A small distillery the family kept when it sold the rest.

Fortaleza is a young brand with an old surname. The company says it launched Tequila Fortaleza in 2005, but it traces its history to Don Cenobio Sauza, who founded his first distillery, La Perseverancia, in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, in 1873. The house he built became Sauza, one of the best-known names in tequila; the company’s history says his son Eladio took over in 1909 and that Eladio’s son, Francisco Javier, known as Don Javier, ran the business from 1946.

Don Javier is the link to Fortaleza. According to the company, he bought land on the highest point of the town of Tequila to build a hacienda, and on that land stood a small distillery that he named La Fortaleza — the word means fortress, or strength. It had a small brick oven, a pit for a tahona, a few wooden fermentation vats and two small copper pot stills, and the family made tequila there until 1968, when, the company says, it was judged not efficient enough and was turned into a museum showing how tequila used to be made. Tales of the Cocktail described it in 2015 as the smallest of Don Javier’s three distilleries, about five minutes from Casa Sauza.

In 1976 Don Javier sold the family business, the company and the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation both say, but the family kept the hacienda and the old distillery. The Sauza brand went on under other owners; today it belongs to Suntory Global Spirits.

The return came through Don Javier’s grandson, Guillermo Erickson Sauza, the son of Doña Sylvia. The company says that in 1999 he began getting the old distillery running again, and that after several years of renovation Destilería La Fortaleza was making tequila the way it had been made a century earlier.

Los Abuelos, then Fortaleza.

The brand did not start under the name it carries now. Distiller magazine reported in 2025 that Guillermo Sauza first launched it in Mexico in 2002 as Tequila Los Abuelos, “the grandfathers,” in homage to the family; VinePair dates the Los Abuelos name to 2000 and the opening of the restored distillery to 2005. A trademark dispute kept the name out of the United States — VinePair reported in 2021 that the conflict was with Ron Abuelo rum — so for export the tequila took the name of the distillery, Fortaleza. The company’s own history still signs off “Viva Los Abuelos!! Viva Fortaleza!!”

Distiller says Fortaleza first reached the United States in 2006, and that the distributor Wine Warehouse picked it up in 2008 for distribution from San Diego, after which it built its following city by city, beginning in California.

The process is the brand’s main message, and the company describes it step by step. Agave from the Tequila Valley is grown for at least eight years, then cooked by steam for 36 hours in an old stone oven and left to cool for another day. It is crushed entirely by a tahona, a round volcanic stone of about two tonnes, pulled today by an electric tractor that, the company says, took over from a mule. Fermentation runs for about four days in open-air wooden tanks with a yeast the company says has been in the family for generations, and the tequila is distilled twice in copper pot stills to around 46 percent, close to bottling strength. Reposado rests in used American oak for seven months and añejo for two years.

The bottle carries the same message. The company says its bottles are hand-blown in Jalisco, so that each one is slightly different; the Tales of the Cocktail Foundation reported that they are blown in Tonalá, an artisan town outside Guadalajara, and topped with agave-shaped stoppers moulded and painted by hand. Bottling, Distiller reported, is done on a small Swiss machine from 1938 inside the distillery.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all craft whiskey, gin and tequila names: Tequila Ocho, Fortaleza, High West, Westland, Balcones, St. George Spirits and Empress 1908. Craft spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small distilleries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a local bottle shop to a bar list far from home.

A craft spirits brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family distillery that has chosen not to grow quickly.

Fortaleza is still a family business. Distiller described it in February 2025 as family-run, and quoted Guillermo Sauza calling himself a caretaker of the property for future generations; he told the magazine that his granddaughters are the seventh generation of the family’s tequila line. The Tales of the Cocktail Foundation reported in 2015 that he preferred to stop adding new territories rather than change the way the tequila is made, since the old equipment sets the pace.

The distillery itself is part of the brand. It stands on a cobblestone street in the town of Tequila, and the company takes visitors by appointment; VinePair noted in 2021 that tours are booked ahead. The Tales of the Cocktail Foundation wrote that the distillery’s water comes from a deep well near the extinct Volcán de Tequila. The family history also claims a place for Don Javier in the story of tequila’s legal protection: the company says he led the group of producers that applied for an appellation of origin in 1973, and that the Denomination of Origin for tequila was recognised in 1996.

The name needs care online. Fortaleza is also the capital of the Brazilian state of Ceará, and a football club there shares it; the tequila’s own site is tequilafortaleza.com. Our separate typography note on the Fortaleza tequila font looks at the lettering on the label.

For a design guide, Fortaleza shows how a brand can make its process the identity — a stone wheel, a hand-blown bottle and a hand-painted agave stopper — and let a famous family name sit quietly in the background. Compare Sauza, the 1873 house the family sold in 1976, and Tequila Ocho, the single-estate tequila from Arandas. For this guide we use agave green, adobe and hand-blown glass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Fortaleza’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.