Mundo Cuervo in Tequila, Jalisco, Mexico

One of the cool things about Guadalajara is that it's only an hour away from a town called Tequila, which, you guessed it, is where tequila is produced. There is a train that runs out there on weekends, but today being a weekday, I grabbed a van service from the Jose Cuervo folks. That unfortunately means that they didn't stop at competing distilleries like Herradura, Sauza, and La Cofradia, but nonetheless we stopped in the fields to check out how agave is harvested. This included a taste of the raw agave flesh (rather tasteless, actually), as well as some kind of lotion that he made from the leaves. That's a volcano in the background of that photo, BTW.



After that, we went to the distillery itself, where they took us through the production process, and of course gave us plenty of samples in the process. Frankly the tastes and smells just gave me college flashbacks, but there was some very expensively aged one that I tried that tasted more like whiskey than tequila. Anyway, after all of that, we were on our own for lunch, so I went to the market behind the church and found a random stall that seemed to have things that I'd never tried before...or so I thought. I asked for a sincronizada as well as a pellizcada, the former of which turned out to be a ham quesadilla but using flour tortillas, while the latter was just another name for sopes.



I still needed more food though, so I ended up at Cholula La Fonda, which, as it turned out, was owned by the Cuervo folks. Yep, it's the same Cholula that one knows from the hot sauce, although the cool thing about this restaurant was that there wasn't a single bottle of it in sight. Instead, they came to you and made fresh salsa tableside, depending on how you wanted it (I immediately requested some lovely roasted habanero). I also grabbed this plate of enchiladas tapatias, as it was supposed to be based on some local Jaliscan recipe. I'm not sure if I could really tell much of a difference, but that didn't matter. I was gobbling down chips and habanero salsa like there was no tomorrow. And indeed, I'm going to pay for this tomorrow morning...my belly is still rather warm right now.