José Cuervo is the world’s top-selling tequila brand. Yet, many people don’t realize that José Antonio de Cuervo was an actual person. In part, that’s because there hasn’t been much written about him.
“There are no previous books that quote him,” writes Ted Genoways in his book Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico.
In the book’s prologue, Genoways writes, “José Cuervo is arguably the most famous name in Mexican history, but because of his own reticence and carefulness, because of the documentary absences in public and private archives, and because of his tight-lipped community and the passage of time, many people today do not even realize he was a real person. Cuervo was not just real. He was central. He was a key figure in his nation’s most tumultuous and formative period, as an empresario, as a kingmaker, as a cultural force. He also helped set the mold for Mexico’s covert form of cross-border commerce with the United States, in the face of his own government’s corruption and the racism and nationalism of his northern neighbors.”
The first family of tequila
The Cuervo family’s history in tequila predated José by many years.
In 1758, Cuervo’s great-great-grandfather was granted a plot of land by King Fernand VI of Spain to plant agave. His sons expanded the family holdings and in 1812, built La Rojeña distillery, which is still the brand’s home, in the city of Tequila.
Courtesy of Tequila Los Abuelos
José Cuervo was born in 1869, and he didn’t directly inherit the family business. “By the end of 1891, José Cuervo and his siblings were orphaned, landless, and drowning in debt, while Cenobio Sauza had become the largest landowner and wealthiest tequila maker in all of Jalisco,” writes Genoways.
The Sauza and Cuervo families battled, sometimes literally, for control of the tequila industry. Each owned distilleries in Tequila, and each gained and lost agave lands over the decades, all documented in Tequila Wars.
In the 1920s, a Cuervo family member killed a member of the Sauza family but was later absolved. A few years later, one of the Cuervos became mayor of Tequila and seized the Sauza distilleries for a short time. Back and forth, it went.
José Cuervo’s rise to power
Courtesy of Tequila Los Abuelos
A strong work ethic and a convenient marriage helped to plot the course of José Cuervo’s life.
Cuervo’s great-uncle, Jesus Flores, owned a few distilleries. Flores recognized his great-nephew’s talent for running a smaller one outside of Tequila and hired him to run the newly modernized La Rojeña distillery. Cuervo did so successfully.
Before he died at the age of 72, Flores suggested to his second wife, Ana González Rubio, 30 years his junior, that she might consider marrying Cuervo, who was 30 at the time.
Courtesy of Tequila Los Abuelos
The pair married, but never had children of their own. However, José Cuervo took in his wife’s niece, Guadalupe Gallardo González Rubio, who lived with Cuervo from age 6 to 24. Much of the descriptive information about Cuervo in Tequila Wars comes from Guadalupe’s records, though as Genoways notes, she often got dates wrong.
Bringing tequila to the United States
In the years that Cuervo ran the company, the city of Tequila, state of Jalisco, and the country of Mexico were in near-constant turmoil. That’s particularly true during the Mexican Revolution that lasted from 1910-20.
Courtesy of Tequila Los Abuelos
Cuervo and others attempted to navigate constantly changing leadership to bring railroads and electricity to the town of Tequila. The railroads would provide crucial paths to export tequila to the United States, something achieved at scale during Prohibition (1920-33) and during World War II.
Export of tequila was not legal in the U.S. during Prohibition, of course. Cuervo helped to establish a cartel, inspired by his German relations, of tequila producers. This had later consequences.
“The old tequila-smuggling routes and the cartel model of black-market exportation were taken over by the drug trade after passage of the Narcotics Act in 1935,” writes Genoways.
Courtesy of Tequila Los Abuelos
Around the 1880s, distilleries like La Rojeña modernized old-world technology like baking pits and pot stills, often used to produce mezcal today. They converted to steam ovens to bake, roller mills to shred agave, and column stills to distill.
Today, such technology used to make tequila in volume continues to be a topic of discussion in the industry, as some brands use cloned plants and perform sugar extraction via a diffuser. Similarly, problems related to blue agave grown as a monoculture crop plagued tequila producers in the 1800s, as they do today.
The Cuervo legacy
After Cuervo’s death in 1921 at age 51, the company passed to his wife, Ana. Upon her death in 1934, it passed to her niece (and José Cuervo biographer), Guadalupe, until she died in 1964. At that time, the company was already under the control of her brothers-in-law, Guillermo Freytag and Juan Beckmann. Descendants of the Beckmann family still own the company.
Unlike Sauza (Suntory Global Spirits), Don Julio and Casamigos (Diageo), Patron (Bacardi), Espolòn (Campari), and others, Cuervo is still a Mexican-owned brand. In Tequila Wars, Genoways shows us how important a part of Mexican history José Cuervo was, both the man and the brand.
