The Ajijic Plaza

One thing we love about old Spanish colonial towns is that they all have lovely town plazas.  On one side (or perhaps two sides), there is always a church, and another side generally has some governmental buildings.  Then there are shops and restaurants situated around the main park square.

The plaza in Ajijic is no exception. It has an old church and several buildings dedicated to the arts, as well as a ton of excellent restaurants, large and small, some with outdoor seating; a coffee shop; a tremendous number of sculptures; the center “bandstand”; park benches; kids playing; people selling things; stores; . . . .  It’s a delightful place.  No government buildings though because Ajijic is really a subdivision of the community of Chapala, so the government buildings are in the Chapala town plaza.

On the weekends, you will find a lot of Latino families enjoying the space and a fair number of gringoes.  During the weekdays, the plaza is filled with ex-pats: men sitting together, women sitting together, couples sitting together, couples sitting alone — they are everywhere, and clearly, they are enjoying “the good life.”  Here are some pictures of Ajijic’s  downtown plaza.

The center of the plaza — a public grandstand

Sculptures from every possible material are everywhere

This coffee shop is always filled with ex-pats.

Another favorite ex-pat restaurant

One of the side streets is pedestrian-only and is filled with stands of local artisans.

This little side street also has a magnificent long mural, almost the length  of the street.  It is historical, with several of the leaders of Mexico’s independence represented.

And people sometimes lay items out on a blanket to sell

The Cultural Arts Center is also on the plaza.

This art center sponsors several classes, and one day, we watched several  retirees painting various scenes in the plaza. They were serious and spent several hours on their projects.

And off one of the ends of the plaza is a beautiful old church.

The Ajijic Town Plaza has become our “go to” place most every day.  There’s always something to watch, and the artisan and gringo art stores surrounding the plaza are always a delight.

A professional tequila tasting!

One of the special activities of our Tequila day tour was a stop at the Jose Cuervo tequila tasting room. We had a professional taster sit with the eight of us while we went through a series of four different kinds of tequila, exploring them with various food items designed to enhance taste or smell.

We each had a plate of crackers, coffee beans, cinnamon sticks, lime pieces, and the sweet honey chewy part of the agave plant.  Oh, we had a glass of water too to swish between the four different kinds of tequila.  The cracker was to be used for cleaning the palate too, along with the water.

We had four different kinds of tequila to taste: (1) a white tequila (the cheapest and generally used for mixed drinks like margarita) and which spent 15 days in a stainless steel container before it was bottled, (2)  a tequila that was aged for two months to one year in an oak barrel, (3) one that was aged from one year to 3 years in an oak barrel, and (4) one that was aged longer than 3 years in oak.  You can’t see the latter very well, but it’s in the back in the brandy snifter kind of glass.

We first smelled the aroma of the white tequila (no oak barrel for this one).  To get the proper aroma, you had to tip the glass sideways as much as possible with spilling it.  This allowed for the largest area of surface air over the tequila.  Then you’d bring it up to your nose smelling first the aroma at the bottom of the glass lip before smelling the aroma at the top of the lip of the glass.  The smell was different. Not sure if they use the word “bouquet” for the aroma of the tequila or not, as they do with wine.  Anyway, our guy did not use that word.

Our guide knew his tequila!

Next, we “enhanced” our sense of smell.  We took the lime sliver, and twisted it to get its flavor stronger before we brought it to our nose.  Then we tipped the glass and smelled the aroma again.  It was definitely a different aroma.

Then, we tasted the tequila.  We did this by putting a bit in the front of our mouth, swishing it through our teeth, and then swallowing.  Lastly, we put a bit of the lime in our mouth and did the taste test again to see how the taste differed.  The key was to just put a tiny bit in your mouth; otherwise, it really burned in your mouth and one the way down.  I learned the hard way!

Then we followed the same procedure with the two-month plus aged tequila, the light golden one.  This time, though, we used the sweet agave to enhance the smell and taste.

Next we used the same procedure with the one-year plus aged tequila, the one on the left in the picture.  To enhance aroma and flavor here we used the cinnamon.  We also starting looking at the “legs” of the tequila.  For this one, the legs were evident and came down in tiny rivulets, much as it does with good wine.

If you look closely, you can see the legs about a third of the way down from the top of the glass

And then came the prized tequila, the one that was aged the longest and was in the brandy glass.  We followed the same process of tipping the glass sideways, etc.  This time, for the aroma and taste enhancer, we used the coffee bean. 

One of the other members of our group doing her thing:

Here is a copy of our “professional tasting” form:

This was our first professional tasting experience, and it was educational.  Neither Harold nor Julie has the tastebuds to discriminate like the professionals can, but nonetheless, it was great fun.  And in the future, if we buy tequila, it will probably be either “rested” or “aged,” but not the expensive aged.

Everything you wanted to know about making Tequila — Feb 11

One can’t go to Mexico and not learn something about tequila, and to assure we learned enough, we did two day trips, one to the town of Tequila and to the Jose Cuervo tequila places, and the other was a Tequila Express First Class train trip.  First, our trip to Tequila.

We headed out on a Charter Club bus again with Rosie as our guide.  Here was our route:

As we got closer to Tequila, we began to see the blue agave plants everywhere, and they seemed to appear in every little bit of space we could see.  More on that later, but here are a few of the agave fields.

The fields went up the mountain sides and were down in the valleys too 

And even in small spaces alongside the road.

We were even fortunate to see a group of people harvesting the agave, and they were quite excited to have their picture taken.

One picturesque scene is Mt. Tequila, a volcano whose hardened core from its eruption 220,000 years ago rises from the middle of the mountain, a rare occurrence in geological history.

The eruption of this volcano creates soil that is conducive to the blue agave plant, which, by the way, is not a cactus, but is rather a succulent. FYI!

Another similar beverage is mezcal, but tequila is now a protected beverage which must be grown in this area and be certified (such as champagne), so if the bottle does not have a stamp and does not say 100% Agave, then don’t buy it.  You are getting a cheap substitute.

It was mass produced beginning in the early1800s, and in the last 18th century, José Guadalupe Cuervo received the first official concession to produce the tequila from the king of Spain.  In 1860, it was first bottled, and now, everyone has seen a bottle of José Cuervo Tequila.  More on that later.

Our first stop was at the Cuervo agave farm, and the growing process was described for us by none other than a Cuervo descendent, and if you’ve seen the recent Cuervo TV ad, he is in it.

The growth of the blue agave plant takes up to 10 years, but the farmers have figured out how to cut down the growth time to 7 years.  Yes, it takes 7 years to grow one plant, and the plant, once harvested, is dead, so you have to start over again. To compound the difficulty, one agave plant doesn’t give you much liquid.  You need thousands of them.

Each plant sends out suckers which are smaller plants that the farmers allow to grow reasonably large.  Then these sucker plants are planted in the fields, and through a process of trimming of the leaves several times over the 7 years, the sucker is finally ready to be harvested itself.

The small sucker is removed from close to the base of the original plant 

The sucker, since it needs no water, can be tossed into a mound, and once the mound gets high, they plant the suckers in a new field.

The Cuervo descendent who was our guide

He sharpened his blade to get ready for a trimming.  First, the plant is trimmed into a tree like shape.  Next time it is trimmed, it is more like a ball.  They do this so the worms which can get into the leaves, do not spread into the heart of the plant.

This little brown dot is a worm hole — evidence of the worm eating its way into the base (The reason why they cut off the tips of the leaves during the growing process) 

When ready for harvest, the leaves are whacked off by hand.

And then the ball (no real root system) is trimmed neatly.  The more expensive tequilas use only the material from the ball; cheaper ones can use a bit of the stems too. 

Here is a neatly trimmed ball.  Note that it looks much like a pineapple.

Julie worked hard on the trimming.  Well, sort of.  She did pose for the picture :-).

We had a taste of the core of the plant.  Tasted very bland and chewy.

 After our instructional session at the farm, we headed into the town of Tequila to visit the Jose Cuervo distillery, which wasn’t in production at the time.  Actually, they were building their own distillery on their land where we were in the fields, and we saw several concrete trucks rolling past to get to the new distillery site.  BTW, there are over 600 brands of Tequila in Mexico.  Cuervo is the largest of them.

The distillery was huge, and the process is complex, so I’m not going to attempt to reproduce it here, but here are some pictures of the mechanical contraptions within the distillery:

The ovens

The distilling process vats

Some of it goes into white oak barrels for 1 month to a number of years., depending upon quality wanted.

The various tequilas the Cuervo distillery makes, from cheapest (on right) to most expensive (on left)

Three different kinds of charring inside the barrels, with each one providing a different flavor

At the end of the process, you could see the chemists at work assuring quality for the products 

An added benefit — we got to go down into the cellars where the Cuervo family reserves are held.  It was a huge stone room with tequila going back to the 1800s.  It also included all the artistic boxes they are currently using for each year’s new product.

The descent. . . .

We did one more thing at the distillery — a professional tequila tasting, the subject of another blog posting.

The other adventure for the day was to amble around the town plaza in Tequila, see the shops, have lunch, and generally just enjoy the beautiful day.  Tequila is another one of Mexico’s magic towns (a designation for cities of historical or cultural or social significance) and it is also a UNESCO heritage site.  They are working on updating the exteriors of the buildings to make it more of a tourist attraction.  It is a pretty city.

All the towns have this type of name plate at some prominent location within the community, probably the towns in the state of Jalisco 

Cuervo means “raven” FYI

Lots of historical sculptures in the town square

And real Mexican vaqueros (Maybe real)

Every town square must have a church

And this one also has a tequila barrel tourist vehicle.