MAY 31, 2020 • WINE SPECTATOR 53T
equila has been boom-
ing in recent years,
and the leading role that
top-drawer examples have
taken poses a chicken-
and-the-egg question: Did
celebrities drive the mar-
ket by co-creating super-
premium spirits or did a
rise in quality convince
movie actors, rock musi-
cians and professional ath-
letes to suddenly attach
their names to them?
We may never know the answer, but
one element tying together the high-end
tequila choices is a shared emphasis on a
time-tested formula for improving liquor:
wood aging.
Though the fermented and distilled
juice of the agave plant has been a fixture in Mexico since the 16th
century, and was first imported in volume to the United States to-
ward the end of the 19th century, it has only been in the past sev-
eral decades that makers have begun to focus on wood maturation.COMES OF AGE
Not only did more long-
aged expressions come to
market—as well as a new
category called extra añejo
(extra old)—but tequila
producers started to exper-
iment with varied cask
types and a process called
finishing, popular in the
whisky world, in which a
spirit undergoes extra
aging in a different cask.
At the same time, con-
sumers have become savvy
about the variables that
contribute to a premium product. One is
agave purity. Though the denomination
of origin restricts the regions in which
agave can be harvested to the state of
Jalisco and small portions of four other
states, an inferior version of tequila, called
mixto, is allowed to include as much as 49% sugar from other sources,
as well as artificial coloring and flavoring. Choose bottles with the
legend “made from 100% blue agave,” or assume you’re buying mixto.
Much is also made of the designations “Highlands” (Los Altos)TEQUILA
Superpremium releases across
multiple age categories ofthis Mexican spirit are
showing wood accents
BY JACK BETTRIDGE
Hacienda Patrón in Jalisco,
Mexico. The producer’s oldest
bottling, an extra añejo aged
10 years, is made from 100 %
blue agave and matured in a
mix of American and French
oak barrels.
COREY^ ARNOLDWS053120_tequilaRev.indd 53 3/18/20 11:21 AM