A long time ago, I was hanging out in Jalisco with an American friend who had a truly admirable enthusiasm for Spanish and a limited grasp of the language. A local fisherman was courting Abigail and asked her what she liked to drink. “Vino!” she said enthusiastically. “Vino blanco!”
Now, to the Spanish speaker not familiar with rural Mexico, this would seem that, for once, Abigail’s Spanish was entirely correct. She was a big fan of pinot grigio. “Vino blanco,” or “white wine,” seemed as close as you were going to get in rural Jalisco.
“Miguel said he’d bring me some white wine!” she told me. I was dubious. We were camped on a beach in the middle of nowhere.
The next day Miguel showed up on his bike with a coke bottle full of clear liquid. Abigail looked a little dubious, but was the intrepid type and took a swig. To her credit, she swallowed it and said, “Hmmm!”
She had just taken a big gulp of raicilla. Although we were big fans of tequila, we didn’t know much about raicilla. And we certainly didn’t know that old timers and rural people sometimes refer to this regional mezcal as “vino.”
This usage is old. In 1564, the Spanish opened a trade route between their colonies in the Philipines and Nueva Galicia, a territory that included the modern state of Jalisco. Fillipinos who worked on the Spanish galleons brought portable wooden stills for making a coconut distillate known as vino de cocos, or “coconut wine.” By 1616, this distilling tradition had been adopted and adapted by the native population of Nueva Galicia. From plants called mezcales, they distilled vino de mezcal or vino mezcal.
In some parts of Mexico, particularly rural areas, people still call mezcal “vino” and agaves “mezcales.” We see this echoed in the word vinata, which means distillery in many parts of Mexico, including Sonora, Sinaloa, Michoacan, Chihuahua, and Durango.
Sometimes vino may have another descriptor—for instance, raicilla from the mountains may be called “vino de cerro,” which means “wine from the hills.” When I traveled to southern Jalisco to research the controversy surrounding the use of the word “tuxca” to describe the mezcal of the region, I spoke with Don Macario Partida of Chacolo, who affirmed that they use vino to describe mezcal, adding “What we call it here is a mezcalito or a vinito,” he says. “We’ve called it that for all time.”
All this aside, you can still feel safe ordering “vino blanco” in a restaurant and getting a glass of white wine.
Leave a Comment