We just returned from an amazing and beautiful trip to Tequila, Mexico to visit some artisanal tequila distilleries and meet some of the artisans responsible for creating these unique expressions of the blue agave plant. For our guide in this excursion we chose to go with Jeff Hines of Realtequila.mx. Jeff has been a proponent of tequila without additives and family run tequilerias for many years and has a wealth of knowledge about the industry.

Getting To Tequila

To begin with, the town of Tequila is far enough away from Sayulita that it is in a different time zone and it will be a 3 1/2 hour trip, unless your driver takes a wrong turn which just makes it longer. As you get into the high desert and get closer to the town of Tequila the land resembles parts of the American Southwest with its mesas and valleys and you begin to see patches of agave plants everywhere in the shadow of the Tequila Volcano.

Forteleza Distillery

We arrived only slightly late for our first appointment at 1:00 at Tequila Fortaleza. I was very excited to visit this distillery as the tequila is exquisite and has been unavailable anywhere I’ve looked for a long time. I did find a half bottle at a bar in Puerto Vallarta and did my best to drink it over a couple days. The bartender was kind enough to hide it for me until I returned.

At Fortaleza their guide, Kimberly took us through every step of the process of creating this hand made treasure from the agave piña to the hand made bottles, the hand placed labels, the hand made toppers and everything in between. Guillermo Sauza is the owner of Tequila Fortaleza and his philosophy includes keeping things hand-made to employ more people in the Tequila Valley.

Roasted Agave

Of note when you begin the tour is the smell of roasting agave, rather like cooking sweet potato. Fortaleza only has two smaller capacity ovens that take about 40 hours to fully cook the agave with steam and give it time to cool. They generally only cook on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. After cooking the agave is shredded and ground in the traditional way using a large stone wheel called a Tahona. The agave is pressed several times to extract all the juice.

During this part of the tour we were offered a piece of the cooked and shredded agave to taste and smell. This is an opportunity that you won’t get without visiting a distillery and it’s an important step in understanding the flavors that end up in the bottle. The juicy pulp is very sweet and I have to revert to the sweet potato analogy because it is that same earthy, rounded sweetness rather than the sharp sweetness of processed sugar.

Fermentation

From the Tahona the juice goes into large wooden fermentation vats. These vats are open to the air and that allows naturally existing yeasts to enter the juice during fermentation. This is one of the places where unique qualities can be introduced naturally into the juice. Different locations will have different naturally occurring elements and different seasons will as well. These differences can also affect the time the juice spends in the fermentation vats. My memory is not real clear on this but I think it was about 5 to 8 days for this step of the process.

Next come the copper stills. Using the same methods their great grandfathers used 150 years ago the juice is distilled in large copper stills. The first part of the distillate is called the head and contains some undesirable alcohols and characteristics so it is collected separately. The juice goes through two distillations before it is finally the Still Strength Blanco Tequila, anywhere from 46% to around 55% alcohol.

The Still Strength goes into large stainless steel vats where it is diluted with water to create the desired alcohol percentage which is normally 40%. The standard in Mexico used to be 35% so it is not unusual to find tequila at that strength in Mexico. Some of the tequila goes into used oak whiskey barrels, 3 months for reposado, up to 36 months for añejo and longer for extra añejo. When you taste vanilla notes in a no-additives tequila those come from the barrel.

Tequila Additives

There are two times in the life of a tequila when additives can be introduced into the product. One is in the juice prior to fermenting. With low quality agave and even high quality agave at certain times of year the sugar level can be insufficient. People make up for this in various ways. The most desirable is to use a natural roasted sugarcane called piloncillo. The other place for additives is in the vat after the still strength is made. Most of the celebrity tequilas as well as other large brands have added ingredients up to the maximum allowed by the rules of tequila making. Additives are being made stronger so small amounts have a huge affect on the end product.

Hand Made Everything At Forteleza

The Fortaleza tour goes beyond the tequila into the packaging methods. We went into a room where the hand blown bottles were being etched. The distillery continues the tradition of hand blown bottles for local use but the bottles are too fragile to travel well so they have had to resort to machine made for export purposes.

The name of the distillery used to be Los Abuelos, paying homage to three ancestral founders in the tequila industry. They were told they could not use that name for export to the United States and that is when the name Fortaleza started to be used. They still make Los Abuelos labels for Mexico and they etch the Los Abuelos logo into the glass under the Fortaleza labels as a sort of nose thumbing to the US authorities.

The piña toppers in their bottles are also hand made. Resin is poured into molds to make the piñas. Once hardened they are hand painted and sanded. Then they are glued onto the corks and the excess glue is removed by hand.

The bottles are filled by hand, one at a time, and the labels are placed front and back by hand. The toppers are put on and plastic shrink wrapped all by people one at a time. It is truly amazing to see this level of individuality in an automated world and it just contributes to the special qualities of this tequila. Guillermo Sauza is the owner of Tequila Fortaleza and his philosophy includes keeping things hand-made to employ more people in the Tequila Valley.

Our guide had arranged something for later for us to taste this tequila and at this point we were hungry. Fortunately the facility had a fish taco stand and bar where we could have some food and beverage.

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Casa Salles Hotel

An overnight trip is necessary to be able to enjoy the visit to Tequila as it would be too exhausting to try to go there and back in one day. Our guide booked us rooms at a wonderful hotel and it was time to check in and get ready for the next tequilleria. Casa Salles Hotel Boutique is a very nice property located next to (and owned and operated by) the La Guarreña distillery, home of tequila El Tequileño. They have a very good restaurant on-site and extremely comfortable beds!

El Tequileño

Our next tour was at El Tequileño. This is another small operation that takes great care in their process and product. The next two distilleries we visited both use more modern methods of cooking, shredding and extracting the juice from the agave. Chief among those differences is the use of pressure cookers to cook the agave.

They also use machines to shred and juice the cooked agave. It still goes through several pressings to extract all the juice but the process goes a little faster here.

And the rest of the process proceeds the same for everybody. The juice goes into into the stills and into the barrels. Some places have more still capacity while others have less. The juice is getting distilled twice so here it can go straight into the second still once the head has been removed.

Jeff Hines was anxious for us to taste their Cristalino. We had told him that we liked Don Julio 70 even though we know it has additives and he told us we would prefer the Cristalino once we had tasted it. He was right, although the Don Julio is everywhere and I don’t know if we’ll be able to find the El Tequileño back home in California. I bought a bottle while I had the opportunity. We brought a bottle of the Cristalino home with us but sadly it is all gone now. I was able to find the El Tequeleño Reposado at a local liquor store chain.

Mango Restaurant

After mucho tequila tasting we went back to the hotel for dinner. The restaurant, Mango had a really nice looking menu. Kelly went for her angus burger on a brioche bun with caramelized onions and chipotle mayonnaise. I tried a charred lettuce and meat salad with a creamy sauce and, surprise!, a molé almendrado dish that was delicious.

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Guillermo Sauza and the Los Abuelos Caves

One of the highlights of this trip was a return to the caves of Fortaleza for a private tequila tasting with Guillermo Sauza that night. This was something that was only possible because of our guide’s connections and relationships, We were treated to some good conversation and a few stories as we sipped the wonderful tequilas that are made there. It was interesting that all the bottles we had that night had the Los Abuelos label rather than the Fortaleza label. Same juice inside but to an impressionable American like me it feels a little more special.

We tasted the typical lineup of Blanco, Reposado, Añejo and Extra Añejo. I have long preferred the añejo tequilas but this experience is the beginning of my newfound love of the more pure expressions of agave in the reposado and blanco. Having tasted the roasted agave earlier in the day I am starting to appreciate being able to taste that in the tequila without so much barrel flavor masking it.

We finally stumbled off to the comfortable beds at Casa Salles to put an end to a long and most interesting day.

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Atanasio Farm Experience and Distillery

So by now you are thinking that nothing is going to top the cave experience with Guillermo but our guide, Jeff Hines with realtequila.mx had more in store for us. After a good breakfast at the hotel, I had two eggs with (surprise!) molé. This was very similar to the molé of the night before, a little nutty, a little sweet, we drove out of town a ways to Atanasio Tequila.

Atanasio is a small father/daughter operation that takes great care in their tequila making process. The father, Rene is a mad scientist of sorts who is always thinking of ways to bring out the expression of the agave in his products. His daughter, Sheccid, is a bright spark of a girl who, at 21 is fabulous at presenting their vision to the world. We took part in the day worker experience where we were to learn a lot more about the agave plant itself.

In the Agave Fields

We began with a lesson in agave reproduction. The plants live for eight years before they are ripe and ready to become tequila. During this time they calve and put out babies that are attached to their mothers by risomes. Once the babies reach 3 years old, one of the jobs of the laborers is to separate them from their mothers and prepare them for a life of independence. This is not particularly easy work and the trabajadores are paid one peso for each baby. We then planted a young agave. This method of reproduction by clone is not necessarily the best because it prevents any sort of evolution from occurring. In some cases this can promote undesirable tendencies in the plant.

The other method of reproduction is to allow the plant to flower and seed. A flowering agave will have less sugar content and therefore be less desirable for tequila making so the motivation for this method of reproduction is relatively low. It is important for the preservation and advancement of the species so it does happen occasionally.

Lunch On the Ranch

Next we drove to another part of their property on a hill surrounded by agave plants with a beautiful view of the Tequila Valley and the Tequila Volcano. I got to practice my Spanish with Rene on the ride up and we talked about marijuana growing in both of our pasts. Here Rene made a fire and heated a comal upon which we heated tacos for lunch. Sheccid brought along a molcajete and we made salsa for the tacos.

Distilling Methods and Innovations

Then it was back to the distillery for the process tour. Atanasio was begun about 7 years ago so it is still a young business. They are operating at about 25 percent of their capacity because the demand is not there yet. I think it keeps them fairly busy as it is but Rene has time for his experiments. One of those was to put some shredded roasted agave in the still during the distillation process. They bottled this at still strength of 46% and it is a really nice expression of the agave without the strong alcohol presence I was expecting. A bottle of that is going into our suitcase for the trip home.

An important and interesting thing Sheccid shared with us is that they try to have their still strength no higher than 46% so they don’t have to dilute it too much. When you dilute the juice you dilute the flavor at the same time. Atanasio is all about bringing out the flavor of the agave, not disguising it.

Jeff Hines At RealTequila.mx

This is another experience we would not have had if not for our guide at Realtequila.mx, his connections in the industry and his knowledge of that industry. I would not have found Atanasio on my own. This experience with Rene and Sheccid, who are so passionate about what they are doing, and who’s product is so very special was beyond what I could have imagined.

With my longstanding passion for visiting wineries in California and coffee farms in Kona it should come as no surprise that I wanted to visit tequilerias in Tequila. As I was planning our time in Mexico this winter I was trying to figure out how to get to Tequila and see something that would be more meaningful than the Cuervo train and circus. I looked into staying in Guadalajara and taking one of the tours that originates from there but nothing seemed to meet with my desires for smaller, more craft style distilleries. There wasn’t anything from Puerto Vallarta either.

I had seen Jeff Hines at RealTequila.mx on the sayulitalife.com website and sent an inquiry. He was having difficulty getting enough people interested to make the trip work for him but in mid December he let me know it was happening. I am so happy he was as determined as I to get to Tequila and that he made this trip happen. The tequila was fantastic but the moments with Guillermo, Rene and Sheccid will be special memories forever.

We use a splash of tequila when we make our Pico de Gallo Salsa since tequila is gluten free, unlike beer. We do keep less expensive tequila around for such purposes.