Into the agave fields

It rained all morning. A hard rain. And the sky was still a splotchy gray pillow so I was a little surprised when Ismael Gama offered to take me out into the gray-blue agave fields outside the little town of Tequila. But then again, this wasn’t something I wanted to miss. A friend of mine, Ana Maria Romero, who knows more about tequila than almost anyone I know, had arranged for me to meet Señor Gama after I’d expressed a desire to see agave being harvested.

“Then you must meet Ismael,” she said. “He is the best jimador I know,” a jimador being someone who uses a machete and a special flat-edge shovel to harvest the enormous agaves that take 7 to 10 years to grow before they’re ready for the alchemies of fermentation and distillation that will turn them into tequila.

Ismael dove his dirty truck through a muddy field owned by Cuervo, stopping along a row of giant blue agaves where half a dozen other jimadors were working. We watched them for a moment so I could see how it worked. With deft strokes the men quickly hacked off the barbed spears of the six-foot-tall agave, then used the flat-spade to trim the hundred-pound pineapple shaped heart, the pina, that would be roasted and mashed at the distillery.

Ismael Gama, a jimador, harvesting a 100-lb. agave pina. Photo by David Lansing.

Frankly, I told Ismael, the work looked incredibly difficult.

He smiled. And then he grabbed his machete, made a series of quick downward slashes, lifted out the pina, and trimmed it to its core—all in a couple of minutes.

“It is hard work,” admitted Ismael. “Which is why we work only six or seven hours a day.”

And how many agave plants can you harvest? I asked him.

He shrugged. “Quizá trescientos.” Three hundred.

And then he handed his machete to me. I wish I could tell you how easy it was, how I quickly pruned the towering agave plant and lifted it out of the red volcanic soil, just like Ismael. But I’d be lying. The truth is that I so quickly bloodied my arm that Ismael took the machete away from me before I turned into a pin cushion. But he didn’t laugh at me. He holstered the machete and handed me a rag to mop at the blood. Perhaps, he said, we should go now to the distillery and sample a little tequila.

An excellent idea, I said. And that is what we did.