Every number in the Tequila Index rests on three pillars. Here is what each one is, what it can and cannot tell you, and how the three are held together.
What drinkers actually report, gathered over time rather than at launch. A bottle that people keep buying and keep rating well is telling you something a single tasting cannot: that it is consistent, that the batch you find on a shelf resembles the batch we opened, and that it survives contact with real life.
This pillar is deliberately slow. A burst of enthusiasm in one season does not move a score, because the point of the pillar is durability, not noise. Reviews are weighed against the panel, never substituted for it, and no review we cannot trace to a real reader counts at all.
Competition results are evidence, not verdicts. They tell you a bottle was submitted, poured for a jury, and judged well on that day. They do not tell you what it costs, whether it contains additives, or whether the expression on the shelf this year is the one that won.
So awards inform a score without setting it. We record what a house has won and say so on the dossier. We do not inflate a number because a medal exists, and we do not discount a bottle whose maker never enters competitions. Plenty of the best tequila in Mexico has never been submitted to anything.
Everything in the glass starts in the ground. Who grew the agave, how long it was left to mature, whether the house controls its own fields or buys on the spot market, and what happens to the plant between harvest and oven: these decide the ceiling of what a distillery can produce.
A house with estate control and patient agave has room to make something exceptional. A house buying immature agave on a hot market does not, however good its distiller is. We track sourcing where it is disclosed, and we say plainly when it is not.
The pillars describe what we weigh. The mechanism has not changed: bottles are bought at retail, poured blind in coded glasses to a panel of five, scored independently, and reduced to a trimmed mean with the highest and lowest discarded. Every bottle returns to the panel at least every 18 months, because production changes. No single palate, and no single pillar, moves a score on its own.
We do not publish a numeric sub-score for each pillar. We would have to invent most of those numbers, and an invented number is worse than no number. When we can measure a pillar honestly at the bottle level, it will appear on the dossier and this page will say when that started.
| Range | Band | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 95 to 100 | Exceptional | A reference bottle. Benchmark for its category. |
| 90 to 94 | Outstanding | Excellent in every dimension, minor quibbles only. |
| 85 to 89 | Excellent | A confident recommendation at its price. |
| 80 to 84 | Recommended | Good, with reservations the review names. |
| Below 80 | Fair | The review explains exactly why. |
Verified Pure marks a bottle whose panel lot is confirmed to contain nothing but agave, water and time: no glycerin, no sweetener, no oak extract, no coloring. It is our own standard. It cannot be bought, sponsored, or applied for, and it is re-checked when a bottle is re-reviewed.
Nobody pays for a score. Nobody can. The Index carries no advertising, accepts no producer money, and treats a $500 decanter exactly like a $25 shelf bottle.