Forgive imbibers of tequila, that most versatile Mexican distilled beverage, for not knowing it rose to prominence amid revolutionary fervor. Or that the multi-billion dollar industry’s leading brand, José Cuervo, bears the name of a historical figure whose entrepreneurial story is directly bound up in tumultuous times.
That hidden history is exactly what intrigued longtime journalist and author Ted Genoways. His years-long exploration yielded a book, “Tequila Wars: Jose Cuervo and the Bloody Struggle for the Spirit of Mexico,” due out May 6. Genoways, who called Nebraska home up until 2022, will be at Francie & Finch Bookshop in Lincoln that day for an official book launch. The event starts at 5:30 p.m.
Genoways’ book has already received high praise from knowledgeable sources.
José Cuervo, the company and the person, “is synonymous with the story of tequila that’s been sold to the world, but until now no one has uncovered his real history, ” said Sarah Bowen, a professor at North Carolina State University and author of “Divided Spirits: Tequila, Mezcal, and the Politics of Production.”
On one level, it’s apt that a Nebraskan should bring this new appreciation to light. The timing of the state’s ratification of the 18th Amendment prohibiting alcohol sales in the U.S. signaled to Cuervo an opportunistic window to flood the American market with his spirit before the country went legally dry in 1920.
The saga also carried a personal connection for Genoways, who grew up listening to nostalgic stories told by his father, Hugh Genoways, about travels to the state of Jalisco and the Tequila Valley to study bats. The older Genoways’ career is what brought the family to Lincoln when Ted was in high school, where he quickly developed a reputation for his writing.
“What was exciting to me as I was working on this project is that people who up until now had just existed as names on bottles and distilleries are fully realized characters and people,” said Genoways.
Even though Cuervo personally intersected with and was impacted by well-documented events of the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s, that era’s chaos and violence saw many records destroyed. As old allegiances and family-business rivalries risked retaliation, some people — especially those who preferred working behind the scenes such as Cuervo — kept their names and deeds discreetly obscured.
“Maybe the most self-promoting thing he ever did was putting his own name on the bottle, and we know his name today because of that. But he left little record of himself otherwise,” Genoways said.
As a result, most people don’t realize Cuervo was a real person, let alone a pivotal figure in Mexican history.
“In an era when there were so many big, impulsive personalities defining the country and pulling it in different directions and eventually pulling it apart, I admire Cuervo always wishing to calm the waters and looking for ways to build cooperation,” Genoways said.
An unassuming but highly effective leader and powerbroker, Cuervo found himself on the right and wrong side of the revolution. He adopted the business practices of foreign entrepreneurs, vertically integrating his operation from the distilleries to the trains to the shelves. He found ways into the U.S. during Prohibition and brokered deals to keep his product on the market when the laws changed.
Genoways interrogates agricultural and food systems. His deep dives have included an intimate look at an ag operation in Nebraska’s York County for his book, “This Blessed Earth: A Year in the Life of an American Farm Family.”
For his new book he spent years tracking down leads to reveal the epic drama behind tequila. More than a decade ago he researched and wrote articles about the industry’s attempts to make the agave farming system more sustainable. Genuine tequila is made from the blue agave plant that only grows in Tequila.
While reporting, he got completely hooked on the place. He would constantly ask people to tell him the history. Almost universally, they responded that the history was destroyed during the revolution. The stories that did survive did so in people’s memory, they said.
It made a skeptical Genoways dig deeper.
“My reporter’s instincts were that that really couldn’t be true. That the history had to be tucked away in government records.”
Sure enough, it was there in things like records of water and tax collection disputes. Over 12 years, he made roughly two dozen research treks to Mexico. He’d find a new set of documents that would provide some answers — and present new questions.
“As I started to piece all that together I made inroads with the old families of the tequila region.”
Gaining access to the private, never before shared archives of the two major tequila-making families, the Cuervos and Sauzas, proved to be the breakthrough his project needed. Cuervo’s niece, Lupe, whom the family raised, was an obsessive diary keeper, Genoways said. Her observations and writing allowed the story to continue during a time when Cuervo vanished from public life.
She writes vividly about some of his excursions, such as when he disappeared into a canyon north of Tequila and created a cluster of houses along a mountain stream, which eventually attracted other tequila makers. Genoways visited the site and others during the reporting process.
He also credited Guillermo Erickson Sauza, the owner of the tequila brand Fortaleza and the great-great grandson of Don Cenobio Sauza. The younger Sauza maintains an extensive family archive that Genoways called “probably the best archive of tequila materials anywhere.”
In total, he estimates that 95% of the book is new, even to Mexican scholars.
“At the start of this I expected that based on the years of his life Jose Cuervo had been deeply affected by the Mexican revolution. I didn’t have any idea that tequila had been repeatedly attacked by revolutionaries. I didn’t have any idea the extent to which he was involved in politics and was often right in the middle of these conflicts. I certainly didn’t know he had been tried for treason or that he had been threatened by Pancho Villa. These were real surprises along the way.”
How did Genoways convince families to cooperate enough to grant him access?
“Showing up, expressing interest,” he said. “It became a process of building shared trust. … I think when people started to see what I was trying to build was not just a dry history of the industry but actually tell a story of these families they got excited and wanted to participate.
Perhaps most meaningful to Genoways are the endorsements his book received from Sauza and Cuervo descendant Luis Cuervo Hernandez.
NC State’s Bowen is impressed as well. Few if any products evoke Mexico’s history and heritage more than tequila, she noted. “To understand where this industry is going, we have to understand where it comes from. Ted Genoways’ book helps us do that …”
Genoways was partial to tequila before the book. Now, he’s a connoisseur.
“I’ve gotten to know so many people in the industry, especially the owners of these brands, the master distillers. Now when I enjoy some tequila with friends it’s not just that the bottle is an excellent bottle of tequila, it reminds me of specific people and places.”
For now, Genoways is busy doing press for his new book. He’ll be at the Omaha Press Club to talk about his book on July 17. Last summer he worked with Sauza to develop more history-based tours at their properties. He’d like to do more of that in the future. And he’d like to do more writing.
“There’s many other fascinating stories to tell,” he said. “I hope this becomes the foundation for a lot more storytelling and filling in of that history.”
