A highland distillery, a first brand and a family’s gift.

Don Julio is named after a real distiller. English Wikipedia says Don Julio González-Frausto Estrada began distilling tequila in 1942 in the highland town of Atotonilco El Alto, Jalisco, at a distillery he named La Primavera, “the Springtime.” His first brand did not carry his name: it was Tres Magueyes, and English Wikipedia describes it as the start of the path that would later become Tequila Don Julio.

The Don Julio name came from his family. English Wikipedia says that in 1985, for his 60th birthday, his sons created a tequila in his name, and that as word of its quality spread a company was formally set up to take it into business. The same article notes that Marco Cedano returned to Don Julio as an engineer in 1983 and later served as its master distiller.

Outside investors arrived at the end of the century. The now-defunct Seagram Company invested in Tequila Don Julio, S.A. de C.V. in 1999, English Wikipedia says. In 2003, the article continues, Diageo formed a joint venture with Casa Cuervo, the company behind José Cuervo, selling it a 50 percent stake in the brand; trade reports in 2014 described the two companies as partners in Don Julio from that year, with the Cuervo side controlled by the Beckmann family.

Production has stayed in the town where it began. English Wikipedia says the tequila is made at the company’s facility in the Colonia El Chichimeco district of Atotonilco El Alto, from agave grown in the highlands around the town on the family estate.

A short bottle for the table, a tall one for 1942.

Don Julio’s design signature is the height of its bottle. Tasting Table reported in December 2023 that González turned away from the tall, plain bottles then common and chose short, square bottles meant to stand on the table, so that guests could see one another across it; the magazine says the idea made its debut at his 60th birthday party. VinePair described the core bottles in 2022 as “short and squat” and said Don Julio chose them so they could be passed easily around the table. Most of the range has stayed compact since, Tasting Table noted.

The exception is the brand’s anniversary bottle. Don Julio 1942, an añejo named for the year González began making tequila, was launched in 2002 to mark sixty years since that start, Difford’s Guide says; the Mexican newspaper Mural marked the same anniversary that December with a feature on sixty years of Don Julio’s tequila-making. Its bottle goes the other way from the core range. VinePair described it in 2022 as extremely thin and about 17.5 inches tall, made of hand-blown Mexican glass and shaped as an homage to the long, gently inward-curving leaf of the agave. Difford’s Guide says the present bottle and gift box date from 2010, and that the original was squatter, in lighter and greener glass, with a black-and-white photograph of Don Julio on a label shaped like an agave leaf. Tasting Table observed that the slender shape can be taken for a dessert-wine bottle by people who do not know it.

The rest of the range is arranged by age. English Wikipedia lists Blanco, Reposado and Añejo as the core, with 70, an añejo claro, 1942 and Real, an extra añejo, above them, and says Real won double gold medals at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in 2008 and 2011.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all tequila and whisky names: Sauza, Don Julio, Olmeca, El Jimador, Herradura, Espolòn and Canadian Club. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses 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 corner shop to a bar list.

A 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 tequila or whisky 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 tequila for an Irish whiskey, and a single owner.

The last step in Don Julio’s ownership came through a swap. In November 2014 Diageo agreed to take full control of the brand from Casa Cuervo and, in exchange, to sell Bushmills, the Northern Irish whiskey, to the Cuervo group, the Irish Independent, The Scotsman and City A.M. reported; the agreement also ended Cuervo’s arrangement to produce and distribute Diageo’s Smirnoff in Mexico. Diageo’s annual report for the 2015 financial year records that on 27 February 2015 it completed the purchase of the half of Don Julio it did not already own, together with the Mexican distribution business, and its report for the following year records the sale of The Old Bushmills Distillery Company to the Cuervo group. Since then Don Julio has been wholly owned by Diageo.

The anniversaries have become part of the brand’s vocabulary. The 1942 bottle takes its name from the founding year, and English Wikipedia lists Don Julio 70 among the expressions, a name that, the brand says, honoured the 70th anniversary in 2012.

The name needs a little care online. “Don Julio” is a common Spanish honorific and first name, used by many unrelated businesses; the tequila’s own site is donjulio.com.

For a design guide, Don Julio shows how the height of a bottle can carry a brand: a short, square bottle made for the table defines the range, and a tall, slender one sets the anniversary añejo apart. Compare Bushmills, the whiskey that changed hands in the 2014 swap, and Patrón, another tequila from the Jalisco Highlands. For this guide we use aged amber, agave sage and bottle black with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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