From a Canadian distiller’s tequila to a distillery in Los Altos.

Olmeca is a tequila brand owned by the French drinks group Pernod Ricard and made at the Destilería Colonial de Jalisco in Arandas, a town in the Los Altos highlands of Jalisco, Mexico. The brand did not start in Mexican hands. The Spirits Business wrote in April 2025 that it was created in the 1960s by Seagram, the Canadian distiller, and English Wikipedia, citing the brand’s own terms and conditions, gives its introduction as 1967. The magazine adds that under Seagram the brand was somewhat neglected.

The person most closely tied to the modern brand came to it by a long route. In the same 2025 interview, The Spirits Business profiled Jesús Hernández, master distiller for Pernod Ricard’s tequila business, whose career spans more than four decades. He joined Seagram at a small facility in California, the magazine says, starting in accounting and moving into operations and quality assurance over 13 years. When that site closed in the early 1990s, its work moved to Carson, in Los Angeles.

Carson is where the distillery story begins. According to the magazine, Seagram was distributing Patrón there in the early 1990s, and demand ran ahead of supply, which led to the idea of a distillery of Seagram’s own in Mexico — one that could also bring Olmeca, the tequila brand Seagram already owned, in house. In 1994 Hernández was asked to join the project. The team chose the Los Altos highlands over the valley around the town of Tequila, and the distillery was completed in 1997, built to make tequila for Patrón. Within a few months, the magazine says, Patrón withdrew from the distribution arrangement.

Ownership changed again at the turn of the century. In 2001 Seagram sold its wine and spirits business to Pernod Ricard and Diageo, and the tequila side went to Pernod Ricard, The Spirits Business reported, which is how Olmeca came to sit in the same portfolio it occupies today.

An Olmec head, orange-peel glass and a bottle redrawn twice.

The name and the imagery look back to the Olmec civilisation of ancient Mexico — olmeca is the Spanish word — and the brand’s best-known emblem is a carved Olmec head. The Spirits Business described the brand’s 2022 bottle as drawing on Olmec civilisation.

The first of those was documented in May 2014, when Food Ingredients First reported new packaging for the Olmeca range by the branding consultancy Coley Porter Bell. The agency kept the bottle’s distinctive square shape and brought back an orange-peel glass texture, now in a hammered style. The Olmec head, illustrated by Chris Mitchell, was given more stature, and the identity was redrawn with a simpler, more contemporary logo. New Mexican-style hieroglyphs showed agave plants, the mountains of Los Altos and the tahona, the stone wheel used to crush cooked agave; a separate tahona illustration served as a seal of quality, and an agave watermark and Hernández’s signature joined the label. Stuart Humm, the agency’s creative director, said the team wanted to keep the brand’s distinctive visual language rather than strip it back to something minimal.

The second redesign arrived in February 2022. The Spirits Business reported that Pernod Ricard had redrawn the bottle with consumers aged 18 to 28 in mind, using at least 20 per cent recycled glass. The new bottle has a geometric cut and a longer neck for easier pouring, with glyph-style engravings that include two toasting shots and a nod to blue agave, and a two-piece label: a round Olmeca logo above a rectangular panel of product information. Damien Batteux, Olmeca’s global marketing manager at Pernod Ricard, told the magazine it was the first modern makeover of the bottle in almost 18 years. The new design rolled out across all markets that month, covering Silver, Gold, Reposado and Añejo, along with a Dark Chocolate variant.

Olmeca’s typography also has its own entry on this site: see what font Olmeca uses.

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.

Tezón, Altos and the tahona.

Under Pernod Ricard, the brand widened into 100 per cent agave tequila. The Spirits Business reported in 2025 that a Tezón brand was created in 2003 as a 100 per cent agave, 100 per cent tahona tequila, and that Olmeca Tezón followed in 2004, which the magazine says reintroduced 100 per cent agave tequila to a global audience. The tahona at Arandas is made of tezontle, a volcanic stone, English Wikipedia says.

The next line came from the bar. The magazine says Hernández met the bartenders Dre Masso and Henry Besant on a trip to Mexico around 2008, and that the tequila they developed together took nearly two years to make; Time Out México reported in 2015 that Olmeca Altos launched in 2009 as a collaboration between the two bartenders, Hernández and Pernod Ricard, conceived as a tequila for cocktails. It is made from blue Weber agave grown in the Altos de Jalisco, at the same Arandas distillery. By 2023 trade titles were calling the line simply Altos Tequila: Drinks International reported that October that Altos had launched a range of ready-to-drink margaritas.

Hernández’s work has been recognised by the trade. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award at The Spirits Business Awards 2024, the magazine reported, and the 2014 packaging carried his signature on the label, which Food Ingredients First said added reassurance.

Searching for the brand needs a little care: olmeca is simply the Spanish word for Olmec, so museum and archaeology pages about the ancient civilisation sit alongside the tequila in results.

For a design guide, Olmeca shows how a brand can borrow its imagery from ancient Mexico — a carved head, glyph-like engravings, a textured glass — and keep it through two full redesigns under a new owner. Compare Patrón, the tequila the Arandas distillery was first built to make, and Havana Club, the Cuban rum sold internationally with Pernod Ricard. For this guide we use agave green, orange peel and basalt grey with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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