A jungle distillery in Jalisco just earned the first perfect 100-point score for Cazcanes Nuestras Raíces in Wine Enthusiast history. Here’s what makes this additive-free craft tequila different.
A 50-year-old Chevy engine, a jungle spring, and a score no spirit has ever received
In a remote village in Jalisco called La Estancita, there is no stainless steel. No pneumatic presses. No celebrity partner with a social media strategy.
There is Humberto Alvarado, a third-generation distiller, a handmade still, and water drawn from a spring his family chose generations ago. From that setup came Cazcanes Nuestras Raíces, and last month, Wine Enthusiast gave it a perfect 100 points. In more than 46 years and over 25,000 products tasted annually, the publication had never awarded that score to a spirit of any kind.
That’s the number. But the more interesting story is what it took to get there; and what it says about where craft agave is headed.
What an Agave Distillate Actually Is
Most people assume tequila is the end of the Blue Weber agave story. It isn’t. Tequila is a protected designation with strict rules around geography, production method, and certification. An agave distillate predates all of that. It’s what agave spirits were before the appellation existed — made by producers who learned from their parents, not from a regulatory framework.
Nuestras Raíces is made exclusively with Blue Weber agave, natural spring water, and wild yeast. No additives. No shortcuts.
The cooked agave is broken down using a salvaged, 50-year-old Chevy inline-6 engine — not because it’s romantic, but because it’s what Humberto has. The result is something the modern tequila production line can’t replicate: a spirit that carries the actual fingerprint of a place, a family, and a method that nobody engineered for scale.
“Humberto’s methods predate the formal tequila category,”
Jon-Paul Fortunati
Cazcanes Chief Innovation Officer
“You can draw a direct line from his personal craft and techniques to the original way agave spirits were made in Mexico.”
That line is the point.
What a 100 Means — and Doesn’t
Blind tasting scores are imperfect. They collapse complexity into a number, strip context, and ask a small panel to stand in for every possible palate. That said, a 100 from Wine Enthusiast — the first perfect score in the publication’s history for any spirit — is not nothing. It means something specific: in a rigorous, blind evaluation against thousands of other products, this one left nothing on the table.
Bottled at still strength — 47% ABV — Nuestras Raíces opens with herbaceous brightness: fresh lime, cut grass, and grilled vegetables, followed by layers of roasted pepper and almond on the nose. On the palate it’s lush and full-bodied, moving through cooked agave, lemon, and sea salt before landing on a faint sweetness of ripe cantaloupe and green apple. The finish is long and mineral, with cooked agave returning at the end — not fading so much as settling. It’s the kind of finish you think about after you’ve moved on to something else.
“Wine Enthusiast has never before awarded a perfect 100-point score
to a spirit of any kind,”
Jose Santillan.
Cazcanes Co-Founder
“The score belongs to the method, and that’s not going anywhere.”
The Scarcity Problem
The 2025 inaugural release sold out on cazcanes.com in under seven hours. That’s less time than it takes to distill a batch. A limited allocation went to select distributors and may still be findable for those with patience and a good spirits retailer relationship — the kind of shop that actually knows what it carries.
The next release is expected in summer 2026. Wine Enthusiast maintains a standards glossary for its scoring methodology for those who want to understand exactly what a 100-point blind evaluation requires.
Sign up at cazcanes.com to be notified when the next batch is available.
FAQ: Cazcanes Nuestras Raíces
What makes Cazcanes Nuestras Raíces an agave distillate rather than a tequila? Tequila is a protected designation with strict rules governing geography, agave variety, and production methods. Nuestras Raíces is made using a pre-appellation method — Blue Weber agave, natural spring water, and wild yeast, distilled through a handmade still — that predates the formal tequila certification system. It qualifies as an agave distillate, a broader classification that reflects how agave spirits were originally produced in Mexico.
Why did the 2025 release sell out so fast? Nuestras Raíces is a small-batch, annual release made by a single third-generation distiller in a remote Jalisco village using handmade equipment. There is no path to scaling this. When Wine Enthusiast issued the first-ever perfect 100-point score to any spirit in its history, the demand response was immediate — the entire direct-to-consumer inventory cleared in under seven hours.
How is this different from other additive-free tequilas? Most additive-free tequilas are still produced at commercial scale using modern equipment. Nuestras Raíces is produced using a 50-year-old salvaged Chevy engine to break down cooked agave fibers, water from a generationally chosen natural spring, and wild yeast — methods that existed before the formal tequila category was created. The production volume is small enough that Humberto Alvarado can maintain total control over every batch.
If you can find a bottle, buy it. If you can’t, sign up at cazcanes.com for the summer 2026 release and treat it like a restaurant reservation you’re not going to miss. This is the direction serious agave drinking is moving — away from celebrity labels and toward distillers whose names you have to look up, in villages that don’t show up on most maps.
