Fortaleza

At a glance

Fortaleza is the rebuilt 1873 Sauza family distillery, now run as one of the most-cited traditional tequila houses in the Valles region. The site is the original Sauza ground in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, brought back to life between 2002 and 2005 by Guillermo Erickson Sauza, the fifth-generation great-great-grandson of Don Cenobio Sauza, after the Sauza brand itself had passed out of family hands in 1976. The house operates on NOM 1493NOM (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 1493: Tequila Los Abuelos / Destilería La Fortaleza (Tequila, Jalisco, Valles region). Sauza family lineage; rebuilt 2002 by Guillermo Erickson Sauza. Home of Fortaleza. and produces a deliberately small annual volume (roughly 323,000 liters per year), built around three traditional steps that the larger tequila industry has mostly abandoned: a stone tahona wheel that crushes cooked agave to extract its juice, open-air fermentation in wooden vats, and copper pot stills. The bottle is verified additive-free. For many writers and bartenders, Fortaleza is the totem reference for what artisan-revival Agave tequilana distillation looks like inside an officially regulated tequila NOM.

The Sauza lineage and the 2005 rebuild

The Sauza family has been a load-bearing name in tequila for five generations. Don Cenobio Sauza founded the original distillery on this same site in 1873 and is generally credited as the first producer to legally export tequila to the United States. The brand passed through his son Eladio, then his grandson Francisco Javier, and then his great-grandson Francisco ("Don Frankie"), who sold the Sauza brand and operations to a multinational in 1976. The Sauza label has since changed corporate owners several times and now sits inside Beam Suntory's portfolio. The family no longer owns the brand that carries its name.

Guillermo Erickson Sauza, the founder's great-great-grandson, bought back the original Sauza distillery grounds and rebuilt the facility on the foundations of the 1873 site. Production restarted in 2005 under the new brand name "Tequila Los Abuelos" (Spanish for "the grandfathers," a tribute to the family lineage). A US trademark conflict with a Panamanian rum (Ron Abuelo) blocked use of that name outside Mexico, so the same liquid ships as "Fortaleza" everywhere except the domestic Mexican market. The two names refer to the same bottle.

Production: tahona, open-air ferment, copper pot

Fortaleza's production sequence is deliberately old-fashioned, with each step chosen as the slower and lower-yield option:

• Cooking. Agave piñas (the harvested core of the plant, after its leaves are trimmed off) are slow-baked in masonry ovens for around 36 hours, then rested. Masonry ovens cook agave gradually with steam rather than the high-pressure autoclaves common in industrial tequila.
• Milling with a tahona. A tahona is a large volcanic-stone wheel that rolls over cooked agave in a shallow stone pit, crushing the fibers and pressing out the mosto (fermentable juice). The wheel at Fortaleza was originally pulled by a donkey; today it is pulled by a small tractor, but the milling action is the same. The tahona is slow, low-yield, and fiber-rich (the spent agave pulp goes into fermentation alongside the juice), which is why most large producers replaced it decades ago with steel roller mills.
• Open-air fermentation. Mosto and agave fiber ferment together in open-topped wooden vats with ambient yeast. Open fermentation lets local microbes contribute character that closed stainless-steel tanks suppress.
• Copper pot distillation. The fermented wash is distilled twice in traditional copper pot stills, the same shape of still used for most premium tequila as well as Scotch single malt. Copper actively reacts with sulfur compounds in the distillate, which is one reason copper-pot tequila tends to read cleaner on the palate than column-distilled industrial spirit.

The flagship Still Strength Blanco bottles at the proof the spirit comes off the second still (around 46% ABV), with no dilution to the more typical 40%. The reposado and añejo expressions rest in ex-bourbon American oak barrels, with the reposado around six months and the añejo around eighteen.

Additive-free certification

Fortaleza is verified additive-free: no caramel coloring, no oak extract, no glycerin, no sugar syrup added at bottling. The verification has historically come from Tequila Matchmaker, the same independent producer-and-enthusiast initiative that ran the Additive Free Alliance public certification list.

The litigation does not change the empirical reality of the bottle. Fortaleza's combination of tahona milling, masonry cooking, open-air ferment, and copper pot distillation leaves a distillate that has not historically needed additive masking to taste finished. Readers tracking the regulatory landscape should follow the CRT v. AFA docket as it develops.

Flagship expressions

Fortaleza ships a deliberately short product line, all 100% agave:

• Blanco. Unaged. Rested briefly in stainless steel after distillation and bottled at 40% ABV. The cleanest read on the house production style: cooked agave, citrus peel, black pepper, wet stone.
• Reposado. Rested approximately six months in ex-bourbon American oak. The wood is held in a supporting role, picking up vanilla and soft oak without burying the agave.
• Añejo. Rested approximately eighteen months in ex-bourbon American oak. Darker, more cooked-caramel, but still recognizably agave-forward.
• Still Strength Blanco. A periodic limited expression bottled at the proof the spirit comes off the second still, roughly 46% ABV. Released in numbered batches rather than as a year-round SKU.

The family operates without a diffuser (no high-pressure shredder-and-water-extraction step) and without column distillation. By the metrics Fortaleza's peers (the Camarenas at El Tesoro / Tapatío, the Vivanco family at NOM 1414NOM (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 1414: Destiladora del Valle de Tequila (Tequila, Jalisco). Don Julio production after the 2018 Diageo move from NOM 1449., the Rosales family at Cascahuín) tend to emphasize, this is the high-craft end of the legally regulated tequila category.

See also