A family tequila house in Atotonilco el Alto.

Siete Leguas is a tequila house from Atotonilco el Alto, in Jalisco, a town the company calls the “Vergel de Jalisco” and the heart of its tequila. The company dates itself to 1952 on its own website, and The Oxford Companion to Spirits & Cocktails (2021), in an entry by Misty Kalkofen, credits the founding that year to Don Ignacio González. A March 2005 announcement reported by The Moodie Davitt Report gives his full name as Ignacio González Vargas and says the brand had been sold under its trademark in Mexico since its founding. The glassmaker Saverglass, in a case study on the brand, names his wife, María Amparo De Anda Franco, as co-founder of the house.

The name belongs to a horse. The company says Siete Leguas — “seven leagues” — was the mare of the revolutionary general Francisco “Pancho” Villa, which travelled with him across the country, and the Oxford Companion adds that the phrase refers to the distance a horse could supposedly cover in a day. The same 2005 report says the brand was named after the horse ridden by Villa.

The house is a family business. The Oxford Companion says Don Ignacio’s son Juan Fernando González de Anda runs operations, and the 2005 report named Fernando González de Anda as the company’s managing director. All of its tequila is made under a single producer number, NOM 1120, according to the Oxford Companion.

Two distilleries, one blanco.

Behind that one number are two distilleries. The Oxford Companion describes El Centenario, the original, as the traditional plant, with brick ovens, a tahona — a stone wheel that crushes the cooked agave — drawn by a mule, and fermentation and distillation with the agave fibres left in. La Vencedora, which it says was completed in 1984, uses more modern equipment. The 2005 announcement gave different dates, describing El Centenario as established in 1942 and La Vencedora in 1956, so the plants’ dates differ between sources. It also described a roller mill at one site and the tahona, pulled by mules, at the other. Both sources say the tequila is a blend of spirit from the two distilleries; the Oxford Companion says this is how the blanco is made.

The range follows the familiar tequila classes: a blanco, a reposado and an añejo, aged in American white oak according to the Oxford Companion, which also lists a five-year-old tequila called D’Antaño. In 2005 The Moodie Davitt Report described D’Antaño as about to be released. For the house’s 70th anniversary in 2022 it issued a special blanco; sponsored articles published by Forbes México in October and December 2022 describe it as made with criollo agaves to emulate the first batch of 1952, produced only with tahona-milled agave and bottled at 42% alcohol by volume.

Those sponsored articles also set out the process as the house describes it: blue Weber agave grown wild on hillsides and harvested after about ten years, the leaves cut away by jimadores with a coa; the hearts cooked for three continuous days in small stone ovens; milling with a tahona, a method the house says it has used since 1952; natural fermentation with wild yeasts in open tanks with the agave fibre; and double distillation in small copper stills.

Siete Leguas also has a place in another brand’s history. English Wikipedia’s article on Patrón says the original Patrón tequila was produced at the Siete Leguas distillery, citing Tequila.net. It says the brand rights were bought in 1989 by St. Maarten Spirits, whose owners were John Paul DeJoria and Martin Crowley, and that production moved to a new distillery in 2002, citing Mark Spivak’s book Iconic Spirits (2012).

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 horse engraved in extra-clear glass.

The anniversary also brought a new look. Saverglass says that to mark 70 years in 2022 Siete Leguas began a rebranding that changed its bottles: the shapes of the 1-litre and 3-litre bottles were changed, a 1.75-litre size was added, and the range was brought into one family across six sizes, from 5 centilitres to 3 litres. Saverglass says it handled the glass creation and embossing, and describes the new bottles as a modern, unified shape in extra-clear glass with detailed engravings — a horse, the logo and abstract figures of agave fields — finished with natural wood caps and new labels. Its stated aim was a more premium look that reflects the tequila’s artisanal origins.

The December 2022 Forbes México sponsored article describes the same change from the brand’s side: a new identity that unifies all of its presentations, cleaner and more transparent bottles that let the drinker see the tequila, a natural wood cap, and labels that present the brand’s most distinctive elements in a contemporary style aimed at newer generations. Neither source names a designer or agency for the new identity.

For a design guide, Siete Leguas shows how a family distillery can renew its glass around the emblem that gives it its name, the horse, while keeping its founding date at the centre of the story. Compare Patrón, the brand first made at its distillery, and El Tesoro, another tequila house from Jalisco. For this guide we use agave green, saddle brown and clear-glass tones with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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