La Gritona Reposado Tequila 375ml

La Gritona Reposado Tequila 375ml is a half-size bottle of small-batch reposado from the highlands of Jalisco.

"It's tequila like our grandparents drank," says Melly Cárdenas, and the style bears her out: light in colour, low on sweetness, with none of the chocolate and vanilla flavours that cover up so many commercial reposados. She has twenty years of production behind her, runs her Valle de Guadalupe distillery with an all-women local team, and shares her business partner Andy Coronado's taste for doing things unconventionally. Mature Blue Weber agave from the region's iron-rich red soil is steam-cooked for a full day in a thick-walled earthen oven, rested, crushed, fermented on wild yeasts in open steel vats, then double distilled. The recycled glass bottles vary in shade from one to the next.

Roasted agave, cracked pepper, citrus peel and a clean mineral finish, with the oak sitting well back. Neat in a copita is the best way to read it, or build a Margarita with fresh lime and no sugar at all.