Book Review: The Tequila Bible
There is a particular kind of book that doesn’t just crowd shelves at home or in the food section of your local bookshop. It coats the tongue and makes you wonder if you are the kind of person deserving to be gently lowered into a vat of mash and left there until you agree that mash bill and terroir matter, and you can, in fact, taste the difference. Bourbon has had this problem for over a decade now. It has inspired not only devotion but industrious reverence fostering antics bordering on cult behavior: the kind that produces meticulously detailed atlases, field guides, weekly videocasts rivaling public access production values and annotated scripture of processes that are, at the core, about fermenting corn and hanging out for a little bit to see if it’s any good. Useful? Sure. Necessary? Occasionally. But after the fiftieth explanation of how yeast works like a Juggalo learning and re-learning about electromagnetism, it is rather easy to begin to suspect the joke is on you for listening with such devotion.
With a generous sense of mercy, Tequila is yet to be flattened by large audiences into a similar tidy taxonomy. Not entirely, anyway: the temptation to codify always waits in the wings, sharpening its pencils. And so Eric Zandona’s The Tequila Bible arrives not as a corrective, but as a kind of sideways glance: a recognition that it’s easy to map a landscape without forcing it into some sort of clean grid system.
Like any good guide to a place refusing to be reduced or pigeonholed, the book starts where it must: passages on fundamental history, how the drink is made, technological advancements, regions, industry growth, types of tequila, and even a nod to the current debate on additives. There are also plenty of infographics doing their job correctly: laid out properly with only the most important data points. With any biblical text of this sort, there’s a temptation to overkill with writing. Zandona and designers manage to steer clear of this pitfall.
And then there are tasting notes, plenty of them. There are suggested pours and recipes. There are photographs doing what good photographs of liquor always do: make you feel like you should be having a drink right now. The design is appealing in the way these books tend to be: clean, sharp and ornate enough to feel like it belongs on a coffee table, not buried on the kitchen counter under three months of unopened mail or as an impromptu coaster.
There is a tension in the Tequila Bible doesn’t entirely resolve, possibly the most tequila thing about it: how is it possible to capture something without sanding off the edges, making the spirit worth caring about in the first place? The bible-fication of anything carries a certain flattening effect: regions become chapters and a living, shifting culture becomes something to casually flip through while waiting for your dinner reservation or the TV show to resume between commercials.
But to hold that against the book too strongly would be to miss the point, or at least to miss the purpose these sorts of books serve. Not everyone comes to tequila looking for a thesis on globalization or a granular breakdown of agave agriculture. Some people just want to know where to start, what to try, and why this particular bottle tastes the way it does. For that, The Tequila Bible is more than enough. It is generous without being overwhelming and informative without demanding a group study session at the end of each segment.
There is an appeal to the sort of book that is tempting to take from a shelf, flip to a random page, and learn something new. This is a strength of Zandona’s running through his published works. Maybe it’s a distillery you’ve never heard of and will now seek out. Maybe it’s a cocktail you wouldn’t normally make. Maybe it’s just sitting in a chair, glass resting on a table, getting a better sense of the place that produced what you’re about to sip.
In a market always threatening to become self-serious, that kind of invitation is most welcome. It’s a reminder that, at the end of all the maps, categories and definitions, this is still about a plant, a process, and a drink meant to be shared. And if the book occasionally edges toward the familiar? Well, so does tequila itself, once you’ve consumed enough. The trick is not to mistake familiarity for exhaustion. Done right, it can be just the beginning. And at the suggested retail price, it’s certainly far from the worst place to start.
B+ / $25 [BUY IT NOW FROM AMAZON]
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