As an M.B.A. student at the University of Texas at Austin, a former marine pilot named Brent Looby befriended two other veterans, Judson Kauffman and Ryan Campbell. When the men were tasked with coming up with a business plan and a pitch deck to win over investors for a class project, “we were focussed on solving the world’s problems, like grad students do,” Looby told me. “Then Judson was, like, ‘Could we at least do something fun?’ ” They came up with the idea of opening a Texas-based distillery. “Texas is a global brand in and of itself,” Looby said. “You go around the world, you tell people you’re from Texas, and it automatically sets you in a different class of people. We knew we wanted to leverage that.”
Looby had his heart set on making “the coolest, best bourbon in the world.” But, when a friend returned from Puerto Vallarta raving about raicilla, a regional Mexican spirit made from several species of agave, the three men were inspired to change their direction. “We were looking at all the trend lines. Premium spirits are going up. Agave spirits are way outpacing everybody. And it’s good if you have an authentic backstory, because authenticity is a big thing,” Looby said. “If we can touch all three, we’d be onto something.” After more research, they settled on sotol, which is made from dasylirion, a desert succulent that, when distilled, produces an earthy spirit that’s less smoky than many mezcals but more flavorful than most tequilas. To Looby, the idea was a no-brainer: “We thought, Why isn’t anybody doing this?”
Converting the sotol plant into a palatable liquor proved more challenging than expected. “We’re under the cover of dusk, jumping over people’s fences off the highway and ripping plants out of the ground to teach ourselves how to do this. The first few goes—oh, my God, they were just so amazingly foul,” Looby said. “There’s no YouTube videos on how to do this.” In 2017, the men began selling Desert Door Texas Sotol. Although sotol remains relatively obscure, it’s starting to gain traction. “You have big brands like Pernod Ricard being, like,‘This could be the next sleeping monster. I gotta get in on that,’ ” Victor Ibarra, a partner in the Mexican company Sotol Oro de Coyame, said. Last year, sotol attained a key milestone for any liquor trying to gain a foothold in the international marketplace: the launch of the first celebrity brand, Lenny Kravitz’s Nocheluna. “There’s enough tequilas and gins and vodkas and things, but what intrigued me about this was that no one knows about it,” Kravitz told Rolling Stone. “I wanted to introduce this on a global level.” Looby told me that he found Kravitz’s investment in sotol encouraging: “I think one hundred per cent it’s going to leapfrog mezcal.” (Mexico produced more than eight million litres of certified mezcal in 2021; Ricardo Pico, a promoter of Mexican sotol, estimated that it has yet to reach the million-litre mark.)
In keeping with its market research about the importance of authenticity, Desert Door emphasized the founders’ Texas bona fides. In photographs, the trio wore scuffed boots and leaned against a vintage Ford. “I’m fifth-generation Texan, Judson’s sixth-generation, and Ryan, well, he got here as soon as he could,” Looby said. But the question of heritage eventually came to be a sticking point.
Under Mexican law, a spirit can be labelled “sotol” only if it is produced in the Mexican states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango. (Distillers elsewhere in the country also make a dasylirion spirit; it’s often called cucharilla.) Similarly, liquor distilled from the blue agave plant can be labelled “tequila” only if it comes from certain municipalities within a handful of states. These laws are meant to protect products with distinctive environmental and cultural characteristics; this is why champagne has to come from Champagne and Scotch from Scotland. In practice, the designations aren’t always honored between countries.
In 1994, as part of NAFTA, the U.S. agreed to honor the designations of origins, or D.O.s, for tequila and mezcal. When the trade deal was renegotiated, in 2020, initial drafts included a provision recognizing the D.O. for sotol, as well as two other Mexican spirits, bacanora and charanda. Then John Cornyn, a senator from Texas, spoke up at a Senate Committee on Finance hearing. “For those members of the committee who’ve never consumed sotol, I would recommend it,” he told his colleagues. Cornyn argued that recognizing the D.O. would mean killing a nascent Texas industry; the provision was struck from the final agreement.
Although the legal pathway to make Texas sotol was now open, critics argued that its production amounted to colonialism and cultural appropriation. They pointed out that, although the sotol plant grows on both sides of the border, the tradition of making the spirit is overwhelmingly Mexican. “It’s a matter of identity and culture,” Ricardo Pico said, at a recent panel. “It’s not only the plant being used. It has a tradition. It has a name.” Some of the most fervent criticism has come from Sandro Canovas, an activist from Mexico City now living in Marfa, where a former feed plant by the railroad tracks was recently converted into a sotol distillery. Canovas occasionally stations himself outside the building, passing out fliers to would-be drinkers and decrying Texas sotol through a bullhorn: “Sotol es mexicano! Boycott these culture vultures!” He put up banners on a fence across from the distillery, one of which accuses the Marfa Spirit Co. of “APPROPRIATION & THEFT.” Recently, he has taken to wearing a shirt that reads “Sotol Police.”
Looby conceded that there may be “some merit” in criticisms of Texas sotol. “I just don’t think it’s applicable to us. The plant does grow here, and it’s been here for a long time. And we’re one hundred per cent self-taught from the ground up,” he said. “With that, you have the creative license, the artistic license, clear white space.” Desert Door would rather “focus on the things that connect us more than the things that divide us,” he noted.
A few weeks ago, I met Pico in Chihuahua City, Mexico. Pico is thirty-nine, a compact man with a boyish air and a voice strained from overuse. The state of Chihuahua has been plagued by cartel violence, but its capital has a burgeoning foodie scene, and Pico, a natural-born promoter, was eager for it to gain recognition. (In between our visits to sotol vinatas, or distilleries, he brought me to several places with, he said, “excellent coffee programs.”) Recently, he has taken to wearing a piece of quartz around his neck. “It’s a weird time in my life,” he said. “I’ve never seen this many detractors and haters.” The legitimacy of Texas sotol was, it turned out, just one of the swirling controversies over the rising popularity of the spirit, and Pico was caught in the middle of it all.
Although sotol is now the primary preoccupation of Pico’s life, it was not on his radar until around twelve years ago. At the time, it was largely considered northern Mexico’s version of moonshine, looked down on as a field drink made for and by rural ranchers; when Pico and his friends went out clubbing, they drank Scotch or rum. After college, Pico was hired by Hacienda de Chihuahua, the country’s largest sotol producer, which makes the spirit using industrial processes, and sells it for relatively cheap. “It’s easy to convince someone to buy a twenty-dollar bottle,” he said. As he travelled through the U.S., meeting with liquor distributors and managers of cocktail bars, he witnessed the boom in artisanal mezcal, whose sales increased seven hundred per cent in a decade. Mezcal is a Mexican spirit once reviled as rustic and now in demand for the same reason, and Pico wondered if there was anyone making sotol in a similarly small-scale manner.
In 2016, he stopped at a liquor store in rural Chihuahua and asked about local sotol. The woman behind the counter looked at him warily, then pulled out a bottle. “I took one sip, and it was, like, Wow,” Pico recalled. The woman wouldn’t tell him who’d made it, but agreed to pass his card along. Eventually, Pico managed to connect with more than a dozen sotol distillers throughout Chihuahua, some of whom, such as Eduardo Arrieta, better known as Don Lalo, were carrying on the tradition taught to them by their forefathers. Pico took trips to tiny desert villages and into the foothills of the Sierra Madre, making arrangements with sotoleros to sell their spirits under his brand Clande Sotol, a nod to the spirit’s clandestine history. After a falling out with his original business partner, Pico relaunched the project as Sotoleros.
