The Drunken Botanist: The Plants that Create the World's Great Drinks (5 page)

The worm, or
gusano,
sometimes found at the bottom of a bottle of mezcal is the larva of the agave snout weevil (
S. acupunctatus
) or the agave moth (
Comadia redtenbacheri
)—and typically not, as is widely reported in the booze literature,
Hypopta agavis,
a moth that does feed on agave but causes less harm.

These grubs are added only as a marketing gimmick and are not a traditional part of the recipe. They are usually a sign of a cheap mezcal aimed at drinkers who don't know better. Makers of fine mezcal have lobbied, unsuccessfully, to have the worm banned entirely because they feel it denigrates the entire category. While the worm may not have an obvious influence over the flavor of mezcal, a 2010 study showed that the DNA from the larva was present in the mezcal it was bottled with, proving that
mezcal con gusano
does deliver a little bit of worm with every sip.

Another unfortunate marketing ploy is the addition of a scorpion, with its stinger removed, into a bottle of mezcal. Fortunately, the regulatory council governing tequila does not allow such nonsense in its bottles.

 

APPLE

Malus domestica

rosaceae (rose family)

T
he apple best suited for cider and brandy is what we would call a spitter: a fruit so bitter and tannic that one's first instinct is to spit it out and look around for something sweet to coat the tongue—a root beer, a cupcake, anything. Imagine biting into a soft green walnut, an unripe persimmon, or a handful of pencil shavings. That's a spitter at its worst. How, then, did anyone discover that something as crisp and bright as cider, or as warm and smooth as Calvados, could be coaxed from it?

The answer lies in the strange genetics of the apple tree. The DNA of apples is more complex than ours; a recent sequencing of the Golden Delicious genome uncovered fifty-seven thousand genes, more than twice as many as the twenty thousand to twenty-five thousand that humans possess. Our own genetic diversity ensures that our children will all be somewhat unique—never an exact copy of their parents but bearing some resemblance to the rest of the family. Apples display “extreme heterozygosity,” meaning that they produce offspring that look nothing like their parents. Plant an apple seed, wait a few decades, and you'll get a tree bearing fruit that looks and tastes entirely different from its parent. In fact, the fruit from one seedling will be, genetically speaking, unlike any other apple ever grown, at any time, anywhere in the world.

Now consider the fact that apples have been around for fifty million to sixty-five million years, emerging right around the time dinosaurs went extinct and primates made their first appearance. For millions of years, the trees reproduced without any human interference, combining and recombining those intricately complex genes the way a gambler rolls the dice. When primates—and later, early humans—encountered a new apple tree and bit into its fruit, they never knew what they were going to get. Fortunately, our ancestors figured out that even bad apples make great liquor.

The first boozy concoction to come from apples was cider. Americans refer to unfiltered apple juice as apple cider and usually drink it hot with a cinnamon stick. But ask for cider in other parts of the world and you'll get something far better: a drink as dry and bubbly as Champagne and as cold and refreshing as beer. When we drink it at all in North America, we call it hard cider to distinguish it from the nonalcoholic version, but such a distinction isn't necessary elsewhere.

The Greeks and Romans mastered the art of cider making. When Romans invaded England around 55 BC, they found that cider was already being enjoyed by the locals there. By that time, apple trees had long ago migrated from forests around Kazakhstan and were well established across Europe and Asia. It was in southern England, France, and Spain that the technique of fermenting—and later distilling—the fruit was perfected. Evidence of this ancient art can be found in the European countryside today, where large circular apple grinding stones used to crush the fruit are still half buried in the fields.

Because the oldest orchards were seedling orchards—meaning that every tree was started from seed, resulting in a mishmash of novel and never-before-seen apples—early cider would have been made from a blend of all the fruit in the orchard not sweet enough to eat. The only way to reproduce a popular apple cultivar was to graft it onto the rootstock of another tree, a technique that had been used on and off since 50 BC. Apple farmers started making clones through grafting, and those popular varieties eventually acquired names. In the late 1500s, there were at least sixty-five named apples in Normandy. For centuries, many of the best apples for cider-making have come from this region, all chosen for their productivity as well as their balance of acidity, tannin, aromatics, and sweetness.

In America, the toss of the genetic dice continued, with John Chapman, a man we know as Johnny Appleseed, establishing apple nurseries at the edge of the frontier in the early nineteenth century. He considered it wicked to start a tree by grafting, so his always grew from seed, the way nature intended. That means that early settlers grew—and made cider from—uniquely American apples, not the well-established English and French cultivars being grown across the Atlantic.

Historians love to trot out statistics on cider consumption before the twentieth century to demonstrate what lushes our ancestors were. In apple-growing regions, people drank a pint or more per day—but they had few alternatives. Water was not to be trusted as a beverage: it carried cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery,
E. coli,
and a host of other nasty parasites and diseases, many of them not well understood at the time but clearly originating in water. A mildly alcoholic drink like cider was inhospitable to bacteria, could be stored for short periods, and was safe and pleasant to drink, even at breakfast. Everyone drank it, including children.

Cider has always been low in alcohol because the apples themselves are low in sugar. Even the sweetest apples contain much less sugar than grapes, for instance. In a vat of cider, the yeast eat what sugar there is, turning it into alcohol and carbon dioxide, but once the sugar is gone, the yeast die off for lack of food, leaving behind a fermented cider that contains only about 4 to 6 percent alcohol.

Today, some cider makers bottle their product and then add another round of sugar and yeast, allowing the carbon dioxide to build up inside the bottle and create bubbles, Champagne-style. On the other end of the spectrum, so-called industrial ciders made by large scale commercial distilleries may also contain non-fermenting sweeteners like saccharine or aspartame to give cider the sweetness that the mass market demands.