Hispanic Heritage Month Starts Tomorrow (2026): The NOM Number on the Back of Your Tequila, the 1% Nobody Has to Declare — and 8 Agave Bottles Worth Buying
Hispanic Heritage Month runs from September 15 to October 15, and the drinks industry marks it the same way every year: a margarita recipe, a photo of a lime, a list of the same six celebrity tequilas. That is not heritage. That is a seasonal display.
Here is the more useful version. Mexican agave spirits are among the most tightly regulated products on your shelf — more regulated than bourbon, more regulated than most wine — and nearly all of that regulation is printed on the bottle in front of you. There is a number on the back label that tells you which distillery actually made the liquid. There is a legal allowance for additives that nobody has to declare. And there is a production choice, made hundreds of miles away, that decides more about how the bottle tastes than the brand name on the front does.
Learn to read those three things and you will never again buy an agave spirit on the strength of its packaging. That is the guide below — and eight bottles, from $29.99 to $69.99, that reward the reading.
The 8 agave bottles in this guide
1. The NOM number: who actually made this
Turn any bottle of tequila around. Somewhere in the small print you will find "NOM" followed by four digits. That is the Norma Oficial Mexicana registration of the distillery where the spirit was produced — not the brand, the distillery.
This matters more than it sounds. Mexico has well over a thousand registered tequila brands and only a few hundred distilleries making them. Dozens of brands share a single NOM. When you see a new label with a beautiful bottle, a founder's story and a price of $70, the NOM will often tell you it came off the same production line as a $28 bottle sitting two shelves down. The CRT (Consejo Regulador del Tequila) maintains a public register; the number is searchable in about fifteen seconds on a phone.
The inverse is the useful case. A distillery with a long single-family record and a small brand portfolio is telling you something real. El Tesoro Tequila Blanco ($69.99) is made at La Alteña in the Jalisco highlands — NOM 1139 — a distillery founded by Don Felipe Camarena in 1937 and still run by the family, now under master distiller Carlos Camarena. That is not marketing copy you have to take on faith. It is a registration number you can check.
2. The 1% nobody has to declare
Mexican regulation permits tequila to contain up to 1% additives by volume — glycerin for texture, caramel colouring for the look of age, oak extract for the taste of a barrel the liquid never sat in, and sugar-based syrup for sweetness — with no obligation to disclose any of it on the label.
One percent sounds like nothing. In a spirit at 40% ABV, in a category where the entire flavour argument is about the vegetal, peppery, mineral character of cooked agave, it is enormous. Glycerin at that level changes how the spirit coats your mouth. A trace of syrup rounds off exactly the green, brothy edge that distinguishes a highlands blanco from a lowlands one. Oak extract lets a reposado that sat in wood for eight weeks taste like it sat for eight months.
This is why "additive-free" became the most meaningful phrase in agave spirits over the last few years, and why more than a hundred bottlings have now been verified under the Additive-Free Alliance programme. The label claim is not a health argument. It is a transparency argument: the producer is telling you that what is in the bottle is cooked agave, water, yeast and time, and nothing added to imitate any of those.
Tequila Ocho Single Estate Plata Tequila ($57.99) is the clearest illustration in the category. It is the first single-estate, vintage-dated tequila — each release names the specific ranch the agave came from and the year it was harvested — and it is additive-free. If a producer is willing to print the field and the vintage, there is nothing to be gained by adjusting the liquid afterwards; the entire point is that this year tastes different from last year. Mijenta Tequila Blanco ($54.09) comes at the same idea from the sustainability side, with additive-free production and certified B Corp status behind it.
3. How the agave got cooked — and crushed
Two production decisions account for most of what you taste, and neither is required to appear on the label.
Cooking. Agave piñas are full of complex carbohydrates that have to be converted to fermentable sugar by heat. A traditional brick oven (horno) does this over a day or two and caramelises the outside of the agave in the process — that is where the baked-sweet-potato, cooked-squash note in good tequila comes from. An industrial autoclave does the same job in hours, more cleanly and with less of that character. A diffuser skips cooking almost entirely: it blasts shredded raw agave with hot water and acid to strip the sugars out chemically. It is dramatically more efficient and it produces a spirit with very little agave flavour left to defend, which is frequently where the additives come in.
Crushing. After cooking, the agave has to be milled. A modern roller mill is fast and thorough. A tahona — a two-tonne volcanic stone wheel dragged in a circle over the cooked agave — is slow, expensive and crushes the fibre rather than shredding it, and most distilleries abandoned it decades ago. The handful that kept it, El Tesoro among them, did so because tahona-crushed agave carries more of the plant's earthy, mineral, faintly saline character into the still.
You can taste this ladder directly. Pour a diffuser-made blanco next to a brick-oven, tahona-crushed one and the difference is not subtle — it is the difference between a clean neutral spirit with a suggestion of agave and something that tastes unmistakably of a cooked plant.
4. Mezcal plays by different rules
Tequila is legally a subset of mezcal: all tequila is mezcal, but tequila must be made from blue Weber agave, in designated regions centred on Jalisco. Mezcal proper can be made from dozens of agave species, mostly in Oaxaca, and is traditionally roasted in earth pits lined with hot rock and wood — which is where the smoke comes from. The smoke is a by-product of the roasting method, not a flavouring.
Monte Alban Mezcal ($29.99) is the accessible entry point and the one most people meet first. If you want the longer version of this comparison, we wrote it out in full in Mezcal vs. Tequila in 2026. Browse the wider shelf at Mezcal and Tequila & Mezcal.
5. The eight bottles, and why each one is here
Alma Del Jaguar Tequila Blanco ($59.99) — a highlands blanco from a brand built around jaguar habitat conservation in northern Mexico, with a share of sales going to the cause. Clean, peppery, citric; a blanco that works as well in a glass alone as in a Paloma.
Tequila Ocho Single Estate Plata Tequila — the single-estate, vintage-dated bottling described above. The reference point for anyone who wants to understand what terroir means in agave.
Mijenta Tequila Blanco — additive-free, B Corp certified, and soft and floral in a way that converts people who think they dislike tequila.
La Gritona Tequila Reposado ($49.99) — made in Valle de Guadalupe, Jalisco by a women-led team under Melly Barajas, rested in used American whiskey barrels and bottled in recycled green glass. A reposado with restraint: wood as seasoning, not as disguise.
El Tesoro Tequila Blanco — tahona-crushed at La Alteña, NOM 1139, Camarena family since 1937. The most educational bottle on this list.
Quita Penas Reposado Tequila ($45.99) — a well-priced rested tequila for the house Margarita you actually make on a Tuesday, without dropping to the mixto shelf.
El Jimador Tequila Blanco ($29.99) — 100% agave at an everyday price, named for the jimadores who harvest the plant. The benchmark for what a batch cocktail tequila should cost.
Monte Alban Mezcal — the smoky counterweight, and the bottle that makes a tasting flight make sense.
6. A four-bottle Heritage Month flight
If you want to actually mark the month rather than just drink through it, pour these four side by side, half an ounce each, at room temperature, in a small tulip glass or a clay copita — never a shot glass, which sends all the alcohol straight up your nose and none of the aroma.
- Everyday blanco — El Jimador. Establish the baseline.
- Craft blanco — Alma del Jaguar or Mijenta. The same category, made carefully.
- Tahona blanco — El Tesoro. The production method becomes obvious here, not before.
- Mezcal — Monte Alban. Different species, different roast, different country of the mind.
Add water a drop at a time to the ones that feel hot. Do not chase them with lime; you are trying to taste the spirit, and citrus resets your palate to zero. Run the same structure as our blind tasting bracket if you want it competitive.
Where to start
If you buy one bottle this month, make it El Tesoro or Tequila Ocho — not because they are the most expensive here, but because they are the two that most clearly demonstrate what the rest of this article is about. If you are buying for a table, pair a craft blanco with Monte Alban and let people find the difference themselves.
The full agave shelf, from everyday bottles to añejos and extra-añejos, is at Tequila & Mezcal. The smoky end of it lives at Mezcal. If you would rather start from what other people are actually buying, Best Sellers and New Arrivals are the quickest way in.
Then turn the bottle around and read the back. That is the whole trick.
