on this occasion, so that eliminated the first one that came in at £38, leaving two at around £25. One was 10p cheaper than the other, but that one was also 2% lighter in alcohol at 38%, so I went for the slightly dearer one until… I noticed that one was only 50cl against the cheaper one’s 70cl. I could have stood there all day, wondering what to do, so I reverted back to my original plan. The extra 20cl made the cheaper tequila significantly cheaper, so that would be my winner. And the winner was… el Jimador – named after the people who cultivate, select and pick the blue agave plants it is made with. To be fair, the other bottle was far more attractive but rules is rules.

£25 is a bit more than I’d been expecting to pay, given the prices at The Whisky Exchange but remember, you have to add £5.49 P&P to the £19.95 that they charge for this particular brand, so it only cost me a matter of pence more.

It was to be a while before I would crack it open as, being a little under the weather, I knew I wouldn’t be able to taste it - I’d been using the preceding evenings to lighten the load of my slightly less premium spirits. Still, the next weekend would be something to look forward to, since I decided I’d crack it open at the poker night that accompanied this year’s end of year golf tournament.

And you can read about that next week.

Before that, it’s the weekend. Tonight I’ll be staying in with the missus, having a drink and watching telly like we do every night, but this time we’re calling it a date, so that makes it special. We’re just excited for the weekend, so that’s fine. Tomorrow on the other hand, is the latest in the long line of pub crawls that could almost make the basis of a flimsy bestselling novel, or a romantic comedy starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Matthew McConaughey, if pub crawls were romantic. They aren’t; they're about a group of lads getting drunk and talking shit, so if you only see one movie this year, it isn’t going to be that one.  Why do so many movie trailers start with, “This year…”?

This year… Paul has planned a route along the canal that runs through Manchester, so that should be fun.

Whatever you’re up to, have a good one.