Sotoleros
A small sourcing project led by the sotol educator Ricardo Pico that bottles microbatch sotol and lechuguilla from traditional Chihuahua distillers, with releases that rarely exceed about seventy bottles.
At a glance
Sotoleros is a small sotol sourcing project led by Ricardo Pico, a Chihuahua-born sotol educator and one of the more visible advocates working to document the spirit. Rather than running a single still, the project bottles tiny lots bought from traditional distillers and releases them under one name, so a buyer is really buying the work of an individual vinateroA vinatero (or sotolero) is a master distiller of sotol, the spirit drawn from the wild desert spoon plant. rather than a fixed house style.
Independent coverage of Sotoleros is thin, so this page stays deliberately short and factual. What can be verified is set out below; where the record is incomplete, this site does not fill the gaps with invented detail.
What is known
Pico was a co-founder of Clande, a cooperative of sotol producers that closed in 2020. Sotoleros grew out of that work, and several of the distillers it sources from are described as holdovers from his Clande days. The project bottles microbatch sotol, made from the desert spoon, Dasylirion, alongside microbatch lechuguilla, the closely related agave spirit of the north, and the occasional blend of the two. The producers work at a very small scale and keep to traditional methods, with releases that rarely exceed about seventy bottles. The sourcing centres on traditional vinatasA vinata is a traditional sotol distillery in northern Mexico, the desert-country equivalent of a mezcal palenque. in Chihuahua.
Low confidenceLow confidence: information here is partial, based on limited sources, or has not yet been cross-checked. Read with caution and treat specific facts as provisional.This site could not independently verify finer detail about Sotoleros: the specific producers and lots in any given release, the species breakdown of individual bottlings, alcohol strengths, or whether the project regularly sources outside Chihuahua. The verifiable core (Ricardo Pico's leadership, the Clande lineage, the microbatch sotol-and-lechuguilla model, and the very small release sizes) is reported in independent coverage; the rest is left open rather than guessed at. Read any single bottle off its own label.Where Sotoleros sits
Sotoleros sits at the smallest, most enthusiast-facing end of the sotol world: a curator moving a handful of bottles from individual makers into the hands of people who already care about the category. In that sense it is close in spirit to the ex-cooperative project Clande that preceded it and to a rotating curator like Parejo, and far from the larger estate operations such as Hacienda de Chihuahua. It is best understood as a documentation-and-access project as much as a brand.
See also
Sotol
Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert spirit, distilled not from agave but from the Dasylirion genus. Protected as a Denomination of Origin since 2002 across Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Durango, governed by NOM-159-SCFI-2004, and at the center of a live cross-border IP dispute with Texas producers.
Sotol Clande
A small Chihuahua sotol cooperative founded by Ricardo Pico in the late 2010s to bottle traditional underground-oven sotol from several sierra vinatas under a unified label; the cooperative wound down in 2020 and Pico relaunched the network as Sotoleros.