Lick the salt, take a shot, bite the lime. Tequila!

The blue agave plant takes a decade to mature in the heat of the semiarid desert. It looks like a cactus yet it’s a member of the lily family, protecting its juicy, fibrous interior with thorny spines. And at its heart are the delicate earthy, spicy and floral favours that distillers seek to share with a thirsty public in the form of agave spirit. The spirit is of course best known as tequila, and in Mexico it also goes by mezcal or less frequently, komil.
Agaves - particularly the Mexican blue agave - were introduced into South Africa within the last century and a half. But how they got there is a tale equivalent to the origin of the margarita. One story claims it was Portuguese sailors who brought them in the mid-19th century. A second relates that agave plants were distributed throughout South Africa in the early 1900s for both erosion control and as a fodder crop in droughts. Thousands of plants were planted by many families in the Graaf-Reinet area. A third story says a young girl brought three imported agave plants from Grahamstown in 1938, and planted them on a farm outside Graaff-Reinet. Still another theory goes that the agave plant was introduced by a traveller riding from Grahamstown to Cape Town between 1820 and 1830.