Sotol Clande

At a glance

Clande, often labeled Sotol Clande or Clande Sotol, was a small cooperative sotol brand founded in the late 2010s by Ricardo Pico in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. The brand pulled together the output of several traditional sierra producers (sotoleros) working at small vinatas across rural Chihuahua, and bottled the results under a unified label that paid open homage to the clandestine tradition of twentieth-century sotol-making.

Clande wound down as a brand in 2020. Pico subsequently relaunched the same network of vinatas under a new brand, Sotoleros, with many of the same sierra producers; Clande bottles still circulate on secondary markets and in tasting databases. The page below describes Clande as it existed during its short active life, and is candid about what the public record does and does not establish.

What "Clande" meant

The name is short for clandestino, "clandestine." It is a direct reference to the persecution era of Chihuahuan sotol, when production was effectively illegal and producers risked imprisonment, raids, and the destruction of their stills. As Atlas Obscura's feature on the category reports, sotol production peaked above 300,000 liters annually in the early 1930s before federal crackdowns drove the trade underground; producers faced bullet-riddled stills and jail time. The vinata tradition survived in the sierra largely because rural sotoleros kept producing through that era for local consumption, well outside the formal economy. Prohibition was effectively lifted in the early 1990s, the Sotol Denominación de Origen followed in 2002, and the formal standard (NOM-159-SCFI-2004A 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-159-SCFI-2004 (Sotol). The official Mexican standard for sotol production. Names only two legally permitted species (Dasylirion cedrosanum and D. duranguensis), limits production to Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango, and permits up to 49% non-Dasylirion sugar (analogous to tequila mixto). Notably excludes D. wheeleri, which is the most-distributed sotol plant in the Chihuahuan Desert; a regulatory gap.) was published in 2004.

Naming a brand "Clande" was therefore a deliberate editorial choice. It refused to launder the category's history as artisan-pastoral marketing, and instead pointed directly at the prohibition-era origins of the modern Chihuahua tradition. The closest thematic parallel in the agave world is the use of vinatero as a quasi-resistance term in Sonora during the 1915-1992 bacanora ban: a producer name that carries the memory of having been illegal.

The cooperative model

Clande was structured as a small cooperative of vinatas rather than a single distillery. Mexico News Daily's 2019 feature describes Pico's project as anthropological in posture, partnering closely with traditional masters rather than directing production himself; the same piece notes that fewer than thirty sotoleros operating in the traditional manner remain in Chihuahua today, with fewer than ten in adjacent Coahuila and Durango. The cooperative model was the practical answer to that scarcity: rather than build a new distillery, aggregate the small batches that already existed.

Each member vinata used the traditional Chihuahua production sequence: underground (or partially in-ground) wood-fired pit ovens for roasting the desert spoon hearts over multiple days, hand-milling of the cooked hearts, open-air fermentation, and small-batch distillation. The result is the textured, place-specific sotol that distinguishes traditional sierra production from the larger, partly-industrial Chihuahua operations that adopt stainless-steel fermentation or column rectification within the same DO.

The brand's bottlings were typically labeled by color (Clande Sotol Red, Yellow, Purple, and so on) rather than by formal cuvée name, with each color corresponding to a different vinata or batch. A lechuguilla bottling under the Clande label also circulated, drawing on the Chihuahua sierra's parallel tradition of distilling Agave shrevei and related sierra agaves outside the Sotol DO.

What we do not know

A serious page on this brand has to mark the limits of what is checkable.

• The exact founding year of Clande. Press coverage clusters around 2018-2019 but does not pin a launch date.
• The member vinatas. Press accounts describe the cooperative in general terms; specific municipalities, sotolero names, and ownership splits are not in the public record this site could find.
• The Dasylirion species in any given Clande bottling. Tasting-note databases sometimes attribute a species to a specific color (Wheeler's sotol for some, Cedrosanum for others), but the brand did not publish a definitive species map.
• The wind-down details. Skurnik's Sotoleros page notes only that "the small cooperative brand Clande folded its tent in 2020." Whether this reflected pandemic disruption, commercial restructuring, or a deliberate pivot to the Sotoleros brand is not stated.

For the consumer reading a Clande bottle today, the most defensible framing is: a serious traditional-Chihuahua sotol made by a cooperative of sierra producers under a now-discontinued label, with a successor brand (Sotoleros) carrying forward much of the same underlying network.

Where Clande sits in the sotol landscape

In the Chihuahua sotol category, Clande occupies the same slot the small-vinatero bacanora houses occupy in Sonora: a brand whose contribution is the aggregation and presentation of an existing rural tradition rather than the building of a new industrial production line. The contrast is with the larger and more industrial Chihuahua houses such as Hacienda de Chihuahua (the pioneer post-DO brand, with the widest international distribution), the Don Cuco / Sotol Por Siempre Jacquez-family operation in the far northwest of the state, and the Flor del Desierto vinata of José "Chito" Fernández in Coyame. Clande, and now Sotoleros, sit on the small, cooperative, single-vinata end of that spectrum: the part of the category that most directly preserves the prohibition-era identity the brand name invokes.

See also