A family distillery in the town of Tequila.

Arette is made at El Llano, a distillery in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, owned and run by the Orendain family. The company says El Llano was founded in 1900, and in November 2025 the Guadalajara magazine Players of Life marked the distillery’s 125th anniversary, describing it as founded by the Orendain family that year. English Wikipedia says the family began producing tequila in the same building in the early 1900s, that El Llano was rebuilt in 1978, and that it stands in the centre of the town.

The brand itself is younger. Brothers Eduardo and Jaime Orendain established Arette in 1986, according to the company, English Wikipedia and Players of Life. In a December 2025 interview with the magazine, the family traced the idea to the brothers’ grandfather, Don Eduardo Orendain González, and recalled his saying that making tequila is easy, but making a brand takes many years. English Wikipedia says the brothers have run the company since 1976 and describes them as its master distillers.

Accounts of the family line differ in detail. The company speaks of five generations of tequila-making, and its website also calls Eduardo and Jaime the fourth generation, while English Wikipedia calls them the fifth. In 2025 Players of Life named Eduardo Jr. and Alex Orendain as the generation now carrying on the family legacy. A March 2020 visit report by Tess Rose Lampert for Mezcalistas named Jaime and Lalo Orendain as El Llano’s owners.

The family also has a public role in the trade. English Wikipedia describes Eduardo Orendain as a former mayor of the town of Tequila and as president of the Cámara Nacional de la Industria Tequilera, the national tequila industry chamber; in May 2012 the New York newspaper El Diario named Eduardo Orendain Giovannini as the chamber’s president when it presented a book on the history of the tequila industry.

An Olympic horse and two lines of tequila.

The name honours a horse. Arete, spelled with one “t”, was the horse on which Humberto Mariles won the individual show-jumping gold for Mexico at the 1948 London Olympics, according to English Wikipedia’s record of the event; Wikipedia’s article on Mariles adds team jumping gold and a team eventing bronze that year. The company says the brand is “named after Arete,” and English Wikipedia says it was introduced in 1986 to commemorate that Olympic success. A September 2025 article in Drinks Intel, published as branded content, says the extra “t” in Arette honours the two brothers.

The company divides its tequila into two lines. Its Artesanal line — including a Blanco Suave, a Blanco Fuerte and an Añejo Suave — is, it says, cooked for 48 hours in stone and brick ovens, fermented with wild yeast in open-air concrete tanks and double-distilled in copper pot stills. Its Clásico line, a blanco and a reposado, is cooked in autoclaves and fermented in open-air stainless-steel tanks. Lampert’s 2020 visit report describes the same split: brick ovens and concrete for the artisanal tequila, autoclaves and steel for the clásico.

At the top of the range sits Gran Clase, an extra añejo that English Wikipedia says is rested for at least four years. Players of Life reported in November 2025 that the agave is grown on the company’s own land, that it is cooked for 48 hours in masonry ovens and fermented spontaneously in open-air concrete tanks, a practice the magazine dates to 1900, that the aged tequilas rest in American oak ex-bourbon barrels from Kentucky, and that every step through bottling and labelling takes place at El Llano; English Wikipedia says the brand uses only estate-grown agave from fields on the outskirts of Tequila.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all tequilas: El Tesoro, G4, Cascahuín, La Gritona, Siete Leguas, Arette and Mijenta. Tequila is a protected name. English Wikipedia records that it became Mexico’s first appellation of origin in 1974, and that under that appellation the agave may be grown and the spirit made only in Jalisco and in selected municipalities of a few other Mexican states, from blue Weber agave. Within that common frame, the brands here range from family houses to younger labels.

A tequila brand’s identity is often carried less by the liquid than by its label, its bottle and the place it names, because the name on the front and the distillery behind it are not always the same thing. Every bottle carries a NOM number, which English Wikipedia describes as the government-assigned number of the distillery where the tequila was produced, so a single distillery can make tequila for more than one brand. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its tequila is actually distilled.

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

A 125th anniversary rested in the first oven.

For El Llano’s 125th anniversary in 2025 the company prepared a limited release, Arette Aniversario 125: a blanco rested for seven years in glass inside the distillery’s original first cooking oven, which Players of Life reported had been out of use for more than 40 years before it was restored to age special family productions. The Drinks Intel branded article said the edition would be released at the BCB trade show in Berlin in October 2025.

The same branded article says each bottle is filled and labelled at El Llano, the building in the centre of Tequila where the family began.

The interview gave the family’s own summary of that inheritance: history and the past, it said, cannot be bought. English Wikipedia also lists other labels made by the company, among them Paladar, Agave de Oro and El Gran Viejo, which sit alongside Arette and Gran Clase.

For a design guide, Arette shows a family distillery building a brand on a name with a documented story — a 1948 Olympic horse, re-spelled with the brothers’ extra “t”. Compare Fortaleza, another family tequila from the town of Tequila, and Siete Leguas, a Jalisco house also named after a horse. For this guide we use oven brick, Olympic gold and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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