TEQUILA WARS

The little-known man behind the famous drink.

This rich, edifying book remedies a striking gap in the historical record. José Cuervo's namesake tequila is one of his nation’s iconic exports, a liquor made from local agaves that became a billion-dollar industry (and begot a commensurate number of hangovers). But until now, Genoways writes, there’s never been a book about him: “Even in Mexico, there is only one brief academic study that examines Cuervo’s rise.” His low profile in death has much to do with the way he lived. As many of those near him met violent ends, he maintained a “calm, reserved exterior” and stayed “strategically invisible,” a finishing-school product who parlayed a dodgy pedigree—his uncles were land thieves—into commercial immortality. Beset by drought, crop disease, bandits, and the outbreaks of violence and political chaos that accompanied the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, Cuervo developed various tactics to stay afloat. He won public favor with civic-minded donations, showcased his product at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, paid bribes, lobbied reporters, built political alliances, and helped bring electricity and rail lines to his region. He lived amid ambient menace and unthinkable violence, fleeing his home on horseback in the cinematic scene that opens the book and, in a subsequent chapter, spotting the hanged corpses of at least 50 revolutionary soldiers. Genoways makes frequent and effective use of diaries kept by Cuervo’s niece, a strong writer whose words help us see and hear the action. The frenetic rate of change in Mexico in this era—leadership of one state government changed five times in about a year—occasionally makes it challenging to track the narrative threads and players. But smart pacing and memorable detail are this book’s primary features.

The comprehensive story of a liquor empire built during a pivotal period in Mexican history.