El Silencio
A large, design-led Oaxacan mezcal brand founded in 2013 and made in San Baltazar Guelavila, now among the top US mezcals by volume, with a black-bottle Espadín, an Ensamble, and a Rare expression.
At a glance
El Silencio is a large, design-forward mezcal brand, instantly recognisable for its matte-black bottle, founded in 2013 by Fausto Zapata and Vicente Cisneros. Its core range is made in San Baltazar Guelavila, a mezcal-making town in the central valleys of Oaxaca, by a ninth-generation maestro mezcalero, Pedro Hernández. Where many of the houses elsewhere on this site are tiny family operations, El Silencio is built for scale: it is consistently cited as one of the top three mezcals by volume in the United States.
That scale, and a complicated ownership history, are what make El Silencio worth understanding. It shows how a traditional, certified mezcal can be produced in an Oaxacan town the old way and still be commercialised as a global lifestyle brand, passing through the hands of one of the world's largest drinks companies along the way.
How it is made
El Silencio's core mezcal is a certified Oaxacan mezcal made in the artisanal style. The agave is principally espadín (Agave angustifolia), the cultivated workhorse of Oaxacan mezcal, with hearts selected at roughly ten to twelve years of maturity. The traditional sequence holds: the hearts are roasted in an earthen pit, crushed by a horse-drawn tahonaTahona: a large stone wheel, traditionally pulled by a horse or mule around a circular pit, used to crush the roasted agave hearts and release their sugars before fermentation., fermented with wild yeast, and double-distilled in copper. The brand's palenque, Casa Silencio, doubles as a boutique hotel and has been promoted as a mezcal-focused luxury retreat.
The range is built around three tiers. The flagship Espadín is the volume seller in its signature black bottle. The Ensamble is a blend of several agavesEnsamble: a mezcal made by blending two or more agave varieties, either fermented and distilled together or married afterward, to build a more layered profile than a single agave gives. bottled at a softer strength. The limited Rare is the small-batch top of the line.
Ownership: a brand that changed hands
El Silencio's commercial history is unusually well documented for a mezcal, and this site reports it as neutral commercial fact rather than as praise or criticism. In April 2019, the US drinks multinational Constellation Brands (the company behind Modelo and Corona in the United States) took a minority stake in the brand. In 2025, the brand was acquired by IJW Whiskey, a US-based company, for an undisclosed sum, after which IJW reported owning the brand outright.
High confidenceHigh confidence: the main claims on this page are backed by primary sources (regulatory documents, peer-reviewed research, or direct producer attestation) and have been verified against the editorial correction log.The ownership milestones (2013 founding by Zapata and Cisneros, the 2019 Constellation minority stake, and the 2025 IJW acquisition) are reported consistently across independent trade press. What is not clearly established in the public record is whether the original co-founders or Constellation Brands retained any stake after the 2025 sale; trade coverage noted that this detail was not disclosed. This page therefore reports the transactions as documented and does not assert anything about residual ownership.Where El Silencio sits
El Silencio occupies a particular niche: a mezcal that is genuinely made the traditional way in an Oaxacan town, yet operates at the scale and marketing polish of a major branded spirit, and has moved through corporate ownership the way large tequila brands routinely do. In that sense it is closer in commercial shape to a branded house like Bozal or to the celebrity-and-multinational tequila stories elsewhere on this site than to a single-village bottler. Reading it against a credit-the-maker house like Del Maguey, which built its name on naming individual villages and producers, is the most useful contrast: both start with traditional Oaxacan mezcal, but they sell it on very different terms.
See also
Mezcal
Mexico's broadest agave-spirit category. Distilled from dozens of agave species across thirteen denominated states, governed by NOM-070-SCFI-2016 and protected as a Denomination of Origin since 1994. Produced in three legal classes (Mezcal, Mezcal Artesanal, Mezcal Ancestral) and required by law to be 100% agave.
Del Maguey Single Village
The single-village mezcal brand founded in 1995 by American artist Ron Cooper, credited with introducing artisanal village mezcal to the US market and effectively creating the modern American mezcal category; acquired by Pernod Ricard in 2017 with its named village partnerships maintained.