The Agave Sting: el Jimador Reposado vs Jose Cuervo Tradicional

I like it when an impromptu booze conversation breaks out at your local supermarket. The place was Cheadle’s Sainsburys. A need for something reasonably priced but decent for my hip flask had led me there when bring a bottle showed they had the el Jimador Reposado for 20 quid.

I’d been out of tequila for a while, and keen to try this one, so I was thinking it would be good to accompany the Open Golf Championship at the Royal Liverpool. Sadly, less than 10 minutes after making the purchase I learned I’d be designated driver for that event so, not only would I not be able to wander around getting hammered all day, nor would there be a special Open Golf Championship themed post any time soon. Instead… shall we just talk about the tequila? (reader’s voice – “yeah, suppose so…”).

So, I was in the checkout line, and I noticed out the corner of my eye that the lady in front was giving me looks. Now, tequila was the only thing I was buying, I’m in Cheadle and I’ve pretty much gone out in me trackie bottoms, so I’m thinking I probably look a bit dodgy. So I decide to pretend I’m not noticing her, but she actually seems to want to start a conversation. Which was nice. She actually just wanted to know what I was buying. What did she say she thought it was… I can’t remember now. Anyway, she was off home to eat some chocolate and drink some wine.

The blanco expression was the first 100% agave tequila I ever came to try, and still sits proudly at the top of my tequila rankings table, so I’d been keen to try the reposado for a while. This one has been aged for between 2 and 3 months (depending on which website you believe), and at £20 it’s more than £5 less than I paid for the Blanco originally at Carrington’s.

No, it doesn’t have the most intriguing bottle or label, but you do at least get a full 70cl (though only 38 of those ABVs) and frankly, £20 for that much 100% agave tequila is a bargain. Even before trying this one, I’d recommend you stop buying the standard Jose Cuervos or the Sierra and get the blanco next time you have tequila requirements.

I can tell you now, I do like this tequila. It’s got that slight agave sting, but not quite so much as its younger, whiter brother, and for that reason I actually prefer the blanco – yeh, I like the rough nature of the unaged agave.

I had actually been saving the last drop of my Jose Cuervo Tradicional [which has previously featured in a post about mediocre alcohol - not because it was bad, but because I didn't have much to say about it] for a direct comparison with this and, while you might know the result already if you follow my twitter feed, let’s have a look now, shall we?

Yes.

Vitalstatistix

Let’s remind ourselves first of all, of the facts:

Cuervo – 100% agave, 50cl, £19.99, 40% ABV

Jimador – 100% agave, 70cl, £20, 38% ABV

Some calculations.

The Cuervo works out to nearly 40p per cl while the Jimador is a more generous 28.5p. Remember though, you’re getting an extra 2 ABVs with the Cuervo. We’ll see how important those are in the final verdict.

Presentation

As with the blanco variety, the Jimador has gone for an uninspiring square but clear bottle and a simple label with an artist’s impression of a tequila farmer. It’s sealed with a screwcap and an annoying but unintrusive plastic insert – that I don’t remember being present with the blanco. Another thing I didn’t receive with the blanco is a little booklet hung around the neck suggesting one or two cocktail ideas. That’s always a bad sign – not necessarily that the spirit is bad, but rather that the distributor/manufacturer has chosen to target the mixing market.

On to the Cuervo then, which is presented in a narrow bottle with a classic style label that features a number representative of the number of years since founding that this bottle was made. A nice touch for those of us who appreciate these kind of things, but ultimately meaningless. The whole package is delightfully topped off with a sturdy stopper that makes a marvellous sound when you extract it.

Colour

Once again, not a massive consideration, but still a grounds for comparison. There’s little to choose with both brands exhibiting a pale yellow colour but if I had to choose, I’d say the Cuervo is slightly more in possession of the allure.

Tasting

Having opened both bottles at the same time for the purpose of photographing, the sweet smell of agave soon filled the room. It was time to take the glasses into the lounge and appraise the noses independently. For context, I think we were watching Rocky iv, which I noticed is more or less just a series of montages – there’s at least like, four in it. Wi-i-i-i-in, in the end! I’m gonna win in the end! Wait, that’s Teen Wolf.

Results? I’m surprised to be saying this, but the Cuervo pretty much sweeps the board – though not by too much. It just has a slightly greater fragrancy on the nose leading into more complexity on the palate. Jimador is more subdued, nothing wrong with it, just if you’re comparing.

The Jimador still makes a good sipper and can be enjoyed in the various fun tequila ways. Because it’s good value I don’t mind sloshing it about a bit, so that’s a definite bonus. So if £20 is your budget, I’d base your purchase on this; if you want a tequila purely for sipping or impressing guests, get the Cuervo, but if you want that but you also want to fritter it away in a series of meaningless trysts, you can’t go wrong with the Jimador.

Mediocre-hol (or uninteresting alcoholic drinks)

My recent post on low cost Cognac Martell VS got me thinking about all the various bottles I get through that really leave very little impression – the ones that, when I look over my notes or the various things I’ve written over the course of time, had left me struggling even to pad out a paragraph or two. With the Martell I somehow managed to turn a dearth of thoughts and impressions into a post that could be said to have had a point but, it wouldn’t be fair to you (or to me), if I had to keep doing that. But the mediocre spirits deserve a mention too, don’t they? Of course they do (even if it’s just to let you know there are better ways to spend your money), so this week, let’s look back over the last 12 months or so and give a cursory nod to some of the bottles that were neither good nor particularly bad, the ones that the term meh was invented for, and that may have escaped a mention elsewhere. Perhaps we can make it an annual thing – like the annual Spirits of the Year post that I started last year and will continue shortly...

Let’s split it into categories.

Vodka

Stolichnaya Gold – 40% ABV, 70cl for £21.65

I had high hopes for this, given my admiration for the other two unflavoured Stolis (blue (which was a winner of one of the coveted Spirits of the Year awards last year) and red), but an immediate comparison with the remains of my red led to crushing disappointment. Why would anyone knowing what I know now, deliberately stump up that extra £5-10 for an inferior product such as this? Everything that is enjoyable about the flavour of its siblings is absent – replaced with the pharmaceutical taste you get if you accidentally chomp on a pill. It just makes me feel sad. I mean, it probably is still better than a bunch of other vodkas – it does contain 40 ABVs at least, which gives it the advantage over supermarket fare but… come on. Who thought this was a good idea?

Gin

Tesco London Dry Gin – 37.5% ABV, 70cl for £12

Very sweet, but uninteresting. I’m yawning just thinking about writing anything about this one. Go on, let’s have a look at what we’ve got:

Non-descript bottle: check.

Obscenely low ABV: check.

I just don’t see the point in it.

Tanqueray – 43.1% ABV, £15 for 70 cl

This one was bought for Mrs Cake’s Christmas present as a means of supporting her predilection for g&t. £15 in Somerfield it was, that’s quite a bargain. It’s a good strength (that’s almost interesting enough to warrant it’s own post), though on the airline we flew with to Canada, they had a 47.3% variety (that would have been more interesting).

In terms of presentation, you’ve got a slightly off green bottle with a red faux-wax seal and utilitarian white label. It would probably make a good, sturdy bludgeon.

And that’s where I run out of things to say. How hard is it to write about gin? I suppose I’ll look up some gin blogs in a bit and find out. Nevertheless, Tanqueray is good enough to drink on it’s own, though obviously no one does. It’s probably even a waste to put it with tonic. But is it interesting enough for me to get a whole post out of it? No.

Rum

Tesco West Indian Dark Rum- 37.5% ABV, £12.50 for 70cl

Eee… I got nothing. Blah, blah, blah, whatever. I remember buying this one for taking on a camping trip. I knew I was going to be drinking out of plastic cups, so I didn’t want to get anything that would make me regret that. Yes, it’s suitable for drinking out of a plastic cup in a camper van in a field behind a Derbyshire pub. From there it became acceptable hip flask fare. Mrs Cake polished it all off as a matter of fact at the Sounds From the Other City festival when I bought her a cider she didn’t like.

Mixer fodder.

The Kraken – 40% ABV, £19.50 for 70 cl

Tesco actually sent me a voucher for this one, which I coupled with one of those £3 off a £40 shop vouchers to make a monstrous saving of £6.50. Yes!

Sadly, I’m just not into it. Mrs Cake seems to be very fond of it though. She came in one night telling me she’d been to a bar called Turtle Bay where they do rum platters and that she’d had one called The Kraken that she loved.

We’ve got a bottle of that, I said. You can have it if you like.

I was disappointed on first impression. It is essentially too sweet for my personal taste and the spicyness is just the wrong side of pleasant. I don’t know if this is representative of spiced rum in general, but it isn’t currently something I get the point of. The information on the bottle suggests it is blended with caramel also, so not exactly a rum for the spirit aficionado.

In spite of that, I’m pleased to be able to say I’ve turned Mrs Cake into a hard liquor drinker. When she goes out with friends these days, she always insists on not having a mixer. Her friends think she’s wild. I say what’s the point in drinking hard liquor if you can’t taste it? Apart from getting hammered.

Tequila

Jose Cuervo Tradicional – 38%, 50cl for £19.99

Tired of the lack of tequila options available in my local supermarket, I was thrilled to find that Tesco had started stocking a 100% agave variety of Jose Cuervo – Jose Cuervo Tradicional. It’s £19.99 for 50cl and bottled at 38% (mine was at least – the internet suggested it’s 40% but I don’t know how that can be). It’s a reposado rather than a blanco so in spite of the disappointing ABV, I consider it to be pretty good value.

The bottle is tall and clear with a classy label and a cork stopper. Impressive. Each bottle also has a number printed at the bottom of the label that tells you how many years after 1795 it was produced. Not really sure of the point in that, but it’s a feature.

So with friends coming over I decided to allow myself to dip into my booze budget for this one. We managed to polish off 4/5 of it in the one evening, which isn’t unusual for tequila. If there’s one spirit you buy solely for caning, then tequila is it. A lot of people might balk at paying £20 for a tequila such as this, as you’re essentially paying more for less, but when you take that step up to 100% agave, you don’t go back because it’s totally worth it.

In terms of actual quality, the agave flavours are somewhat mild, which is disappointing, but if you’re not as into tequila for sipping, as I am, this might be a positive. We did try it with lime and salt also and we all agreed that the lime wasn’t even necessary.

A word that seemed to come up a lot on online reviews was “earthy”, which I’m afraid I don’t really get on board with. I’d say it’s quite clean and fresh and I’d definitely buy it again – though obviously that’s unlikely since I’ll be keen to try something else – but as a go-to; do.

I’ll just finish with a word from a Master of Malt customer review:

“NEVER gives me a hangover.”

I don’t know why this is considered a sign of a good spirit… is it? In my opinion, only idiots judge alcohol on whether they have a hangover the next day because really, if you had a hangover it wasn’t what you drank, but how much of it.

Irish Cream

Country Mist – 14.5%, £5.19 for 70cl

A cheapo Irish Cream brand that I picked up from Morrison’s. Even cheaper in fact than the king of budget Irish Creams, Ballycastle Premium. It is presented in a standard bottle for this genre – squat and dark – and features a generic and uninteresting picture of a field – presumably to represent Ireland. Nowhere on the bottle does it state “produced exclusively for Morrison’s” or anything like that.

So Irish Cream brands have sorted themselves neatly into a few different types of late – sublime (Baileys, Ballycastle Premium), pleasant (Ballycastle), weird (Carolan’s) and wrong (Irish Country Cream). Country Mist is another one for the “pleasant” category. It is too cheap and thin to impress, not luxurious enough to delight, but in spite of its light body, the flavours are pleasant – no, they don’t jump out at you, but I have to give it credit for avoiding anything errant. Also in its favour is that it isn’t a conspicuous off-cream colour. It works in coffee, it works on ice. It isn’t up to the standard of either of the Aldi brands, but it is good enough.

Vermouth

Rosso Vermouth- 14.7%, £5.50 for 1 litre

Typically low rent bottle with a Spartan label.

Not sure why I prefer vermouth over wine because it’s clearly not as complex or fine as a nice wine, but it is more pleasant to drink. Perhaps it’s because it’s uncomplicated that I like it – it’s like alcoholic fruit juice – stick some ice in it and it’s refreshingly intoxicating.

As far as this one is concerned, I really like the colour – having gone for a Rosso variety this time, despite being tempted by an extra dry, I have to say I like the slightly brown tinge which, to a whisky drinker like me, suggests a degree of ageing in oak barrels. I have absolutely no idea what the real cause is, but in this aspect at least it meets with my approval.

Martini Rosato- 15%, £9 for I litre

First of all, hats of to Tesco for honouring an unapplied historical discount on this one. Your accounts may be unreliable, but your customer service has so far been decent in my experience.

Martini Rosato is described as a modern age, aromatic spiced vermouth, blended from red and white wines and featuring Madagascan cloves and Sri-Lankan cinnamon quills among the botanicals it is infused with.

I have to say, I was a little disappointed, and I’m going to class it as fairly standard.

I’ll leave that here for now, then. I know it doesn’t seem like all that much but, to be fair, a number of other uninteresting spirits will appear in posts I’m planning for the new year, so I don’t want to spoil the surprise as far as any of those are concerned. You can expect another roundup this time next year, in which some of those will feature. More importantly, you can find out what the recipients of my prestigious Spirits of the Year 2014 were next week. Until then, enjoy your Christmas. I hope you get plenty of chance to be day drunk  and that you receive plenty of interesting bottles as gifts. Me too. 

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.