The story of agave spirits is not a tidy straight line. It is a story built in fits and starts, across centuries of indigenous knowledge, colonial upheaval, commercial ambition, regulatory struggle, and cultural reclamation. From the first fermented cup of pulque offered to Aztec deities to the modern mezcalero bottling single-village spirits for a global audience, every glass of agave spirit carries the weight of that history. These are seven of the milestones that made the industry what it is today.
1. The Sacred Maguey ca. 200 CE and Earlier
Long before the first still was fired in the Americas, agave was already central to life in Mesoamerica. Indigenous peoples across what is now Mexico had been harvesting aguamiel, the sweet sap of the maguey plant, and fermenting it into pulque for well over a millennium before European contact. Archaeological evidence suggests pulque production dates back at least 2,000 years, possibly longer.
For the Aztec (Mexica) civilization, pulque was not simply a beverage. It was sacred. The drink was associated with Mayahuel, the goddess of the maguey, and with the 400 rabbits (Centzon Totochtin) who governed intoxication in the Aztec cosmology. Pulque was consumed in religious ceremonies and offered to the gods, but everyday consumption was tightly restricted. Getting caught drinking outside of permitted contexts could carry severe penalties, including death.
That cultural gravity surrounding agave and fermented spirits did not disappear when the Spanish arrived. It went underground, adapted, and ultimately survived to inform how Mexican communities relate to mezcal and pulque to this day. The maguey was never just an ingredient. It was a relationship, and understanding that changes how you approach everything that came after.
2. Fire Meets Agave: Spanish Distillation and the Birth of Mezcal 1500s
When Spanish colonizers arrived in the early 16th century, they brought distillation technology with them. The merging of that technology with roasted agave hearts produced something entirely new: distilled agave spirit, what we now call mezcal.
The exact origins of distillation in Mexico remain contested. Some historians argue that indigenous clay pot distillation techniques predated European contact, pointing to traditions in Colima that may have roots in methods arriving via Pacific trade routes before Spanish colonization. Others credit the colonial period, specifically the Arabic-derived distillation knowledge that the Spanish carried from Europe, as the primary origin. The Manila Galleon trade, which connected Acapulco to Manila beginning in 1565, may have introduced Filipino and Asian distillation methods that influenced regional practices in western Mexico. The debate has not been settled.
What is not contested is the result. By the late 1500s and into the 1600s, mezcal wine, as it was then called, was being produced across large portions of New Spain. The Spanish Crown imposed taxes on it, tried periodically to suppress it to protect imported Spanish wines and spirits, and never fully succeeded. The demand was too great and the geographic reach of agave too vast.
3. The First License: Commercial Production Takes Root 1795
For most of the colonial period, mezcal production operated in a murky legal space, tolerated, taxed, sometimes banned, then quietly tolerated again. That changed in a meaningful way on September 4, 1795, when the Spanish Crown granted Jose Maria Guadalupe de Cuervo the first official license to commercially produce mezcal wine in what is now the state of Jalisco.
The Cuervo family had been farming and producing in the Tequila region for decades by then, but this license formalized something important: the idea that agave spirit production was a legitimate commercial enterprise deserving of legal recognition rather than official suspicion.
This was not simply a business milestone. It established a precedent. The products of a specific region, made from specific plants, by specific producers, could be regulated, licensed, and protected. That principle would take nearly two more centuries to fully develop into the denomination of origin framework we have today, but it started here.
4. The Iron Horse Opens a Market: The Railroad and Tequila’s U.S. Expansion 1880s
By the mid-19th century, tequila, the mezcal produced in and around the town of Tequila in Jalisco primarily from blue agave, was well established as a regional spirit and a source of Mexican national pride. Getting it to markets beyond Jalisco was another matter. The production region was landlocked, and transporting fragile bottles or heavy barrels over rough roads was expensive and slow.
The extension of the railroad to Guadalajara in the 1880s, and eventually the connection of that rail network to the U.S. border, changed the economic math entirely. Suddenly, producers could ship product quickly and cheaply to Guadalajara, to Mexico City, and north into the United States. Tequila brands began building export identities. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago gave several tequila producers their first significant exposure to American consumers.
This moment matters not just for tequila but for the broader idea of agave spirits as a commercial category. The railroad transformed a regional craft product into an internationally traded commodity, for better and for worse. The pressures that come with scale, the shortcuts, the industrial production methods, the consolidation, all trace back to this opening of the export market.
5. Protected by Law: Mexico’s Denomination of Origin for Tequila 1974
By the mid-20th century, tequila had developed a significant international profile, particularly in the United States, but the category faced a genuine identity problem. Products labeled as tequila were being produced with varying amounts of actual blue agave, mixed with cane sugar and other additives, and the term was being used loosely by producers in other countries. Mexico had a valuable cultural and commercial asset that was not legally protected.
In 1974, Mexico declared tequila a product with a protected Denomination of Origin (DO), restricting the use of the name to spirits produced in a defined geographic region that includes the state of Jalisco and portions of four other states: Guanajuato, Michoacan, Nayarit, and Tamaulipas. Production standards were codified, and the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT) was established in 1994 to oversee compliance.
The DO was not universally celebrated. Critics then, as now, have pointed out that the geographic boundaries were drawn in ways that favored established commercial interests and that the permitted use of non-agave sugars, up to 49 percent in the mixto category, diluted what tequila could claim to represent. Those are fair criticisms. But the DO also established a framework that made it possible to have those arguments at all, and it created a legal mechanism for protecting the category from even more dilution on the international market.
6. Mezcal Gets Its Rules: The Denomination of Origin for Mezcal 1994
For most of the 20th century, mezcal occupied an awkward position relative to tequila. It was older, more diverse in terms of the agave species and production methods it encompassed, and deeply rooted in the cultures of Oaxaca and other southern Mexican states, but it was commercially marginalized, associated in the popular imagination with the worm in the bottle and rural poverty rather than with craft or quality.
In 1994, Mexico established a Denomination of Origin for Mezcal, creating a regulatory framework that recognized the category as distinct from tequila and subject to its own geographic and production standards. The Consejo Regulador del Mezcal (CRM) was established to administer the DO. The original protected territory included Oaxaca, Guerrero, Durango, San Luis Potosi, and Zacatecas, with additional states added in subsequent years.
This was a genuinely consequential development, though its immediate effects were limited. Mezcal was still a niche product, and the regulatory structure was not yet sophisticated enough to capture the real diversity of agave species and production traditions that existed within the category. But the DO gave mezcal a legal identity and a platform from which to grow. The craft producers and cultural advocates who would drive the mezcal renaissance of the 2000s had something to work with.
7. Artisanal, Ancestral, and the New Era: NOM-070 Revised 2016
The revised NOM-070 standard, published in 2016, may be the most consequential regulatory action in the recent history of agave spirits. For the first time, the official mezcal standard created formal categories that distinguished between industrial, artisanal, and ancestral production methods, using criteria that account for the type of still, the energy source used in cooking, and other production variables.
The ancestral category, the most restrictive, applies to mezcal produced using clay pot distillation with natural heating, a method practiced in a handful of communities, most notably in the Miahuatlan region of Oaxaca and in parts of Michoacan. The artisanal category captures a broader range of traditional production methods, including natural fermentation in wooden or animal-hide vessels and distillation in copper or clay pot stills. Industrial production covers everything else.
These categories are imperfect and have generated their share of controversy. Some producers feel the criteria do not accurately capture the complexity and diversity of traditional practice. Others argue that the framework, even with its flaws, created a vocabulary for talking about how mezcal is made that allows consumers to make more informed choices and gives traditional producers a meaningful distinction to claim.
What is beyond dispute is the effect. The 2016 revision coincided with and accelerated a global surge of interest in mezcal as a category. Agave spirits from species that had barely registered on commercial radar, tobala, tepextate, tobaziche, sierra negra, began appearing on back bars around the world. A generation of mezcaleros and their communities stepped into a global conversation about their work.
That conversation is ongoing and not without its tensions. Questions about sustainability, about equitable compensation for producers, about the ecological pressure that growing demand places on wild agave populations, are urgent and unresolved. But those questions are only being asked because the category developed the standing and the audience to make them matter.
That standing did not come from nowhere. It came from more than 2,000 years of accumulated knowledge, colonial survival, commercial ambition, political protection, and cultural pride. The milestones above are not historical footnotes. They are the architecture of every bottle on the shelf.