A Gentleman’s Meditation

There’s a particular silence that descends when one enters a proper aging room. Not the artificial hush of a climate-controlled wine cellar with its technological precision, but the earned quiet of a sanctuary where time itself has been given authority. At Destilería La Alteña, nestled in the highlands of Jalisco, this silence carries weight. Row upon row of American oak barrels rest in dignified slumber, each containing tequila that will not see daylight for another three years. The master distiller, Carlos Camarena, moves among them with the measured deliberation of a man who understands that his role is merely to steward a process that began long before him.

“To rush is to disrespect,” he often tells me, his English precise despite his preference for his native Spanish. “Not just the spirit, but the land that created it.”

It’s the kind of sentiment that would sound manufactured coming from a brand ambassador in a tailored suit. From Camarena, whose family has produced tequila for four generations at this very location, it carries the simple gravity of truth.

The Patience of Proper Things

In our age of immediate gratification, where online shopping, overnight shipping and instant downloads have conditioned us to expect the world at our fingertips, there remains something profoundly countercultural about spirits that demand decades to reach their potential. In a world that’s digital, it’s rewardingly analog. 

An añejo tequila or mezcal represents a defiance of modern impatience—a quiet insistence that some pleasures cannot, must not, be rushed.

The finest agave plants used in premium tequila grow for twelve to fifteen years before harvest. Their journey from earth to bottle requires nearly two decades—a timeline that would horrify most corporate boardrooms. Yet it is precisely this unhurried pace that creates the depth that no marketing campaign can fabricate.

To that end, I find myself increasingly drawn to aged spirits not merely for their complex flavors, but for what they represent: a commitment to legacy over convenience, to inheritance over immediacy.

The Aristocracy of Craft

There exists what I’ve come to think of as an aristocracy of craft—a nobility not of blood but of approach. The men and women who devote their lives to perfecting slow processes belong to this quiet elite. Like the English dry-stone wall builders who work without mortar, using techniques unchanged for centuries, or the Japanese knife makers who fold steel thousands of times, the makers of heritage spirits practice a form of devotion that transcends mere occupation.

At Del Maguey, where the remarkable single village mezcals have redefined the category, founder Ron Cooper and maestro mezcalero Paciano Cruz Nolasco showed me espadín agave plants in Oaxaca that will not be harvested until many years from now—possibly when the current apprentices are themselves master distillers.

“The best things we create, we create for the future,” Nolasco explained without a trace of regret. “This is correct.”

It’s a perspective that feels increasingly foreign to our modern sensibilities, yet instantly recognizable to anyone who has contemplated what it means to live with purpose beyond immediate reward. The oak trees planted at Blenheim Palace in the 18th century were never expected to shade their planters but were intended for naval vessels centuries later. The medieval cathedral builders laid stones knowing they would not live to see the spires completed.

This is not merely patience, but a fundamentally different relationship with time itself.

The Gentleman’s Pour

There is a reason why aged spirits have historically been the domain of gentlemen of means and leisure. Not because of their price point—though quality is rarely inexpensive—but because proper appreciation requires precisely what the gentleman cultivates: patience, discernment, and reverence for tradition.

The ritual of the pour matters. A fine mezcal or aged tequila deserves the same ceremonial respect as a vintage port or single malt whisky. The proper vessel—never plastic, never oversized—cupped in the palm to warm the spirit slightly. The unhurried nose before the first sip. The understanding that the first taste merely introduces the experience, while the second reveals it.

In an era when shots are tossed back with careless haste, the measured appreciation of an exceptional spirit becomes a small act of rebellion. Not flashy, but correct.

A Legacy in Liquid Form

What separates the merely expensive from the truly valuable is often the question of heritage. An aged spirit carries within it a record of decisions made decades prior—the selection of agave, the choice of wood, the decisions around distillation. It is, in the most literal sense, inherited wisdom in liquid form.

This perspective transforms the after-dinner drink from a mere indulgence to a form of communion with craftsmen past and future. The glass in your hand connects you to both the harvesters who selected the agave under the Mexican sun years ago and the drinker who will appreciate the bottles you cellar for posterity.

At my family’s ranch in Texas, we keep a modest collection of exceptional bottles—not as trophies, but as companions for moments that matter. The 2005 El Tesoro Paradiso was opened when my godsister graduated from university. A particularly fine Clase Azul Reposado awaited my fiftieth birthday last spring. These are not merely drinks but markers of time, commemorating the passages that give shape to a life well-lived.

The Measure of Time

Perhaps what draws me most to these spirits is how they make tangible the passage of years. In a digital age where photographs exist as pixels rather than silver prints, where correspondence happens in ephemeral messages rather than letters kept in cherry wood boxes, the aged bottle offers something increasingly rare: physical evidence of time’s passage.

You cannot accelerate a twenty-year aging process. No technology, no additional investment, no force of will can reproduce what only patience produces. In this way, these spirits remind us of other irreducible realities: the development of wisdom, the building of reputation, the growth of relationships that matter.

Señor Camarena put it eloquently as we stood among his resting barrels, “We do not age the spirit,” he said, gesturing to the silent room. “Time ages the spirit. We merely create the conditions where time can work as it should.”

What more profound aspiration could there be for any of us—to create conditions where time can work as it should? Not to fight against its passage, but to ensure that its inevitable flow produces something of worth and beauty.

In the quiet sipping of a fine aged spirit, we are reminded that the most meaningful pleasures cannot be rushed, only awaited with proper anticipation. There is dignity in this patience, a quiet nobility that, like the spirits themselves, only improves with age.