No Way José (Cuervo)
The Daily - Saturday, June 23, 2012
TEQUILA, Mexico — While tequila’s “lick it, slam it, suck it†mentality will never go away — how could it? — the spirit’s growth among smaller, handcrafted brands made for slow sipping is soaring. According to Mexico’s National Chamber of the Tequila Industry, there were about 35 tequila producers two decades ago and now there are 159, many of them boutique brands.
Big tequila brands like Sauza, Cuervo and Patron have led the charge, maintaining their base while steadily building up tequila’s image. They pushed quality, steering connoisseurs away from low-quality mixtos and toward “100% de agave†— made entirely from the tequilana Weber blue variety of agave. The big guys also expanded the use of barrel aging, breaking with the idea that tequila should be downed in one shot or used as a mixer. As the demand for quality tequila grew, larger brands spun off sub-brands (Cuervo Silver, Patron XO Cafe); the door was open for the kinds of small producers that are becoming increasingly popular in the United States.
Guillermo Erickson Sauza, who runs Tequila Fortaleza, might be the best embodiment of Tequila’s new wave. The Sauza side of his family (his mother’s) founded Sauza in 1873, but his grandfather sold the name and most of its holdings in 1976.
After a long stint in the corporate world, Erickson Sauza fired up the museum-like Fortaleza distillery and realized he had something extremely promising. His pair of stills, at 400 and 250 liters, are several times smaller than what most bigger brands use, but he didn’t touch a thing.
“That first batch was good but we had no trucks and no place to put it,†he said, sporting his trademark cowboy hat and Hawaiian shirt. “The learning curve’s straight up.â€
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