Margarita de Bacanora Sonorense

This is from Sonora. Not the margarita that Cancun bartenders pour for cruise ship passengers, not the slushy lime-green thing they serve at chain restaurants in the north. This is a Sonoran cocktail built on bacanora, and the spirit is the entire point.

Bacanora is not mezcal. Let me say that again because the bartenders in Mexico City still get it wrong. Bacanora is made from agave Pacifica (Agave angustifolia variety Pacifica), grown wild in the sierra of eastern Sonora, roasted in earthen pits, fermented, and distilled in copper. It carries a Denomination of Origin that covers 35 municipalities in the state. From 1915 until 1992, it was illegal. Seventy-seven years underground. The men and women who kept distilling it through prohibition, in the ranches above Bacanora, Sahuaripa, and Arivechi, are the reason this spirit exists at all. Treat it that way.

The chiltepin on the rim is the wild chile of the Sonoran desert. Birds eat the berries from thorny bushes and spread the seeds across the sierra; harvesters pay for those chiles by the gram because nobody farms them. The salt comes from Bahia de Kino, where the Sea of Cortez evaporates in flat pans on the coast. The agave is the family of the spirit. The lime is the brightness that wakes everything up. Nothing in this drink is decorative. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and Sonora pours from the desert into the glass.

My mother never made this. She was from Jalisco and she drank tequila like a Jalisciense. I learned bacanora from a senora named Dona Rosario in Sahuaripa, who poured me a glass at three in the afternoon and told me to taste the smoke before I said anything stupid about it. I have not said anything stupid about bacanora since.