As wine sales slide and water limits tighten, farmers from the Central Valley to Santa Barbara County are planting a drought-tolerant crop with a long wait, a big question mark and no name to borrow. On the west side of Fresno County, second-generation farmer Stuart Woolf has spent the past several years putting a crop in the ground that few Californians would have recognized a decade ago. His agave now…
Walk into any serious mezcal bar today and eavesdrop for five minutes. You will hear words like cupreata, quinquangulata, and papalometl tossed around the way people once said “smoky” and called it a day. You will hear debate over whether a particular tobaziche from the Sierra Juarez carries more limestone minerality than the same varietal produced an hour south. Twenty years ago, none of that conversation existed in English, and…
A limited-edition “Farewell Season” bottle marks the start of a multi-year deal and the final season at Nissan Stadium. The Tennessee Titans and La Pulga Tequila announced on Sept. 29, 2026, that La Pulga has been named the Official Tequila Partner of the Tennessee Titans. Beginning with the 2026 season, the multi-year partnership will bring La Pulga’s tequila to fans at Nissan Stadium and will continue into the team’s new…
A New York federal judge ruled that five lab samples were not enough to show widespread adulteration of Casamigos and Don Julio. The decision does not settle what is in the bottle, and the fight over tequila trust is far from over. A US federal court has thrown out a proposed class action that accused Diageo of selling Casamigos and Don Julio tequilas as 100% agave when they were not…
Pick up almost any bottle of tequila and you will find a small cluster of letters and numbers stamped somewhere on the back label. NOM 1123. NOM 1414. CRT. To most drinkers these markings may as well be a barcode, a bit of regulatory noise between the brand name and the alcohol percentage. Read them correctly, though, and they tell you a great deal about what you are about to…
When you flip a bottle of mezcal and scan the label, the words joven, reposado, and añejo might look familiar. If you have spent any time around tequila, they are familiar: they describe how long the spirit has spent resting in wood. In mezcal, those same terms carry the same basic meaning, but the context around them is very different. Mezcal’s relationship with wood aging is complicated, contested in some…
A colonial-era plant, a pandemic-born brand, and a new category that is asking the global spirits world to reconsider what agave can be. For more than half a century, the global agave spirits conversation has been conducted in Spanish. Jalisco and Oaxaca have set the terms, defined the categories, and built the regulatory frameworks that govern how the world understands tequila and mezcal. That dominance is well earned. But it…
Ask a hundred serious agave spirits enthusiasts how they built their palates and you will get a hundred different answers. But beneath the specifics, the strategies tend to cluster around two poles: the focused collector who works systematically through a single category, producer, or agave variety until they know it cold; and the wide-net drinker who grabs whatever is new or unfamiliar and trusts that sheer volume of exposure will…
There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a table when everyone stops talking at once. Not from awkwardness, not from boredom, but because something just happened in someone’s mouth and the brain hasn’t caught up yet. I had that silence the first time I tasted a tepeztate mezcal. The conversation we’d been having just evaporated. I set the glass down. I picked it up again. I wasn’t…
The two most famous agave spirits share a plant and a country. Beyond that, almost everything is up for discussion. Someone at the table picks up the bottle, squints at the label, and asks: “Wait, is this the same as tequila?” You have about thirty seconds before the conversation moves on. Here is how to use them well. Start With the Plant Both tequila and mezcal are made from agave,…
