It was odd to read Seth Kugel's piece on cachaça in the NY Times today, given that my own story about Brazil's national spirit is also just out in our May issue—evidently the stars have aligned in a media-related way for this sugarcane distillate. Space limitations meant that I had to cut portions of my story, so I thought I'd run one here as an apéritif of sorts, if you haven't read the article yet, or a digestif if you have.

In the article I describe at some length what cachaça should taste like. What I left out was the part about what it shouldn't taste like, which is sugar. Sugar is essentially the balm that industrial distillers use to moderate cheap cachaça's alcoholic burn, and that's why inexpensive cachaça typically tastes sweet. Essentially, as you down your shot at the corner cachaçeria after your 14-hour shift at the cement factory outside São Paulo, the sugar helps convince your tongue that its taste buds weren't actually just burned right off.

Or, as Caio Gudman put it to me, "In cachaça, sugar is like mascara. The next morning you wake up to the reality."

Gudman owns Fazenda Capuava, which is about three hours outside São Paulo near the small city of Piricicaba. (I met him because he's also the fellow who produces Beleza Pura for Olie Berlic, the cachaça importer who's a central part of my story.) Gudman's a jovial sort, a tall, broad man of Danish, German and Portuguese descent, with an enveloping personality—it's warm and sort of inescapable, a bit like the initial buzz you get from a good caiparinha. In addition to making Beleza Pura, a small part of his business, Gudman farms more than 6,100 acres of sugarcane on three estates, and produces more than 13 million gallons of cachaça per year.

It's not like you can apply the word 'artisanal' to Gudman's business, but even so his attitude wasn't that different from many winemakers I know. "Sugar cane is more or less like wine grapes: If you have good raw material," he said, "you can get good cachaça. It's that simple. You start with the land."

At the time we were driving through Capuava's sugar cane fields, and at the crest of a small rise we stopped and got out of his car. This part of Brazil, north of São Paulo, produces a vast amount of sugarcane, and I felt as though I were standing in an ocean of green stalks. Gudman, standing next to me, threw his arms wide to embrace the view and said, "OK! Sugarcane, sugarcane, sugarcane, sugarcane! Four hundred kilometers. Every direction."

What was appealing about Gudman's approach, though, compared to the other vast farms in the area, is that he's kept more than a quarter of his property as indigenous forest, tangled oases of trees, vines, birds, and wildlife—especially capybaras, which happen to love munching on sugarcane. Also, over 60 percent of his sugarcane is now farmed organically, and, he said, "In ten years we hope to be 100 percent organic. But I didn't make that decision for myself—that's for my grandchildren."

Which is a pretty heartening attitude, I'd say.