The Rising Wave: Celebrating WITH Craft Tequila and Mezcal

When George Clooney and friends sold CasaAmigos in 2017, liquor giant Diageo paid $1 billion for the company–even though it was only four years old and selling 120,000 cases. But tequila was hot, hot, hot.

The Diageo-owned brand quickly grew within three years to 1 million cases of Casamigos a year in 2020 and then to 2.2 million cases in 2021.  By 2022, it had tripled in brand value, becoming the fastest-growing spirit brand in 2022, according to The Spirits Business.

It wasn’t the birth of the celeb tequila wave, but it certainly was an accelerant, as subsequent launches proved.

In 2019, Michael Jordan and four other NBA team owners launched Cincoro. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson released Teremana in 2020, and Kendall Jenner launched 818 in May 2021. 

Overall, agave spirits are the fastest-growing category in liquor, rising at 6 percent annually since 2002. Consumers are also more or less equally split between men and women, and significantly, almost half of agave spirits consumers (46%) are aged 25-44. Another 34% are 45-64.

But do celebrity brands deliver the quality true tequila aficionados crave?

Another market segment – craft agave spirits (including craft tequila) – is growing, and fast, building repeat business for bars serving up artisanal, small-batch brands from heritage producers and educating consumers.

According to mezcal and tequila expert Sarah Kabat-Marcy, managing partner at Carmel’s esteemed Cultura Comida y Bebida, celebrity tequilas may be doing more harm than good as the industry increasingly relied on industrial-scale production and harvesting agave too young. That’s in contrast to authentic and traditional tequila producers, who fans gather to taste and admire at the Agave Heritage Festival, held in April in Tucson, Arizona, a hotbed for agave lovers. 

In Tucson, renowned ethnobotanist Gary Paul Nabhan and David Suro Piñera, owner of Siembra Spirits, teamed up to write Agave Spirits: The Past, Present, and Future of Mezcals, on the history of agave beverages from the vast spectrum of 200 types of agave, not just the Blue Weber, the one that tequila is sourced from. 

“The agave plant was never destined to become tasteless, cheap tequila,” the book’s promotional copy says.

Kabat-Marcy, a former wine sommelier turned mezcal geek, is one of a growing number who sees celebrity tequila and industrial brand overproduction as threats to indigenous production and authentic mezcal and tequila flavors.  

“The industry is just so flooded with industrialized, large productions that are counterproductive to cultural recognition and sustainability,” she said. “And these definitely supported deforestation and mono-cropping. They are not keeping the money in Mexico.”

Her Carmel, California restaurant, Cultura Comida y Bebida, has a 13-page agave spirits list. Only three-quarters of one page is tequila from Blue Weber. The rest is from 50 other varieties of agave.

“The industry giants have selected the Blue Weber variety because it takes less time to reach full maturation,” she said. “This variety naturally takes, on the early side, five years to eight or nine years to reach full maturation before it’s ready for harvest for production because that’s the point where the natural sugars are in the pinya (the heart) part of the agave.”

But, she said, because of the popularity and demand primarily made by celebrity and industrial tequila brands, bigger companies are harvesting agave for two to three years, reducing quality.

“So it’s this small little agave that has hardly any sugars or starches. So then the industry created the agave diffuser. They spray the agave down with hot water and liquefy it mechanically. And then they add glycerin and chemical colors and fake vanilla and caramel flavors, even though it says 100% agave on the label,” she said.

For those who don’t have an agave expert to guide them, she recommends the Tequila Matchmaker app. “You can select the category ‘additive free,’ to find good producers,” she said.

Building Rapport and Driving Repeat Business

Promoting more authentic flavors and producers has helped her build relationships for her business with dedicated customers for whom her place is a way to discover heritage producers and authentic, nuanced flavors. Restaurateurs should educate themselves and become educators, she says. 

“Fortify yourself with information around what brands support the ethos of sustainability and preservation of culture,” she said. “It’s a responsibility, especially being an ambassador in this industry–not a brand ambassador, but an ambassador of sharing with your customers about brands, because they’re relying on you. They’re looking to you to guide them in the right direction. And if you fortify yourself with education, then you can.

The field is exploding, she said. “When I first started studying mezcal, it was very niche. And I had only been privy to a handful of expressions that were on the domestic market. And within the last five years, it has blown up and grown exponentially. The market is incredible. It’s crazy how big it’s grown in such a short amount of time.”

It wasn’t always this popular. 

“Initially, when we first opened our restaurant, our investors thought we were absolutely nuts and really tried to convince us not to do mezcal because they and their friends hardly knew about it. This was only seven years ago,” Kabat-Marcy said. “Within those first two years of being open, it was kind of just this geeky little fringe of industry people who appreciated it and found it interesting and esoteric. And then, in the last five years, it’s just heightened beyond what I could imagine.”

“We had no idea. It wasn’t like we were prophets of industry. We just stuck with it. We found it really fascinating and wanted to learn more and share with our friends, family, and customers, and it just happened to become simultaneously extremely popular,” she said.

Sarah Kabat-Marcy’s Top Recommended Producers

ArteNom

Cascahuin
Fortaleza
G4Ocho
Siembra Valles