With so many new tequila brands coming to market, how do you create one which stands out? That was the question facing former master sommelier and winemaker Richard Betts, when launching Komos Tequila in 2017.
“I don’t think anyone has anything to add to the blanco conversation,” he says. “If you want a good blanco, drink Siete Leguas, or Ocho, or Fortaleza. We wanted to play around with stuff and make interesting expressions.
“We look at how all tequila is made and marketed. And it’s tradition, tradition, tradition. Not all tradition is bad, but plenty of traditions need to be questioned. I didn’t grow up in Tequila, I grew up spending a lot of time in Mexico but I don't have anything to say about the tradition. Luxury tequila is consumed on rooftops in London or on a boat, on a beach, and in nightclubs, there are no mariachi bands, there are no chips and guacamole or hot sauce. If we term this type of living as ‘good living’, wine is part and parcel with that so it makes sense that we can bring the enthusiasm that I have for winemaking to the tequila production and make something different.”
Betts grew up in Tucson, Arizona, spending every weekend across the border in Sonora, Mexico. It was during these formative years that he fell in love with agave spirits, drinking bacanora, a kind of traditional Sonoran mezcal, from refilled plastic bottles. But initially, the drinks industry wasn’t on the cards at all. Betts had initially dreamed of becoming an environmental attorney and began his career at a small environmental firm and clerking for a senator on Capitol Hill.
“I really cared about the environment, and I wanted to make a difference, but I wasn’t having fun and I realised that if I’m not having fun I’m not useful to anybody else, let alone myself. I don’t mean that in a selfish way, I think we all have to love ourselves before we can love another.”
The answer was a pivot to wine. By the early 2000s, Betts was the sommelier at the Little Nell Hotel in Aspen, Colorado, and making wine in four countries on three continents under two wine brands, but his love for agave spirits never disappeared and with that came the urge to learn distillation.
Environmental concerns
“I was drawn first to mezcal because I really liked all the different varieties, being from wine, and I really liked the idea of terroir but the environmental damage and waste was a huge problem for me. Each palenque in each of those communities where we were looking to distil is on a river, when the stills cool down, they take the top off and they shovel the bagasse (solid waste) into the water and they pour the vinasse (liquid waste) into the water too. The vinasse is highly acidic, it's oxygen-starved so it soaks up all the oxygen until no life can live there. Then, the community that drank that water can’t any longer. So, they drink cola, but they’re in the middle of nowhere, and everything has to come in a bottle, usually plastic, and the bottles don’t get recycled, they put them in the landfill and when the landfill is full, set it on fire and fill it up again. It’s an environmental catastrophe.
“When we created our mezcal brand, we created adobe bricks from the waste bagasse and vinasse which we donated for public works – it took about six months to get the recipe right. When I started Komos, I did so with that in mind. We’ve now brought the agave-waste-into-adobe-brick programme to tequila. It’s germinating, Kendall Jenner does it, I’m not sure how we feel about celebrities in tequila, but if she’s going to do that, I think that’s awesome.”
The world of agave spirits has changed rapidly since Betts first set out to create an agave brand. Nowadays the most marketable brands can often contain additives that create an inauthentic tequila profile but Betts believes that all publicity is good for tequila.
“People are learning that tequila tastes like something that it doesn’t taste like, but I’m not discouraged. There’s going to be enough room for everybody to thrive. In wine, we had white Zinfandel in the United States in the late ’70s through the 80s. It was sweet pink wine and it was horrible, but actually a really good thing. It saved all the old Zinfandel vineyards that otherwise would have been ripped up and planted with Cabernet. Now we have all of this great old vine material. But the other thing that it did was it brought people to wine, particularly the Americans who drank Coca-Cola or Pepsi – they were soda drinkers and White Zin was a gateway that brought them to wine. So, it was a wonderful thing.
“These souped-up tequilas aren’t what I want to drink but they do serve a purpose. If it gets people to take their first step into the agave realm, then maybe some of those people take the next step. As long as there’s enough agave for everybody to do their thing, I think tequila is in a good place.”
