Thank goodness for this site and NOMs

[mjfuller53]

We have a market the Sacramento, CA area called Trader Joe's. They started carrying a "store brand" tequila called Distinqt Tequila. It's 100% agave and for $19.95 a bottle I figured how bad could it be? The bottle is shaped very similar to Patron and they place the Distinqt bottles right next to the Patron bottles as if it's really Patron or just as good. I thought it was actually quite good and a good value for the price. So I emailed Trader Joe's and asked them who made the tequila. They replied to say marketing agreements prohibited them from revealing who made it. I don't understand that, but they assured me it was the finest tequila available. Of course, what else would they say.

Then recently I noticed in very small, almost unreadable, print that the NOM number was stamped on the label. It was so small I hadn't noticed it before and until I studied tequila on this and other sites, I didn't know what the NOM was anyway. So I looked it up in the NOM database and found it was a brand made by EL Viejito distillery. They have 20 brands, however, if you go on their website they only market the El Viejito label and not their other brands. They, or marketing partners, have created separate websites for several of their other brands. So I still can't say for sure that Distinqt Tequila is the same as El Viejito, because they haven't answered by questions yet, but it's well worth the price. El Viejito won a bronze medal in the 2010 Tequila.net awards competition.

So some day, (hint, hint Mr. Agave) it would be interesting to know what the main marketing strategies for tequila are, to answer questions like how and when are new brands created when many come from the same distillery. Do they use different methods to distinquish them or are they made mostly the same way within each distillery, so that within the different types, i.e. blanco, reposado, anejo, they are like gasoline--mostly the same product across brands?

[MrAgave]

It varies from distillery to distillery, brand to brand. Brands from the same distillery can be quite similar, and also completely different. Obviously you can't change the oven type, extraction method, fermentation vats, and still type when producing multiple brands from one distillery, but changing up the following, you can achieve varying products quite easily: Agave, cooking time / temp, yeast strains, fermentation, distilling time, number of distillations, filtering, alcohol volume, additives, barrel / cask type and size, etc.

Some distilleries also have multiple oven types, different still types / sizes, etc. So these distilleries can obviously make multiple unique brands by changing the production methods on each.