Salinas

Salinas is not on anybody’s tourist map, which is part of why going there feels like a small discovery. It sits in the far north of Minas Gerais, three hours from Montes Claros, in a landscape that has become drier and flatter and less obviously Brazilian than the colonial south — scrubland and red dirt and the specific heat of the sertão creeping in from the northeast. The town itself is a mid-sized agricultural center with a main street, a market, and an unusually large number of shops selling bottles of something amber behind glass cases. You figure out quickly what Salinas is about.

Brazil produces cachaça all over the country, but the Salineira — the cachaça of Salinas and its surrounding region — holds a protected geographical indication that distinguishes it from the industrial product made at scale in São Paulo state. The difference is audible in the vocabulary: here, people talk about wood. Amburana gives a sweet, vanilla-tinged spirit. Bálsamo adds a resinous depth. Jatobá contributes a reddish tint and something dark and faintly medicinal that cuts through the sweetness. A serious producer might be aging the same distillate in five different native woods simultaneously, tasting each barrel quarterly across three or four years before blending. I understood none of this before I went to Salinas. I understand it now.

The Feira do Produtor, held on Thursday mornings at the central market, is where the region’s small distillers bring samples and bottles for sale directly. I spent three hours there on a Thursday in June that was already hot by eight in the morning, making my way along tables of cachaça, accepting small pours in plastic cups, trying to identify what I was tasting before being told. The producers ranged from a woman in her sixties who made perhaps two hundred liters a year from a still in her backyard to a third-generation operation with several thousand barrels in a temperature-controlled warehouse. What they had in common was an insistence on talking about the wood, about the terroir, about the years. Cachaça, in Salinas, is spoken about the way wine people speak about wine, but without any of the performance.

I visited the Distilaria Havana — one of the region’s respected producers — on a weekday morning and walked the barrel room with a man named Elias who had been working there for over twenty years. He opened a barrel of amburana that had been aging for four years — you had to put your face close to the bunghole to smell it — and the smell was something between vanilla cake and lumber yard and the inside of an old church. He poured me a small glass. At ten in the morning, on a red dirt road in northern Minas, it was the right thing to drink.

The town’s annual Festa Nacional da Cachaça in June brings producers from across the region for a week of tastings, competitions, and the kind of collective cheerfulness that happens when an entire economy gathers to celebrate itself. The streets fill with sampling stalls, music runs until late, and the local restaurants serve food calibrated to line the stomach: feijão tropeiro, torresmo, linguiça on the grill. I ate a plate of feijão tropeiro on a plastic chair outside a barraca, with a small glass of two-year amburana on the side, and felt I understood something about why people build their lives around particular places.

When to go: June for the Festa Nacional da Cachaça and the feira at its most active. The heat in the north of Minas is serious year-round, but April through July is the drier and more moderate period. Come with luggage space — you will leave with bottles.