Mate: Argentina's Tea Ceremony

Imagine if you were to replace every Starbucks cup, soda can or water bottle that you see each day among your friends and associates with a funky little drinking gourd pierced by a silver straw. That would be a lot of funky little drinking gourds, no? That's exactly what you see throughout Argentina, for it's what the people use to consume mate (pronounced mahtay), a bitter green tea made from the leaves of the yerba mate plant. They are obsessed, and the gear - not just the gourds and straws (called bombillas) - but thermoses of hot water and bags of the "weed" accompany the average person everywhere they go.

From the admittedly poorly-translated video at the Museo del Mate in Tigre, I learned that "mate improves our nature and our status" - whoa! Pour me some! More realistically, it is reported to give you a natural energy boost, and maybe more importantly, there is a whole ritual when pouring and sharing mate that is an ingrained part of the Argentine culture.

I figured that with its immense popularity, it must contain some addictive chemical component like caffeine - surely all of these people aren't simply hooked on herbal tea. Turns out, mate's chemical makeup and its assertion that it does or does not contain an addictive component, is an ongoing debate. It revolves around a compound everyone agrees is in mate called mateine, and the verdict is out on whether or not it's addictive (although here in the states, yerba mate tea is labeled as "naturally caffeinated"). Read more here - it's interesting.




I wanted to try mate, of course, but it's not really served in cafes except in tea bag form, and that's kind of defeating the point. But my opportunity came at the most unlikely of spots with the most unlikely of servers - in the Parque Provincial Aconcagua with some Argentine Army soldiers acclimating for their ascent of of the mountain. The soldiers shared their snacks and prepared mate for us in their gourds, which we passed around as is the ceremony. How cool is that? Not sure why, but I'll remember that as one of the highlights of the trip.