Tequila used to be called Mezcal

How Mezcal became Tequila.

I’m going to touch on some incredible history of agave spirits that not many people know.  I overheard a Maestro Mescalero explaining that prior to the Spanish conquest of Mexico, all agave spirits were made in the Ancestral way- and that the Artesanal way only came after the Spanish conquest.  So I wanted to dig deeper specifically into this part of Mexico’s history to understand exactly what he meant, and find out when did “Mezcal” become “Tequila”?

The Spanish conquest of Mexico took place between 1519 and 1521, before this time, agave spirits were only fermented and not distilled, because the technology to distil spirits did not exist in Mesoamerica.  It wasn’t until the Spanish conquest that indigenous Mexicans began to distill agave spirits, the knowledge was imparted during the conquest of Mexico.

Before the 1800s, all distilled agave spirits were called "Vino Mezcal", or Mezcal wine.  Mezcal means cooked agave so basically this term means “wine of Mezcal”, or “wine of cooked agave”.

In the 1700’s, the Cuervo family applied for a land grant from the Spanish Crown to produce Vino Mezcal and in the late 1700’s the Cuervo family received the first official license to produce Vino Mezcal.  In the late 1800s the Cuervo family was mass-producing and exporting Tequila to the US.  José Cuervo’s distillery, La Rojeña, is still the oldest active distillery in Mexico.

A few centuries after the Spanish conquest, Porfirio Díaz ruled as President of Mexico for 30 years (1876-1911), and his second wife, Carmen Romero Rubio came from a wealthy family, who were rumoured to have produced Tequila. Tequila's rise in prestige happened during Díaz’s rule. Now, I cannot find direct evidence that Carmen's family owned a distillery, however, legend has it that Díaz wanted to please his wife so he officially recognised Tequila as a national product and moved from the name “Vino Mezcal”, to Tequila.  (I have very much over simplified the love story here from what I have been told, inspectors would destroy mezcal production facilities and there was a chance that Díaz would have never allowed the production of Tequila at all, if it wasn't for his second wife!).

Because of Díaz's reign, and the increase in production of Vino Mezcal, the spirit was increasingly referred to as "Tequila”.

So who was the first person to officially distinguish Tequila from Mezcal?  In 1873 a Cuervo employee named Cenobio Sauza, broke away and founded his own distillery, later called Sauza Tequila and he was the first to officially distinguish "Tequila" from "Mezcal", insisting that tequila should be made only from Blue Weber Agave (Agave tequilana).

It wasn't until 1974 when the official Denomination of Origin (DO) for tequila was created by the Mexican Government to protect the name Tequila, and actually prevent other countries from making, or calling an agave spirit; “Tequila”.  In 1994 the CRT (Tequila Regulatory Council) was created to enforce these regulations, still today.

20 years later in 1994 after Tequila’s Denomination of Origin, Mezcal got its own Denomination of Origin (DO), legally protecting Mezcal in Mexico.

So, a little history into the evolution of Vino Mezcal, a Presidents love story, tied in with a bit of Tequila knowledge and some information about the segway between the naming of both agave spirits.