In Tequila, Cuervo’s La Rojena distillery, the oldest in the Americas, is a lab for the family’s high-end branding renewal. Tequila connoisseurs guide visitors through tasting rooms, past brick-built ovens for cooking agave pineapples, and into a cellar once used only by the Cuervo family.
In the dark of the Cuervo bodega in Tequila, guests are offered the good stuff. Reserva de la Familia extra anejo, first released in 1995 for the distillery’s 200-year anniversary, is taken straight from a cognac glass. It goes down oaky, with a hint of vanilla, and is made with 100 percent agave sugars. It’s a long way from popular Jose Cuervo brands like Especial that only contain 51 percent agave sugar. That’s just enough to be legally called tequila.