Interview with Martin Grassl ( Tequila Aficionado Magazine Y2023)

1. Please state your full name. ?

Martin Grassl (aka Ponciano Porfidio)

2. Please include a short biography.?

In the early nineties, as the one of three gringo pioneers of the new international ‘100% Agave Standard’, I did my bit for the industry with innovative ideas on how to gentrify the category, whose reputation had been adulterated after companies, over decades, had shamelessly bundled pure agave tequila together with the 51% Agave mixtos and called them both “tequila.”

My mission to promote the all-Agave standard began by with the launch of a basic information campaign for Porfidio in the U.S., comparing the excellence of our 100% Agave product with the emetic mixtos. It highlighted the legal and linguistic duplicity shrouding the word “tequila.” Unsurprisingly, such heresy alienated the old tequilero Dons, who comfortably lived off the bulk mixtos tequilas exports to the US, which made up no less than 98.5% of their exports in 1990.

In his parallel mission, Patron’s founder Martin Crowley, the other 100% Agave “plotter” from the 90s, hoisted the '100% Agave Silver' standard to win a share of the premium white spirits segment. For me, however, vying for a share of the prestigious Single-Malt market, '100% Agave A?ejo' was my watchword to gentrify the category. Our approaches were perfectly complementary, while Robert Denton, the third pioneer, manifested his métier by invoking the earthy romance of tahonas, donkeys and the Jalisco hills as “highlands.”

Three decades later, looking at today’s sales for 100% Agave A?ejos, my original mission had clearly started a massive trend. The Old Guard, who had dismissed me back then as just another stupid gringo, moved from disdain to hostility once the 100% Agave Standard was enshrined, be it as “Silver” or “A?ejo,” into the premium catalogues. One person’s success always highlights others’ shortcomings, fomenting resentment and envy. My virtuous, albeit na?ve, mission to educate US consumers about quality criteria to sell my own 100% Agave wares, thus eventually escalated into a commercial crisis in the industry and later, with the successful ascent of the 100% Agave Standard, into a sandbox replay of the Thirty Years’ War over the ownership of three historically generic words and one administrative license:

- Who, if anyone, should own the intellectual property (IP) rights in Class 33 and the franchise income from the word “tequila,” which had, until recently, been the common linguistic patrimony of the Mexican people?

- Who, if anyone, should own the international botanical name “agave,” and phrases derived from it, such as “100% Agave”?

- Who, if anyone, should own the intellectual property rights over the word “mezcal” which had begun as a (Nahuatl) word for agave before transmuting into the name for its most potent product?

- Who should hold the administrative rights to issue export documents for tequila and mezcal? Should it be a private entity, or various entities, or the Mexican government?

The tequila dons of the Ancien Régime resolved to thrust Porfidio into the vanguard of this war-on-words, against my will. Yet I claim that “Porfidio stood one’s man,” paraphrasing Wittgenstein here. In 2022, precisely 30 years and three hundred lawsuits later, a final “outcome analysis” of the war settled these questions:

?- A privately owned organization (the CRT), and not the Mexican state, secured the Class 33 IP property rights in the US (and other countries) over the previously generic tequila word, more thanks to the Obama Administration than the Mexican State.

- The global community benefited from my battle to prove that “agave” was a generic, non-trademarkable word and thus so were derivative terms, such as “100% Agave.”

- The multinationals secured their domination over Mexico’s ‘Tequila? Inc’ franchise system despite the Ancien Regime’s dons who in the 90s had tried to exclude foreigners.

- Not the government but a privately owned entity, the CRT, secured the lucrative and exclusive administrative rights over label approvals, export controls, and, most transcendentally, also over agricultural agave certificates, the guias de agave.

- The word “mezcal” today no longer defines “agave spirits, other than tequila,” since Mexican law conjured up an Orwellian Newspeak term, “destilado de agave,” subsuming the original concept

- The US granted the Mexican government IP ownership over Mezcal through NAFTA.02, but not Class 33 IP status.

In summary, I look at my biography as framed by the Thucydides Trap, a cyclical version of destiny that befalls disruptive creators.?Out of this disruption was born a new reality that differs, fundamentally, from the status three decades before. Inshallah, my “biographical time” was well spent!

3. What is your present position in the agave spirits industry?

Several disruptive innovators inspired my admiration for their audacity and foresight:

- Sydney Frank, who created the world’s first premium “Western” vodka, Grey Goose, ‘Made in France,’ not east of the Old Iron Curtain.

- Robert Mondavi, who created the superlative, first California-made “Bordeaux,” Opus One.

- Shin Jiro Torii, who created in Japan, not Scotland, what for most is today the world’s finest Single Malt, Yamazaki.

- And, not to be overlooked, earlier still there was Christopher Columbus, and his eponymous Columbian Exchange, without whom and which neither Opus One nor Auscal would exist.

Beyond my status as founding co-enabler for today’s “100% Agave” industry platform, over the last decade, my role in the agave spirits industry has grown to help free the agave spirits world from geopolitical constraints. I’ve always been a globalist, not a nationalist, because the 18th century concept of nationalism is anachronistic now that we are all so manifestly denizens of one world. Rather, I am Epicurean, for whom quality, for all things one puts into one’s stomach, always takes precedence over the maker’s race, passport, or skin color.

4. What made you choose the Agave Spirits industry?

I never “chose” the agave industry. And the industry never chose me by birth. It was all happenstance. My filial destiny was to be a dentist in Austria, and by professional training, I was to become a lederhosed banker in safe and boring Switzerland. Born in chilly mountains to a father culturally in goose-step with Teutonic Order, from childhood I yearned to live under the radiant sun and to kick about the scorching desert in cowboy boots rather than trudge in snowshoes.

So, while millions of Mexicans left the “destructive” sun, the social injustice, racial discrimination, violence, and chaos behind when they moved to the US, my own visions led me, contraflow, to worship the Sun God, overlooking the sacrifices that might entail. My only assets were a hundred-thousand-dollar cheque in my shorts and a suitcase in my old, decrepit car, although also in my baggage was a childhood studying Latin, so learning Spanish was easy. However, a deep understanding of Mexican culture proved impossible since an overdose of Karl May novels, John Wayne movies and Lucky Luke cartoons had misled my childhood soul. Since my childhood, I had pored over May’s books with the assiduity of a Carmelite monk learning the Bible, lifting my eyes on occasion to the window at my reality of chilly, grey skies and snow. In retrospect, I deeply underestimated the benefits that boring developed countries’ law and order bestow by guaranteeing their residents’ safety.

So, in 1990, I ended up in Mexico, instead of, let’s say, the Argentinian Pampa, with guidance from another part of the pantheon. Venus began seducing me towards Mexico during my adolescent days in Europe, as I stumbled frequently into the arms of enchanting Mexican senoritas. So, in culmination, aged twenty-four, I awoke one day in bed in sunny Mexico where I had identified the lethargic tequila industry as a fertile field for sowing for a kid imbued with creativity, bravado, cultural ignorance, Teutonic work discipline, and a Germanic sense of quality awareness.

Why Jalisco and not Chiapas depended on the powers of persuasion of the Tapatias, and not tequila! Today, I rationalize, I was foredoomed to kiss and ride the Tequila Snake in the sunny Wild West of Jalisco. Self-deluded, I thought back then that the serpent would metamorphose one day into a domesticated Jolly Jumper by hard work. However, cultures have a vicious way of reshaping all human endeavors. Porfidio eventually lost its intimate relationship with the tequila serpent when an Almighty Eagle swooped out of NAFTA in 1994 and took it to a corral for the exclusive milking by the tequila cartel.

In fact, had I deciphered the glyphs, the future was all written on the Mexican flag with its eagle and snake. Porfidio, with Patron and El Tesoro, had voluntarily put “100% Agave” as “100% Agave Tequila” on the US map. Porfidio tequila then matured into “Porfidio, the 100% Blue Agave Spirit from Jalisco,” or Super-Jalisco. Crowley read the flag iconography better and sagaciously sold out to Seagram's (and later Bacardi), while Denton sold to Jim Beam, so they avoided the litigious bloodbath over who milked the IP rights to the word “tequila.” In 2020, after precisely thirty years of altercations from the overweening tequila cartel, the US government finally got the point and legislated “agave spirits” into existence as a category, bringing peace to our agavacious paradise, and legal certitude for global and Mexican non-D.O. agave distillers.?

In retrospect, I was, unfortunately, just a pretend cowboy lost in Mexico who could not stand the sight of the sight of blood, which is why I never became a dental surgeon. Neither did I have any prior training as a butcher, which would have been even better preparation. So, when hired killers gunned down my first associate Jesus Lopez Roman, and decapitated my biggest Mexican client with a machete, along with multiple kidnappings and the mind-boggling insanity of political blackmail by Mexico’s first democratically elected government, Vicente Fox & Co. Inc., I had to concede that the Wild West of Jalisco and the jungles of the Darien Gap were more challenging than the romantic literary scenes depicted by Karl May. While the Wild West had been thrilling and fun for me in my twenties, when I turned 30, I got over my adrenaline addiction after falling in love with my children and caring for their lives. Like other gringos who have done business in Mexico, I learned the benefits of a boring life as an absentee alembic-lord, and also, later, the protection that ensued from diversifying one’s agave spirits globally. So I can claim to have created not one but two unique products for consumer enjoyment: Porfidio and a fun Wild West telenovela!

In 1990, my love for the Wild West made me sacrifice my life’s sweat and tears for Mayahuel, my Agave goddess, and I maintained my faith in Her even after falling out of love with the Wild West. Today, I assert that a mature gourmet audience can disambiguate agave spirits from the Sierra and still appear sexy, even without the spice of imagination that seduced generations of young kids into drinking tequila and now mezcal.

Rather, I insist on agave’s intrinsic botanic superiority for alcohol making over other bases. It is a healthy, vegan, inulin-based vegetable that, when cultivated responsibly, can also offer sensible ecological solutions for the planet, such as water conservation and reforestation, and, if the makers care, cultivation without pesticides. Whatever happens to fashion trends, I genuinely trust that the agave, under its own title, will always convince consumers of its superiority over barley, corn, rice and sugarcane.

5. How has the industry changed since you’ve become involved in it?

How can I count the ways? Spirits marketing always echoes the “truisms” of the zeitgeist. Like philosophical breakthroughs, new marketing concepts stand on the shoulders of giant salespersons, so progress owes more to incremental fine-tuning, complementary to earlier inspirations, or is contingent on a decisive rejection of the old. In this evolution, the primary determining factor is economic. The liquor industry evolves along two interlinked paths: a country’s per capita GNP against its GINI co-efficient: The more wealth there is in a country, and the more unfairly distributed it is, then the higher the sales of expensive luxury spirits. So, the US and China are apex luxury spirits markets, but Sweden is not. Before the 90s, cheap liquor flooded the US and mixtos were a part of that equation, not an exception. Consumers did not stick with them back then out of gullibility, but because the low prices matched their lower incomes. Then came Reaganomics, the big game-changer that cut taxes for the big earners, plus the moral legitimization of widespread personal credit and spending for low earners. So, the zeitgeist called for better drinks: “Je suis arrivé!” Porfidio announced.

Before Reaganomics, at $19.99 retail, Cuervo 1800 was the most expensive tequila. In 1990, Porfidio A?ejo came, saw the market and conquered at $85. It discomfited Mr. 1800, because Mr. Porfidio’s silliness wasn’t actually silly at all. Over the years, as disposable income rose, so did luxury spirits sales, and with it, Porfidio’s, which like other luxury spirits, kicked ass in post-Communist Russia, the US, Japan, the Emirates, and in the City of London. ?

Looking back to Mexico, in the 90s, agave spirits, 100% or not, were only for “the peasants,” or La Raza, as white Mexicans disparagingly called them. Porfidio copied Corona’s example and changed that forever by invoking the magic powers of Malinchismo. Once Porfidio achieved prestige in the US, that made Porfidio, and any pure agave tequila in general, fit for upper class consumption back in Mexico. Through the forces of Malinchismo, and not much else, Porfidio became the leading 100% Agave A?ejo brand in Mexico itself in the 90s. A sociology professor has opined that “Corona [the beer] and Porfidio contributed to the social and racial democratization of Mexico.” I think that there is some deep historic truth in these wise words, and I humbly accept the credit.

When the 2008 Recession halted the age of exuberance, sales of prestige spirits like Porfidio dropped 90% overnight, in particular in London and New York, when the bankers lined up for bailout checks, and the $19.99 brands flourished again, with Tito’s as the new star. The recessions spawned a new zeitgeist. Thus, the unkempt “micro-agave-distillers” flocked en masse down from the Sierra to make tequila, like their artisan whiskey brethren from Colorado and Oregon. They did not sell objective quality, but, rather, a metaphysical ideal of “authenticity,” made by suffering people for sympathizers, aiming for social solidarity. Someone had to be blamed for their recession-induced hardship, and the large impersonal corporations fit the frame. Consumers no longer cared whether the liquor was actually flavorful, or conveyed visual beauty, or whether its price tag conveyed prestige and social cachet. Instead, spirits marketers now tapped consumers’ distaste for anything that smacked of "ugly white," or corporate. This zeitgeist created a trend for the large distillers to nurture and market faux-small-batch, “craft” agave spirits, catapulting their local distillers down in Mexico into faked stardom, while camouflaging the gringo bosses and the German and Danish liquor technologists behind them, who developed the yeasts and fine-tuned the equipment.

The fashion trend then evolved from the artisanal, unshaven, sun-burnt Euro-Hispanic cowboys in boots to solidarity purchases from the unshod but authentic ethnic minorities of the Del Maguey’s narrative. Thus was born a linguistic turn from the now tarnished corporate “tequila” towards the newly hip “mezcal,” that etymologically and analytically was in fact the same spirit. In taste, this zeitgeist laterally transmuted taste buds, as mezcal’s smoke-contamination with a soup?on of extra methanol and plasticizers [temporarily] mutated from “pungent” to “exquisite.” Mezcal was now politically ultra-correct, hence the perceived taste. This move from a zeitgeist into a taste preference would temporarily alter liquor industry fundamentals when some major tequila corporations began incorporating smoke aromas into their tequilas to stay trendy. Unhygienic tahonas and donkey excreta became in name, even when actually absent, the hottest marketing thing, particularly at mega factories. Jacques Rousseau had long blazed the trail for this Primitivism.

After the recession was over and the expediently elevated paisano heroes forgotten, guru worship reattached itself to consumers like a leech, and a new zeitgeist arose once again. I call it the "Age of Nietzsche". Like übermenschen, the stars descended from Hollywood Heaven to “share” the glory of the agave, even if they were too savvy to risk kidnapping by not actually visiting their agave fields in Mexico. Casa Amigos was the trendsetter, and many others followed. The new sales script pared down on packaging as the budget was diverted to bribing up the stars. ?

Then, in 2022, the zeitgeist marginally adjusted again, to Planet Red, with the Sacred Initiative, called into life by another gringo superstar with a “politically inappropriate” surname from Sussex, Jenner, whose Tequila 818 was promptly smeared in a nasty press campaign for “cultural appropriation” by the fearful white competition because she was (also) white, and hence somehow politically deemed unable to claim that a tequila purchase was all about elevating a Mexican peasant out of poverty. I wonder whether the next episode in this ongoing reality show will be about Australian aborigines, Incas, extraterrestrials, or zombies who make agave spirits; or if there might arise one day in the future a retro-zeitgeist that recalibrates the American narrative to refocus on "great, good or bad-tasting." ?

Today, in 2022, 100% Agave brands of different zeitgeist eras are on sale at most US retailers. Despite Darwin’s dictates, the newer brands have not driven the older into extinction. Even Cuervo Gold and Pepe Lopez, the survivors of the mixtos from the 80s, linger for the economically disadvantaged. It’s called democracy. Sure, over the years, 1942 gained market share at the expense of Don Julio, which lost market share to CasaAmigos, but then, who cares when the same company owns all three brands? So, in reality, nothing has changed.

Yet, over the last three decades, I have witnessed an indexable push towards industry consolidation amongst brand owners, distributors, and retailers, but this is characteristic of all inter-war cycles in history, and so part of the natural cycle.

6. What do you see as the future of the agave spirits industry?

Any liquor category, like people, has its own karma from birth. That implies inevitability, yet good deeds count more for a favorable rebirth. The heavy karma that has afflicted the agave spirits industry over the decades derived from the systematic abuse of language for economic advantage by powerful cliques. For example, vodka has always been vodka, and if it comes from Russia, it’s called “Russian Vodka,” and from France, it’s “French Vodka.” The same algorithm applies to whisky and gin. These definitions are easily comprehensible, and part of the reason whisky, vodka and gin dominate the global stage.

However, unleashing lawyers on agave spirits causes conceptual chaos, the “Game of Names.” In plain English, these rows are semantic quibbles not inherent in the material itself. The conquistadores started the chaos by failing to reach a consensus on the name of the “new” plant that they discovered in the Americas. Caribbean people called it “maguey,” which was picked up by Spanish immigrants on the way to the mainland where indigenous people knew it as “mezcal,” while Iberian immigrants further south called it “penca.” The European botanists then re-named it as “agave.” The chaotic nomenclature attached itself as heavy karma to the birth of the distilled spirit from this “new” plant.

The Conquistadors in North America settled the matter by calling agave spirits “[vino de] mezcal,” or “alcohol from the mezcal plant.” Hence, the lawyers negotiated a sense of order by playing favors with the natives, naming agave spirits from Oaxaca as in “(vino de) mezcal de Oaxaca,” and from the County of Tequila as “(vino de) mezcal de Tequila.” There was a sense of easily understood logic to that. Yet further south, colonial lawyers disagreed with their brethren in North America and schismatically named their agave spirits “Cocuy” and “Miske.” Then, a few centuries later, the Mexican Revolution messed things up again. While the disenfranchised natives fought the Euro-Hispanic elite during the Revolution, their own post-revolutionary lawyers, once bribed, reneged on them, and renamed mezcal from “Tequilalandia” as “Tequila,” even when it came from as far away as politically influential Tamaulipas, 1,000 miles away from the namesake town. So the motivation was racist, not terroir driven. It was a form of economic apartheid, naming agave spirits from the indigenous regions as “mezcal,” but those made by the Spanish ex-conquistadores in Jalisco and Tamaulipas as “Tequila.” The lawyers, still not content, then also culturally appropriated the plant’s name, segregating it from the peasantry, by imposing the botanical Latin “agave” on labels, instead of the vernacular maguey or mezcal. Going further, in 1994, the lawyers then insisted that consumers should no longer refer to agave spirits as mezcal but as destilado de agave, unless made in Oaxaca and environs. Twenty-odd years later, the lobbyist lawyers in Mexico, now disenchanted with destilado de agave term, renamed the category as aguardiente de agave, or “agave firewater,” to support the powerful tequila industry dons’ smear campaign.

Then, neither could the gringo lawyers resist meddling. First, in 1994, they ruled the English term “agave spirits” was illegal, with some sensible reasoning, and baptized them, awkwardly yet technically correctly, as “Spirits distilled from 100% Agave.” But then, in 2020, changing their minds yet again, they renamed them as “agave spirits” which, while easier to pronounce, bore a heavy Google curse in Europe, because in the E.U., the term “agave spirits” would be translated by consumers and Google as Agavenspirituose, and not as what it actually is, Agavenbrand, or potentially could be, an Agavengeist. The legally mandated US labeling couplet of “100% Agave - Agave Spirits” provoked a flabbergasted Oxonian to push for the term “agave distillate” to market the same in the UK in proper English, but with little success.

In the end, however, consumers have their own minds, as in Vox populi vox Dei, when they chose instead to reduce the US binomial to just “100% Agave,” as "100% Agave - Agave Spirits" is indeed a silly tautology. Alas, there is no point in arguing against terms acclaimed by public consensus, but only against autocrats and bureaucrats who impose linguistic barbarism. Yet there was that bitchy karma again as#100%agave cannot be hash-tagged because of the “%” sign, unlike #singlemalt. However, instead of Meta’s coding, let’s hang this one on the lawyers as well. Why? Because both the E.U. and U.S. prohibit the word “pure” for any distilled spirits, the historical reason why “100% Agave” was created as a stand in for “Pure Agave.” For added chaos, US lawyers then ordained that while maguey is indeed a legitimate synonym for agave in the US, the botanical word mezcal is not unless used with add-on word “plant.” The reason was the plant’s name should not induce any “illegitimate” confusion with the drink “Mezcal.” That, of course, takes the reader into the slippery terrain of whether the egg or the chicken came first. Then, Porfidio’s lawyers contributed to the mix with our name for our 100% Blue Agave tequila from Jalisco as Super-Jalisco instead of “Tequila?.” But please blame them, not me.

Once consumers concluded Babel was just babbling, the lawyers resorted to ad hoc emergency rulings for each occurrence, inventing cute stories to justify, retroactively, the legal differences between the different names for one and the same spirit. They transplanted concepts such as “single varietal” and “terroir” from the wine world to the agave universe, citing Cognac and Sherry. Neither of them is single varietal, as in “100% Palomino,” yet both are manifestly contingent on terroir as by Google maps, unlike the Mexican kaleidoscopes. The lawyers hence invoked French and Spanish models by misleadingly misinterpreting them. The industry would have been better following the one true and trusted God, Whisky Almighty, to maximize the category potential. So, the future of the “agave spirits - category proper, whatever name,” is, like one of Facebook’s relationship status, or “it’s complicated.”

This does not augur well for 100% Agave category participants in aggregate, competing globally against whisky, baijiu, shochu, vodka and gin - and not just in the US. Yet, we thank the architects of the German and Chinese languages for their linguistic sanity in naming “100% Agave - Agave Spirits,” respectively, as #agavenbrand and #龙舌兰酒#.

Despite this diverting narrative, I still see a brilliant future ahead for agave spirits, because agave spirits are statistically still only a regional success story, just like baijiu in Greater China, since 90% of pure agave spirits are still consumed on the American Continent, North and South combined. Also, the public’s awareness of the 100% Agave category is no older than 30 years, a curate time of only a split second in history. Hence, I statistically insist that the global expansion potential for agave spirits is still limitless.

7. Is there anything you’d like to say to people who may contemplate entering and working in the agave spirits industry in some role?

When I started out in the 90s, the 100% Agave terroir was still an immaculate virgin and, hence, filled with unlimited, imaginary potential in the US. Back then, there was no global demand for “100% Agave”, and so the market demand had to be conjured into existence from ground zero.

Today, three decades later, we, the three pioneers, did the groundwork, and so the field for 100% Agave distillates is already there for any new brand to enter. A new brand only demands product differentiation in that market. Often, this simply needs a larger marketing budget than one’s price-segment competitors rather than heroic creative effort.

Kotler, academia’s marketing guru, defined marketing as “identifying existing consumers’ needs and satisfying them.” However, as a serial creator myself, I disagree, because I define true marketing as the creating of products for which there is no demand at the time of conception! For example, no one knew they needed an iPad before it came into being. And no one felt they would ever want Porfidio A?ejo from third-world Mexico, while politely savoring their prestigious Scottish Single Malts on the porch. However, many did know that they would want a Porfidio Cactus Bottle to decorate their home, and so the love for a new spirits category was born through the back door.

So, creation is visionary, always dosed with an element of compulsiveness and madness. Creators create for the sake of creation, not to satisfy others. Van Gogh did not paint his masterpieces to sell them for millions, but to auto-medicate. Ayn Rand wrote lengthy books to define the verbal antagonism between the words “creator” and “second-hander.” She defines second-handers as faux-creators who exploit a current demand (created by the real creators), which brings us back to Professor Kotler.

So, to answer the question, for any newcomer, the choice is between being a second-hander with yet another harmonized 100% Agave brand under the Tequila? Inc. franchise with a very substantial market-entry-toll, known as “marketing funds," or come up with a truly earthshaking innovation. Looking at the US zeitgeist of the day, for the U.S., a collaboration with a celebrity partner looks like the most effective way to mine human imbecility. Alas, in a classic fairy tale of the creation of a ‘100% Agave Supernova’, liquid quality, unique packaging, market-channel-bribery funds and celebrity sex appeal would beg to be packaged into one wildly lovable integrated whole. Yet I have never seen such a supernova, so there is a genuine opportunity waiting for equity funds.

However, for the young interlopers and disrupters, the Neuen Wilden, those with big brains but small budgets, I advise to shun the over-saturated US and Latin American markets and target the virgin territories out there for pure agave spirits, such as Continental Europe, India or China. To sell agave distillates outside the Americas, it calls for being a true creator, inventing culturally attuned marketing formulae that transcend the American marketing idiosyncrasies of exploiting ethnicity, Hollywood movie stars, the Wild West, and the Netflix movie Narcos. It is a formidable challenge, but one that the new generation will eventually rise to. My insider tip would be to focus with agave spirits on the inulin factor, the vegan argument, sustainability, organicness, carbon farming, desert greening, and reforestation. Other than that, there is no need for a sage to foretell that agave agriculture and agave distilling are bound by Destiny, emulating the example of whisky, to go increasingly international, hence opening up new frontiers for agave agriculture and agave spirits production outside and beyond the context of the Mexican Wild West, the new trend.

Thus spake Martin Grassl.