the Tequila anecdote

by Yael Schwartzman

I bought a bottle of Herradura Antiguo Tequila Reposado at the Mexican airport's duty free on my way back from a trip to Mexico City. This tequila is an excllent smooth tequila but the bottle is extremely hard to open. They might want one to work hard to ripe the benefits of such sweet, glorious taste.

I was trying to open it about two weeks ago and I noticed that once you twist the cap off there's an interesting thing that has the form of a perforated bench sitting on top of the bottle's neck (See Figure 1) and, to my surprise, when I tried pouring some tequila into a shot glass, nothing came out. Then I tried shaking some tequila out (in the same fashion one tries to shake ketchup out of a brand new glass ketchup bottle) and nothing came out.

Figure 1

I reluctantly gave up and held off for two weeks. Last Friday night as I was trying to do the Shabbat blessings with a friend and we were trying to open the tequila bottle (we were out of kosher wine). It was a hard, arduous journey that I will do my best at describing:

• The cap has a pointy device in the center that I tried to poke the perforated bench-like thing with unsuccessfully. I believe the pointy device to be too short for such function.
• I tried using a knife to take the perforated bench-like thing off, also unsuccessfully.
• I then remembered that I had found the pointy thing to be too short so I thought it might be a good idea to try to screw the cap in further. To my surprise, I cut my right thumb as I was trying to screw in the cap because the tequila bottle has a metal wrapping at the top of the bottleneck that I had tried to remove in order to attempt to remove the perforated bench-like thing.
• I went to look for a band-aid and gave up

Then my friend took over...

• The cap has a pointy device in the center that he tried to poke the perforated bench-like thing with unsuccessfully.
• He tried using a knife to take the perforated bench-like thing off, also unsuccessfully.
• He then tried to screw the cap in further. He cut his right thumb as he was trying to screw in the cap because the tequila bottle has a metal wrapping at the top of the bottleneck that I had tried to remove in order to attempt to remove the perforated bench-like thing.
• He got mad.
• He then got a chopstick and tried pocking the perforated bench-like thing with, unsuccessfully.
• I gave him a screwdriver and he ragingly broke the perforated bench-like thing off.

I gave him a band-aid and we transferred the contents of the broken tequila bottle into a different, smaller bottle and we proceeded to do the Shabbat blessings.

I later discovered there was a small glass ball underneath the perforated bench-like thing and that this device was there in order to minimize the outflow of tequila. So the device had its reasons to be there. However, there were no instructions in the bottle's label and there were no affordances or clues in order to indicate what was the right way to open the bottle. To this day, I still don't know the answer. If you know it, please contact me as soon as possible. Otherwise, although the tequila's taste is outstanding, I might go for a less expensive, less tasty one that won't have all these cool impossible gadgets in their bottleneck... or I might just brake the perforated bench-like thing from the beginning and save myself some time and injuries.