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Ok, lemme start off by clarifying something: it’s OK if you don’t know what the fuck I’m going to be talking about here, based on the title of this review. In fact, I’m willing to bet that at least 75% of you don’t even know what that 2nd-to-last letter is in this post’s title, not to mention how to pronounce it. If one of my good friends wasn’t a crazy Brazilian film maker I wouldn’t know either. And if he wasn’t my best buddy’s brother-in-law, and if their father hadn’t passed his exceptionally good taste in booze on to his son and daughter, I wouldn’t have this bottle in my hand. This empty bottle.

OK, Cachaça — Pronounced Ka sha suh — is a Brazilian cane-derived hooch normally reserved for starting BBQs and lubricating scantily-clad knock-dead gorgeous women via the drink you make with it: Caipirinha (pronounced Kai peer een ya).

Damn, that reminds me of something. Is it just me, or does Brazil have the highest density of incredibly sexy women on the planet?

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah. Women. I mean Caipirinha. No. I mean Cachaça. Aged Cachaça. Pull it together man.

OK, hooch. Most of us think of rum when we think of cane-derived hooch, but the fact of the matter is that sugar cane is a plentiful crop in most of the tropical world. And, being the source of all things sugar, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that everyone and their grandmother has been making home-made hooch out of it since the dawn of time. And I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this particular Cachaça I’m drinking at this very moment has captured the true flavor of sugarcane in a delightfully alcoholic bottle.

It took me a long time to “get” high-end cachaça. This bottle made me get it. Have you ever just sucked on a stick of sugar cane? Think about it. If you have, I want you to travel back in your memory to that moment– to the moment when you first got the cane soft enough with your spit and teeth that it got kinda chewey and you started getting that pure, unrefined sugar out of it. Not sickly sweet like a spoonful of refined sugar, not overpowering. A little bit green, just a tiny bit astringent, and so mellow that you can chew on the cane stalk all day long and not get sick of it.

That’s what this cachaça is like: Soak that cane stalk in pure alcohol for 5 minutes, rub it up against a piece of just-cut oak, and suck on the fucker. Are you with me here?? It’s fuckin’ good, isn’t it?! God damn! It’s GREAT! It’s so straightforward that, in the past,  I completely missed the fact that it was just so straightforward– I was looking past the obvious.

So you know, I just figured all that out as I wrote this review. I just had one of those breakthrough moments– like the time you figured out what you like about wine or that beer makes you fart. I’ve been drinking this stuff in different forms for years, and I’ve never been able to put my finger on that familiar flavor. It’s pure, unadulturated sugarcane. Half as sweet, lighter & more acidic than a good aged rum, but loaded with natural cane goodness.

Sagatiba Velha Cachaça gets 150 points for opening my mind. Whoa dude, the colors…..

(3 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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