Cincoro
The tequila brand founded in 2019 by basketball figure Michael Jordan with a group of NBA team owners, contract-produced at the multi-brand Casa Maestri distillery in the town of Tequila, Jalisco.
At a glance
Cincoro is a tequila brand, not a distillery. It is produced under NOM 1438NOM (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 1438: Destiladora del Valle de Tequila (Casa Maestri) (Tequila, Jalisco, Valles). A large contract distillery that bottles well over a hundred brands; the documented production site for Cincoro., the facility code for Destiladora del Valle de Tequila, better known as Casa Maestri, in the town of Tequila itself, in the lower Valles (valleys) region of Jalisco. The brand was founded in 2019 by the basketball figure Michael Jordan together with a group of National Basketball Association team owners: Wes Edens, Wyc Grousbeck, Emilia Fazzalari, and Jeanie Buss. The name joins the Spanish words cinco (five, for the five founders) and oro (gold).
Cincoro matters to anyone learning the tequila landscape because it is a clean example of a particular commercial model: the celebrity-as-investor-group brand. Jordan is a co-founder and co-owner inside an ownership group rather than a sole operator, and the company contracts its production rather than running its own distillery. This page treats the brand honestly: what the public record supports about who owns it and where it is made, and where claims about how it is made stop.
The founding, and the investor-group model
The brand's origin story is straightforward and well documented in the trade press. Five people who already owned or co-owned NBA franchises pooled resources to launch a premium tequila in 2019. Jordan is the public face and the most famous of the five, but the structure is explicitly a group of partners rather than one celebrity attaching a name to a finished product.
That structure is the most useful thing to understand about Cincoro. Compare it to Casamigos, where George Clooney, Rande Gerber, and Mike Meldman founded and operated the brand from day one and then sold it to the multinational Diageo. Compare it again to founder-operated houses such as Fortaleza or Tequila Ocho, where the families that own the brand also make the liquid at distilleries they control. Cincoro sits in a third position: it is investor-group-owned, it has stayed independent rather than being acquired, and it contracts out its production. None of those facts is a verdict on quality; they are a description of the commercial animal.
Medium confidenceMedium confidence: most claims are backed by reputable secondary sources, but some details rely on inference or have not yet been verified against primary sources.The roster of five founders and the 2019 launch are well reported in the spirits and business press, and the brand markets the name's cinco plus oro meaning openly. The more promotional framing around the brand, the founders' tasting preferences, and the development of the house style, comes from the company's own retelling and should be read as brand narrative rather than verified production history.NOM 1438, and where it is actually made
Every certified tequila bottle carries a four-digit NOM identifying the distillery that made it. Cincoro is produced at Casa Maestri (NOM 1438NOM (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 1438: Destiladora del Valle de Tequila (Casa Maestri) (Tequila, Jalisco, Valles). A large contract distillery that bottles well over a hundred brands; the documented production site for Cincoro.), one of the largest contract distilleries in the category. Casa Maestri bottles well over a hundred separate brands. A shared, multi-brand NOM is entirely normal in tequila and does not by itself say anything about quality, but it does set the accurate mental model: Cincoro is contract-produced at a facility it does not own, rather than made at a distillery the brand alone runs.
This is similar in structure to Casamigos, which is also contract-produced at a shared NOM, though at a different facility in a different region. Where Casamigos sources highland agave from Los Altos, Casa Maestri sits in the lower Valles, on the floor of the Tequila valley, working with Agave tequilana Weber azul. The two brands illustrate the same contract-production reality from two different corners of the tequila map.
What is in the range
The range is built around the standard age-classified tequila ladder plus two extensions. The Blanco is the unaged flagship; the Reposado and Añejo are the core aged expressions; an Extra Añejo sits at the top of the conventional age scale. Beyond those, Cincoro Gold is a blend, and Cincoro Añejo Cristalino is a charcoal-filtered aged tequila stripped back to clarity.
The cristalino category, across the whole industry, is the one where production transparency is weakest, because filtration removes both colour and some of the evidence of what was added during ageing. That is a category-wide caution, not a Cincoro-specific allegation.
Additives and the diffuser question
Cincoro is not an additive-free-certified brand, and this page does not claim it is. Equally, there is no cited evidence that Cincoro uses a diffuser, so this page makes no such claim either.
Medium confidenceMedium confidence: most claims are backed by reputable secondary sources, but some details rely on inference or have not yet been verified against primary sources.What is well supported is that Cincoro is contract-produced at Casa Maestri under NOM 1438NOM (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 1438: Destiladora del Valle de Tequila (Casa Maestri) (Tequila, Jalisco, Valles). A large contract distillery that bottles well over a hundred brands; the documented production site for Cincoro. and is not among the brands carrying third-party additive-free certification. What is not established, and what this page does not assert, is any specific allegation about additive use or diffuser use at the facility for this brand. Tequila regulation (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).) permits small undisclosed additions of colouring, sweetener, oak extract, and glycerin without forcing them onto the label, so the absence of an additive-free certification is not in itself evidence of additive use. The honest position is to report what the record shows, attach a confidence label, and leave it there.Where Cincoro sits
Cincoro is a clean example of the celebrity-as-investor-group tequila: founded by a famous athlete and a group of sports-franchise owners, valley-sourced, contract-produced at a large multi-brand facility, and, unlike Casamigos, still independent rather than absorbed into a multinational. It is not a small-batch, single-estate, additive-transparent house in the mould of Fortaleza or Tequila Ocho, and reading it against both Casamigos and those founder-operated producers is the most useful exercise: the contrast across ownership structure, scale, and disclosure is exactly the literacy these producer pages are meant to build.
See also
Tequila
Mexico's most-recognized spirit. Distilled exclusively from Blue Weber agave across 181 specific municipalities in five denominated states, governed by NOM-006-SCFI-2012 and protected as a Denomination of Origin since 1974.
Casamigos
The celebrity tequila brand founded in 2013 by George Clooney, Rande Gerber, and Mike Meldman, produced at Productos Finos de Agave in the Jalisco highlands, and acquired by Diageo in 2017 for up to one billion US dollars.