ArteNOM Selección 1146

At a glance

ArteNOM Selección 1146 is one entry in a curated series of tequila bottlings released under the ArteNOM label by Jake Lustig, a US-based importer and independent bottler. The 1146 selection is the Añejo release in the series, produced at La Tequileña (NOM 1146NOM (Norma Oficial Mexicana) is the Mexican federal product-standard system. On a tequila bottle the NOM number is the unique identifier of the distillery facility where the tequila was made — every drop in the bottle came from a plant operating under that NOM. Different brands made at the same NOM share a distillery. NOM 1146: La Tequileña, S.A. de C.V. (Tequila, Jalisco, Valles region). Enrique Fonseca and Sergio Mendoza. Home of Don Fulano, Fuenteseca, Tears of Llorona, and the ArteNOM Selección 1146 Añejo.) in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, under the direction of Enrique Fonseca. La Tequileña is the same distillery that produces Don Fulano, Fuenteseca, and Tears of Llorona; the ArteNOM 1146 Añejo is a sibling release in that house's broader output, bottled under Lustig's curatorial program rather than under the Fonseca family's own brands.

The ArteNOM series is unusual in the tequila landscape: rather than a single brand tied to a single distillery, each release in the series is named for the NOM number of the facility that produced it, and each is curated to showcase a particular distillery's expression of a particular class (blanco, reposado, añejo, extra añejo). The 1146 Añejo is the long-running selection from the Fonseca house.

What is an "ArteNOM Selección"?

Most tequila brands the consumer encounters are tied to a single distillery, even when the brand and the distillery are owned by different parties (a contract-bottling arrangement). The brand name on the bottle and the NOM identifier on the back label point to the same facility for the life of the brand, or at least until a corporate move shifts production from one NOM to another.

ArteNOM works differently. It is what European wine and spirits trade calls a négociant house: a curator and bottler that does not own the production facility, but commissions and selects releases from multiple producers under a common label. Lustig launched the project around 2010 with the editorial premise that the most informative way to taste across the tequila category is distillery by distillery, not brand by brand. Each ArteNOM release foregrounds the NOM number of its producing facility, credits the master distiller, and presents that distillery's house style in a single expression class.

The series has historically rotated across multiple NOMs and class slots. The selections most consistently referenced in secondary press are:

• ArteNOM Selección 1146 Añejo at NOM 1146NOM (Norma Oficial Mexicana) is the Mexican federal product-standard system. On a tequila bottle the NOM number is the unique identifier of the distillery facility where the tequila was made — every drop in the bottle came from a plant operating under that NOM. Different brands made at the same NOM share a distillery. NOM 1146: La Tequileña, S.A. de C.V. (Tequila, Jalisco, Valles region). Enrique Fonseca and Sergio Mendoza. Home of Don Fulano, Fuenteseca, Tears of Llorona, and the ArteNOM Selección 1146 Añejo. (La Tequileña, Enrique Fonseca).
• ArteNOM Selección 1414 at NOM 1414 (Destiladora del Valle de Tequila), historically the Reposado in the series.
• ArteNOM Selección 1579 Blanco at NOM 1579 (El Pandillo, Felipe Camarena).
• ArteNOM Selección 1123 Histórico at NOM 1123 (Cascahuín, Salvador Rosales Briseño).
• Older releases under NOMs 1079 and 1549 in the series' early years.

La Tequileña, NOM 1146

La Tequileña is the Fonseca and Mendoza family distillery in the town of Tequila, in the Valles region. Enrique Fonseca trained in Scotland and continental Europe, and La Tequileña is widely described in the trade as the European-style house of tequila: experimental cooperage (Pedro Ximénez sherry casks, Limousin oak, less-common wood programs), long agave maturation in the field, and a production discipline that reads closer to a Cognac or Scotch operation than to a Jalisco contract-bottling house.

The 1146 Añejo bottling brings that house style into a single expression: Agave tequilana Weber var. azul from the Fonseca family's own fields, slow-cooked in masonry hornos (the traditional stone ovens that predate the autoclaves used by most large producers), double-distilled in copper pot stills, and aged in oak for the legally-defined añejo window (twelve to thirty-six months). The exact aging window for the 1146 Añejo as released has varied across years and lots; the producer-verification corpus on this site treats the brand as approximately twenty-four months in oak as a working assumption.

What a "Selección 1146 Añejo" means in practice

A consumer picking up a bottle of ArteNOM Selección 1146 Añejo is buying:

1. A tequila made entirely at La Tequileña, under Enrique Fonseca's supervision, from agave the Fonseca family farms themselves.
2. An añejo class expression (aged at least twelve months in oak, in vessels capped at 600 liters per the NOM-006-SCFI-2012A regulatory-standard NOM is a federal Mexican product norm. Unlike facility NOMs (4-digit identifiers of specific distilleries), a standard NOM defines the rules for an entire category of product: which raw materials are permitted, where the product may be made, how it must be processed, and how the bottle must be labeled. Standard NOMs are written as "NOM-XXX-SCFI-YYYY" where XXX is the standard number and YYYY is the year. NOM-006-SCFI-2012 (Tequila). The official Mexican standard governing every aspect of Tequila production: which agave species may be used (only Agave tequilana Weber var. azul), which states and municipalities qualify, how the spirit must be distilled, what additives are permitted (up to 1% by volume even in '100% agave' bottles), and how the bottle must be labeled. Enforced by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT). regulation).
3. A bottle curated and selected by Jake Lustig for the ArteNOM program, with editorial framing about why this particular distillery's añejo deserves a stand-alone release.

This is materially different from a typical contract-bottling arrangement, in which a brand owner pays a distillery to produce a spirit to the brand owner's specification (yeast strain, cooking method, distillation parameters, cooperage) and the resulting bottle is the brand owner's product. The ArteNOM model is closer to a single-cask bottling in the Scotch world: the distillery's house style is the point, and the curator's value-add is the selection and the editorial frame, not the production specification.

Where the 1146 sits in the ArteNOM series

Within the ArteNOM project, the 1146 Añejo plays the role of the rested-and-oxidized entry in the lineup. The 1579 Blanco is the unaged showcase of Felipe Camarena's Highland production; the 1123 Histórico is the heritage anchor at Cascahuín; the 1414 has historically held the Reposado slot. The 1146 Añejo is the long-aged, European-cooperage expression, and the editorial point of including it in a flight is the contrast between Fonseca's wood-forward Valles añejo and the brighter, more agave-forward expressions in the rest of the series.

A reader new to the tequila category can use the ArteNOM series as a structured way to taste across producers: same curator, same editorial frame, four to six different NOMs, one expression class per release. That structure is hard to assemble from any other single brand on the market.

Editorial framing

The honest position on ArteNOM 1146 today is: a real and unusual project, less aggressively distributed than it once was, and a useful pedagogical artifact for anyone learning the tequila category by tasting. The category at the premium end is dominated by single-distillery brands; the négociant model that ArteNOM represents is rare, and its survival across more than a decade is itself a meaningful editorial signal. Readers who can find a current bottle of the 1146 Añejo at retail are looking at one of the cleanest single-distillery expressions of Enrique Fonseca's house style, curated and selected outside the Fonseca family's own commercial decisions about Don Fulano and the rest of the La Tequileña portfolio.

See also