The Setenta-Mineral

Are you a waistline-conscious basic with the audacity to call a vodka soda a proper highball? If so, we’d rather you skip this and thus never be saved. 

If you live on the mayonnaise side of the border, you’ll be forgiven for not knowing that Don Julio 70 is Mexico’s fastest-growing “call” tequila. You’ve been snowed by the brutally effective marketing of “ultra-premium” brands like Patron, or that celebrity stuff jobbed out by an actor, a disco owner, and a developer with the deathlessly jejune, white-boys-in-Cabo nameplate that means “House of Friends.” (A brand aimed directly at hedge fund ferrets, preordained for a billion dollar acquisition.) 

This gabacho learned of 70 two years ago while licking his wounds at his local—the Dandy del Sur—subsequent to a 2000-peso beatdown at the hound track. Julio 70 is the true gen. It’s a faultless añejo claro. It’s religiously distilled, aged for a year and a half in white oak, and then syphoned into 750ML bottles of 100 PERCENT HANGOVER-FREE Jalisco throat wash. That’s the magic of cristalino filtering.

That’s providing you don’t add sugars. Which you won’t. Because no Mexican man will knowingly drink a Margarita. Fact. (They will, however, kill tonnage of palomas, primarily at weddings.) So top that 70 with agua mineral, preferably the source-bottled Topo Chico brand from Nueva Leon in Monterrey. Garnish with a squeeze. Not a Persian lime, for chrissakes, a Mexican lime. 

When you turn your friends on, we only ask that you tell ’em where you got it. Vodka soda fops are tone-deaf to attribution, but we agave cats always pay homage.

Feature image: photograph by Mike Gerrard.