Agave salmiana

      THE FIRST TIME I remember drinking mezcal was in the early 1980s in Baltimore. I was in college, and my friends and I found a cheap bottle in a run-down liquor store near the campus. The high alcohol content served our purposes, but everything else looked dubious. There was a grotesque, crinkled worm lurking at the bottom, and the spirit’s yellowy brown color reminded me of water from a rusty faucet. It tasted so awful that swilling it on a dare seemed its best possible use. I didn’t think about who made it. I only knew it was from Mexico and distilled from something called agave, which I figured was a type of cactus. And I had heard that crazy things happened when people ate the worm, although I didn’t get that far. I probably would have laughed if anyone had told me that tasting notes on body, finish, and terroir would someday be used to describe mezcal.

      Many years later, I found myself living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and becoming more curious about the large country lying across the state’s southern border. Echoes of it were everywhere—from chile peppers and mission churches to agaves. The vast desert landscapes now divided between the state and Mexico were once conjoined as a viceroyalty of New Spain. But long before conquistadors came hunting for fabled cities of gold, ancient pathways already traversed the region, walked by Ancestral Puebloan, Mogollon, Hohokam, and other peoples. When I first visited Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico, I was amazed to learn of its archaeoastronomical sites, and the straight, well-engineered roads that once brought turquoise, seashells, and macaw feathers to its beautiful stone-walled buildings. Until then, I hadn’t thought much about my belonging to a new culture that had cannibalized the lands of far older and perhaps more sophisticated cultures.

      During the era of Spanish colonization, one extremely long indigenous trail was developed into El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, a sixteen-hundred-mile trade route extending all the way from Mexico City to San Juan Pueblo. The grueling wagon and foot journey along it, of which a particularly arduous one-hundred-mile section became known as Route of the Dead Man, brought an influx of Spanish settlers to the newly formed territory of Nuevo México. With them came Christianity, disease, guns, and alcohol. A tax record from 1873 for the town of Tequila, where sixteen distilleries were serving a population of twenty-five hundred, noted that three casks of “mezcal wine” were sent all the way to Santa Fe via El Paso, Texas.

      One day in the mid-1990s, I climbed into my pickup and drove along several paved-over portions of the Camino Real, as I headed 285 miles south on I-25 to visit some friends in Las Cruces. The highway follows the Rio Grande as it meanders through parched and desolate expanses, bare brown mountains rolling into the distance. El Paso and its Mexican neighbor, Juárez, are only an hour further south from Las Cruces, and we thought it might be fun to spend a few hours on the other side of the border. On a warm Saturday evening at sunset, before Juárez gained its worldwide notoriety as a grisly battleground in the Mexican drug war, we walked across the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande from El Paso.

      Below us, the river trickled through a wide culvert littered with trash. A sagging Mexican flag met us at the middle of the bridge, and we entered the country by passing through a squeaky turnstile. A taxi brought us to a touristy mercado several blocks away, where we sat around an outdoor table, swilling ice-cold bottles of Carta Blanca beer. There were stalls selling piñatas, serapes, and other souvenirs, and a mariachi trio serenaded us with mournful ballads while children implored us to buy Chiclets. A guy in a Pancho Villa–style bandito outfit was making his way from table to table, with a holster loaded with shot glasses strapped across his chest, a bottle of mezcal in his hand. His target? Gringos estúpidos.

      It seemed like the right time to give the drink another try, but of course it wasn’t. The shot he poured me was so strong and sickly sweet that it gave my body a ghoulish shiver. Just then another man appeared with a small wooden box slung over his shoulder. It had a pair of long wires extending from it with handles attached to their ends. With a naughty grin, he instructed two of us to each grasp a handle with one hand and to use our other hand to hold the hand of our neighbor. As he slowly turned a dial on the box, electricity blasted through the wires, tingled our fingers, and briefly paralyzed our circle in a crude form of shock therapy. This, I thought, was the kind of dumb stuff you get into when drinking mezcal. I was a gringo estúpido.

      My head spinning, I was wondering if it would be smart to switch to tequila when we landed in a legendary barroom called the Kentucky Club. One of several establishments in Mexico that claimed to be the birthplace of the margarita, it was on Avenida Juárez, the lively main drag by the bridge. A nondescript facade masked a manly, wood-detailed interior that had been beckoning Americans across the border since Prohibition. The handsomely burnished bar was said to have been carved in France, and Marilyn Monroe had allegedly sidled up to it. The devil-may-care vibe inspired one of the friends I was with to later propose to his girlfriend there, and perhaps inspired her to say yes.

      We were served a round of the famous house margaritas by a poker-faced bartender wearing a crisp white shirt and a black tie. As “A Whiter Shade of Pale” played on the jukebox, we toasted a dusty stuffed raptor frozen in action, its wings spread for flight. Then we drank more. Although I liked to think I was as macho as the steely-eyed matadors staring down at us from faded pictures on the bar’s nicotine-stained walls, I could barely handle my hangover. I would eventually learn that tequila is actually one of many types of mezcal, but I felt so lousy after our Juárez adventure that I thought it might be better to keep clear of any agave distillate in the future.