Uvola de Los Mochis

This drink is from Los Mochis, in northern Sinaloa, where the Fuerte river valley grows table grapes alongside the tomato and chile fields that feed half the country. It is not a national Mexican drink. It is a port-city drink, a Mochis drink, made for the heat that sits on that coast from May through September.

The uva isabella, the dark, foxy grape that grows in the Sinaloa valleys and across the Mexican northwest, is what gives this its color and its character. If you can find it at a mercado, use it. If you cannot, concord grapes from a good produce stand will get you the same deep purple and the same slightly wild, perfumed sweetness that distinguishes this drink from a generic grape soda. Welch's juice is a compromise that flattens the whole thing. Start with the fruit. Cook it down with cane sugar and a strip of lime peel. That is the base of the drink.

The shake is frappé-style, hard with crushed ice, the way the cantinas along the Topolobampo malecon do it for the kids and the abuelas and the women who do not drink alcohol but still want a glass in their hand on a Sunday afternoon. The lime is fresh. The mineral water is Topo Chico, cold from the bottom of the cooler. The salt rim, if you choose it, comes from the salt flats of the Pacific coast, not from a generic table salt. Every element is from this region. Cada estado, su propia cocina, and this one is from one specific port in Sinaloa.