The Cabinet: Ancho Reyes

Sí, el chile es una fruta

~ ANCHO REYES ~
Proprietary chilli liqueurs - poblano and ancho - from Zaragoza, Mexico. / 40% ABV / c£28+ for 700ml
Friends with: Tequila and mezcal as you would expect. But also rum, bourbon. Watermelon, pineapple, grapefruit, strawberries, melon. Vanilla, chocolate, cinnamon, vanilla.

THERE is an astonishing scene in Alváro Enrigues’s novel, You Dreamed of Empires, in which Moctezuma, the Last Emperor of the Mexica, enters the temple of Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlan and starts grooving to Marc Bolan.

It is nominally 1519. The Aztec Empire is fighting wars on many fronts. A ragtag of Spanish adventurers led by Hernan Cortés has made it inside the vast metropolis of Tenochtitlan - though whether as invaders or as guests, no one seems quite sure. What Moctezuma is interested in are their horses. But we begin to suspect that his grasp on reality is not quite what it should be - in part because he has just ingested lots and lots of magic mushrooms.

“I love this room,” says Moctezuma as he surveys the temple where he spent many happy days in his youth. “You can’t imagine how I miss being a priest.” Around him are the viscera recent sacrifices: withered limbs of dead warriors; clay bowls filled with blood. Then all of a sudden, everything starts moving. The desiccated fingers begin dancing “to the beat of some music he couldn’t place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex’s ‘Monolith.’” The priest, too, begins to dance and so too do the decapitated doves, quite sensually. “Moctezuma swung his hips to the beat. It’s nothing I’ve ever heard before, he replied, but I like it.”

Enrigue has explained that what he wanted to do here was to shatter the unity of time and place of the novel that he had taken such pains to create and penetrate the world of the 21st century reader. “It should also feel like an afternoon mushroom trip,” he said.

Curiously, though, the passage also quite accurately describes the taste of the Mexican chilli liqueur, Ancho Reyes. It’s nothing I’ve ever tasted before… but I like it was precisely what I said when I took an experimental sip of it and began, inexplicably, dancing to glam rock. As a bottle - as two bottles! - Ancho Reyes might just be our century’s most exciting addition to the cocktail cabinet, one that is quite capable of piercing a little hole in the canvas backdrop of time so we can quickly peep into other dimensions. Your Margaritas, your Palomae, your Negronia - none of them will ever be quite the same again.