José Cuervo: The Man, the Legend, the Equine Tequila Shots

New York Times

04-05-2025

As far as personal branding goes, getting name-checked in multiple chart-topping singles isn't a bad strategy. To quote just one, Shelly West's 1983 country-radio banger: 'José Cuervo, you are a friend of mine/I like to drink you with a little salt and lime.'
But there's a complex life behind this name, so often tossed around in American overindulgence ditties, and in 'Tequila Wars: José Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico,' the James Beard Award-winning author Ted Genoways has dug deep to find it.
'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,' writes Genoways, 'many people today do not even realize he was a real person.' His densely packed biography of José Cuervo Labastida y Flores is a textured account that details Cuervo's relationships with rival tequila producers, and his efforts to survive in a politically unstable era.
By drawing on family, newspaper, government and university archives, as well as the extant scraps of Cuervo's professional and personal correspondence, Genoways is able to paint a nuanced portrait of an elusive figure. Memories recorded by Guadalupe Gallardo González Rubio, Cuervo's niece, provide many of the book's more colorful passages (including rare vignettes of happy family times) — although, as Genoways warns, her 'ornate, sensitive and marvelously detailed accounts are also frustratingly short on basic facts,' like accurate dates.
'Tequila Wars' opens with a reimagining of Cuervo's 1914 escape on horseback from his Guadalajara mansion, after getting word that Pancho Villa's revolutionary army is on the way to arrest him for backing the wrong side in Mexico's chaotic civil war. Following a brief stop to blow a mouthful of tequila up his exhausted steed's nostrils (depicted here as a folk cure for equine hoof pain), Cuervo goes into hiding.
After that dramatic start, the book settles into more conventional biography mode, going back to the Cuervo family's 1758 entry into the liquor business in the Tequila Valley, distilling the vino mezcal made from the region's blue agave plants. Although an heir later dismissed Cuervo as 'a nice man, not a great businessman,' Genoways argues that he was actually 'an active and aggressive molder of his moment and milieu — as a technological innovator, a business tycoon, and perhaps, most of all, as a political power broker.'
Cuervo worked to get a railroad line to the valley to build out his distribution network. Later, he persuaded rival distillers to band together in a business alliance 'structured in the style of German 'kartells'' to control prices, production and distribution of their goods.
With trade relations between Mexico and the United States once again in the news, the book's examination of Cuervo's illegal trafficking over the border during America's Prohibition years feels like the foreshadowing it is: 'The old tequila smuggling routes — and the cartel model of black-market exploration — were taken over by the drug trade' after laws banning narcotics were passed in the 1930s.
Cuervo's efforts paid off with international recognition and sales. His booming business during the World War I years raised even more scrutiny from the U.S. government, which monitored his tequila-distribution system out of fear he was running guns for America's foes. As Genoways reports, 'For the duration of the war, José Cuervo was an official enemy of the United States,' a tidbit omitted from most modern musical odes.
But it's a concurrent war, the Mexican Revolution that took place between 1910 and 1920, that would have a bigger impact on Cuervo's fortunes and provides much of the book's tension. In these chapters, marauders repeatedly damage the rail lines and destroy his property; it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of who's burning down what — although vintage photographs and several illustrations help keep track of the players in this violent drama.
Having survived the wars, Cuervo died suddenly, at the age of 51, in 1921 and was lauded with positive — if oddly vague — obituaries. Genoways offers his own epitaph: 'His name is inscribed on the family tomb — under the same skull and crossbones where his father was interred — but, more importantly, his name is inscribed on millions of bottles every year, carrying his fame from his native Tequila to the rest of the world.'
If the Terry Pratchett observation that 'a man's not dead while his name is still spoken' stands, José Cuervo will live for the foreseeable future — and thanks to Ted Genoways, as more than just a brand name.