Argentine Traditional Yerba Maté

Yerba mate is an infusion of dried Ilex paraguariensis leaf, a holly native to South America, sipped hot through a metal straw called a bombilla from a hollowed gourd. In Argentina it is less a drink than a habit: one person pours, everyone drinks in turn, and the gourd keeps coming back.

Origin & Story

The Guaraní drank mate long before Europeans arrived, gathering the leaves from wild trees in the forests of what is now Paraguay, northeastern Argentina and southern Brazil. Spanish settlers took up the habit in the late 1500s, and by 1596 an official in Asunción was already fretting about how far it had spread among the Spaniards and their families.

It was the Jesuits who first tamed the tree. Between the 1650s and the 1670s they managed to domesticate it in their mission towns, something others had found very difficult, and they kept their method closely guarded. After the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 the plantations decayed and the knowledge was lost, and mate went back to being harvested from wild stands until growers in Argentina and Brazil worked out domestication again around the turn of the twentieth century.

Today most of Argentina's yerba grows in Misiones, in the north-east. In 2013 Congress declared mate the national infusion, and the government reports that the average person drinks about 6.4 kilograms of yerba a year and that it is found in more than nine in ten homes.

The ritual is easier to follow than it looks. The gourd is filled about two-thirds with leaf, covered with a palm and shaken so the fine dust rises to the top, then tilted so the leaf banks up on one side. A little cool water goes into the empty side first, to protect the leaf from scalding, then the bombilla is pushed in and hot water, never boiling, around 70 to 80°C, is poured into the same hollow. The person serving, the cebador, drinks the first gourd to clear the straw and check the brew, then refills it and passes it on. You drink it all, hand it back without a word of thanks, and say gracias only when you have had enough.

Expect fresh-cut grass, an earthy, woody note and, in yerba that is traditionally dried over wood smoke, a campfire edge. As the water runs through the leaf again and again the flavor fades until the mate is lavado, washed out, and it is time to start a fresh gourd.

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