Kendall Jenner, Michael Jordan, The Rock; This is how American stars are changing the tequila industry in Mexico

People in the tequila industry call this the “Cloney effect”.

In 2017, actor George Clooney announced the sale of his five-year-old Casamigos tequila brand to a British beverage company for a staggering $1 billion.

Almost overnight, it seemed like every top celebrity was launching a tequila label, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to LeBron James to Nick Jonas to Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

The flood of famous brands helped fuel record growth in the industry. Mexico, the source of all tequila, produced 60 million gallons last year, 800% more than two decades ago.

The boom is visible here, a town where the narrow, cobbled streets are packed with tourists and seemingly every distillery is sprawling. In the surrounding hills, the blue agave, the main ingredient in tequila, sells for record prices.

“We cannot keep up with global demand,” said Agustín Velázquez Servín, an agave producer who also has a small brand called Ruiseñor. "Anyone who has tequila right now is selling it at the price of gold."

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But not everyone is happy with the rapid growth of the industry, which comes with both an environmental (farmers bulldoze forests to plant more agave) and cultural costs, and foreigners play an increasingly important role in a of the most proud cultural traditions of Mexico.

“Personally, I find it very sad when thousands of years of history are reduced to a marketing campaign by a very famous individual,” remarked David Suro-Piñera, a conservationist who owns the small Siembra Azul tequila brand. "Everything that really matters about these spirits is coming down to fame."

For Salvador “Chava” Rosales Trejo, who helps run the Tequila Cascahuin artisan distillery and is the grandson of its founder, many celebrities don't understand what it really takes to make tequila.

“They don't understand the land, nor the raw materials, what the agave is, nor the resources we have here," he emphasized.

Those tensions came to the fore this year when supermodel Kendall Jenner introduced her latest business venture: a spirits brand called 818 Tequila.

Critics chastised cultural appropriation, pointing out Spanish grammatical errors on early labels and berating ads that showed Jenner riding a horse, galloping through agave fields. Jenner, who named the brand after the San Fernando Valley area code, was accused online by various commenters of "gentrifying" tequila.

But, like so many stars who joined the tequila boom, she had the last laugh. After months of anticipating the brand to her 182 million Instagram followers, Jenner's first batch of tequila sold out almost immediately.

The factory responsible for the Michael Jordan brand sits along a busy highway on the outskirts of Tequila, where the city gives way to undulating fields of silver agave.

Celia Maestri was a Mexican-American spirits importer in Houston when she and her husband bought the distillery in 2008. Their business, Casa Maestri, was still in its infancy when Clooney sold his brand. That same day, her phones began to ring. With call after call, many wanted to know if the distillery could help them make their own tequila label.

Today, the factory produces almost 150 brands, more than any other in Mexico.

“We are dream makers,” remarked Maestri, whose sprawling manufacturing facility now includes a luxurious lounge where customers can choose from a selection of hundreds of bottles, caps and labels.

The company has produced tequila for a variety of international stars, including Elon Musk, rapper E-40, actress Shay Mitchell and Third Eye Blind frontman Steven Jenkins.

But Casa Maestri's most famous brand is Jordan's Cincoro, which comes in a bottle shaped like an agave leaf and tilted at a 23-degree angle, reminiscent of Jordan's uniform number when he played for Chicago Bulls.

Ranging in price from $75 for a white to $1,568 for an extra añejo, it is one of the most expensive tequilas on the market.

But is it really what Cincoro CEO Emilia Fazzalari promised in a recent Forbes interview [“a new new tequila, a better tequila”]?

Like all tequila made at Casa Maestri, Cincoro is distilled from the juice extracted from agaves that are cooked partly in an oven and partly in an autoclave, a high-pressure vaporizer that producers like for its efficiency but which many connoisseurs of this drink despise because, they point out, it compromises the flavor.

It ranks relatively low on the Tequila Matchmaker app, with one reviewer describing the flavor of Cincoro's $130 añejo as “LifeSaver vanilla caramel dipped in coconut dust” and concluding that “there's nothing here that comes close to what a good, traditionally made tequila strives to be.”

Nevertheless, the brand was wildly successful, tripling sales since its launch in 2020.

Key, of course, is Jordan, who appears in promotional material for the drink alongside his co-investors, four NBA team owners, and drinks it throughout his Netflix documentary “The Last Dance”.

A pioneer of celebrity entrepreneurship, Jordan made more than $1 billion selling everything from Nike sneakers to Hanes underwear to McDonald's hamburgers. He paved the way for stars like Rihanna, who became a billionaire and the world's richest female music artist not because of record sales but because of her cosmetics brand.

Jenna Fagan, co-founder of Teremana Tequila with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, noted that top executives in the hard drink industry are now used to meeting celebrities, who are also dabbling in wine, vodka and whiskey .

“When you sit down with them, you realize that most of them want to have a drink because they think it's a great way to make a quick buck,” he said.

Fagan insists that Johnson is different: a true tequila nerd who is far more invested in his brand than other stars. Unlike most celebrity lines, Teremana has her own distillery and is co-owned by the family that makes it.

However, when asked if the plan is to one day sell the brand to a liquor conglomerate, he replied: "That's really DJ's decision," referring to Johnson by his initials.

Fagan was previously the chairman of Tequila Avión, which was sold to French beverage company Pernod Ricard in 2018 for around $100 million.

That brand was also owned in part by a celebrity: rapper Jeezy, who fervently and memorably promoted it in a song with Sean “Diddy” Combs called “Bottles Up.”

“Bottle it up, keep it high,” the rappers chanted before throwing out the names of Avión and DeLeón, a tequila brand owned, in part, by Diddy.

Pre-Hispanic indigenous groups in Mexico were fermenting agave into a viscous alcoholic beverage known as pulque for centuries, when Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 16th century and distilled tequila for the first time.

Since then, it has become a $10.8 billion a year industry.

In winemaking, the French word terroir is used to describe how the unique aspects of a grape-growing region shape the flavor of the wine made there. Increasingly, it is also used to talk about tequila.

A taster with a refined palate can tell the difference between the agave harvested in the cooler highlands of the state (sweeter) and those from the warm valley surrounding the city of Tequila (more earthy and herbaceous). They can tell by smell if the drink is 100% agave or a blend, which means it is partly derived from other sugars and if the flavor has been enhanced with additives.

Under Mexican law, tequila is not tequila unless it is produced in Jalisco or select municipalities in four other states. However, there is no rule that prohibits foreign ownership of brands or distilleries, and in the last 50 years, tequila has gone from being a spirit distilled largely by small Mexican producers to a global product dominated by multinational corporations. .

Nearly all of the world's major tequila companies (José Cuervo is a notable exception) are owned by foreign companies. Connoisseurs complain that the flavor of those brands, which include Sauza, Cazadores and Herradura, have waned with the advent of increasingly efficient industrialization, including the diffuser, which cooks the agave even faster than an autoclave.

Increasing US demand has been a key part of the transformation. Last year, 72% of all tequila produced was exported to the United States.

At least 700 new brands have been registered in the past four years, with more on the way, said Grover Sanschagrin, an American who co-founded Tequila Matchmaker with his wife, Scarlet.

“We constantly get phone calls and emails from people saying, ‘We are creating our own brand,'” he said. "It's almost like a checklist, like, 'Oh yeah, we've got our distribution figured out, we've got a celebrity.'"

The couple's collection of several hundred tequilas includes many celebrity brands, most of which are not even sold in Mexico.

Though they don't like all of them, they do enjoy some, including Mala Vida, owned by the Mexican rock band Maná.

“A celebrity can come here and make great tequila,” warned Scarlet Sanschagrin. “It depends on the type of partner they choose and what the process is.”

She also added that she found the recent attacks on the Jenner brand sexist. “Gringos have always been making tequila,” he said, noting that former Van Halen frontman Sammy Hagar founded Cabo Wabo in 1996, before selling it for $80 million in 2007. “There is a long list of men who came before than Kendall Jenner, and no one ever said a single word to them."

As morning mist crept over a sprawling agave field a few minutes from Tequila, a dozen men in wide-brimmed hats bent over neat rows of plants, batting at weeds that had sprouted during recent rains. .

One of them was Armando González Castillo, who grew up in these fields, working with his father every day after school.

At the age of 17, he left Mexico, frustrated by the low wages. He went to Colorado and spent a decade and a half working in construction before being deported earlier this year.

Returning to Tequila for the first time a few months ago, González was struck by the number of tourists filling the city center with their huge tequila cocktails and the apparent prosperity of the city.

This was his first day back in the field since 2006, and while that was a far cry from the $200 a day he was making in Colorado, he was pleased to learn that the pay had doubled from $7.50 per six-hour shift to about of $15.

The profits for agave plantation owners have been much higher, as over the past decade the price per kilo has risen from less than a cent to $30 dollars. “Each plant is a business,” emphasized Rubén Ravelero, who was helping supervise the workers that day.

However, he worried that the boom would backfire. The plants have long been considered mature enough to be cooked at around eight years, but are now ripped as early as four years, before they have fully sweetened.

There is also a growing concern for the environment. Tequila making requires a lot of water and produces a lot of waste, and agave fields are encroaching on what was once wild land. Ravelero pointed to the steep side of a nearby hill, where guavas and cactus plants once flourished and now only agaves grow.

He was a child when his father taught him how to grow this plant, along with beans, squash, and peanuts, a planting technique intended to mimic the diversity of nature. He sees the short-term benefits of increased tequila production, but fears that the growing monoculture, as well as the use of pesticides, will eventually bankrupt the industry. "If we kill the soil, we are doing it to ourselves," he remarked.

Guillermo Erickson Sauza proudly entered his distillery, followed by his Labrador retriever, Molly. “It's like going back in time,” she said.

His company, which he sells in the United States under the name Fortaleza, is one of the most traditional tequila brands on the market. Instead of grinding cooked agave with a mechanical crusher, he grinds it with a huge volcanic rock. It also ferments the juice in wooden barrels.

In the 1870s, Erickson's great-great-grandfather founded the Sauza brand, which remained in the family until 1976.

Erickson, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, was 20 when his grandfather sold it to the Spanish company Pedro Domecq, and he always regretted it. She moved to Tequila to found Fortaleza by renovating an old distillery on an 80-acre farm the family had been able to maintain.

The first batch, in 2002, was 100 boxes. Now it produces 30,000 a year. The company recently went from two to three shifts, so the distillery now works 24 hours a day, six days a week.

Erickson isn't sure if celebrity tequila is a good thing or not. He believes that he could eventually help create a new wave of drink aficionados, which would be positive for his business. “It has made tequila much more accessible to more people,” he said.

It was a warm afternoon, and Erickson was hiding from the sun with a glass of tequila under a stately mango tree that had been there since his grandfather owned the land.

One thing she does know is that she has a different goal than most celebrities. “Sure, I could sell and buy a big ship. But what then?" he wondered. "I like to be here. I want to die here."

When he goes to trade shows, he sometimes wears a T-shirt he created himself, labeled "Not for sale."

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