The family has managed to thrive during centuries of war and revolution. Jose Maria Guadalupe Cuervo won the first license from the King of Spain to produce mezcal wine in 1795. The drink’s main ingredient is the sap of the prehistoric- looking agave plants. One variety of mescal became known as tequila, named for the small town in a valley about 40 miles west of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest metropolis.

The drink became a staple for soldiers in the independence and Mexican-American wars. Cuervo started exporting to the U.S. after the introduction of above-ground ovens and railroads, setting up the tequila boom at the turn of the 20th century.


Violence Backdrop


While visitors to Tequila reached 230,000 last year, the Beckmann patriarch has long had ambitions to attract 1.5 million tourists a year to Tequila by 2020.

“The more people who visit the distillery, the better for the brand,” the younger Beckmann said. “They see the distillery and everything that Cuervo is about. This helps the brand communicate more with the consumer, to communicate what Cuervo’s about.”

But violence remains a persistent backdrop. A local cartel, Jalisco Nueva Generacion, has grown to become one of Mexico’s most powerful after drug lord Ignacio Coronel Villareal, alias Nacho, left a power vacuum when he was slain.

While drug war coverage has focused on the Sinaloa cartel’s kingpin El Chapo, his prison escapes and rendezvous with Sean Penn, the Jalisco cartel has steadily gained power with the use of extreme violence. The group claimed the 2011 massacre of 35 people in Veracruz, about 500 miles from Tequila, and the killing of at least 15 police officers in an ambush in April of last year.


Grenade Launcher


In May, they shot down a military helicopter with a grenade launcher and set off a wave of violence that included highway blockades with burning trucks. While not singling out Tequila, a U.S. travel alert warns against driving on some Jalisco roadways and bans U.S. officials from using the highways at night.

Visitors to Cuervo’s facilities in Tequila have grown from 18,000 in 2003 to 130,000 in 2014, a sign that cartel violence has not scared off tourists, said Cristobal Mariscal, Jose Cuervo’s legal director. Violence in Jalisco has been concentrated on the fringes of the state, like at the border with neighboring Michoacan state, he said.