Every number in the Tequila Index starts at 40 and is built from four pillars. Three of them cite records somebody else keeps, so anyone can check our arithmetic. The fourth is our own rating. Here is what each pillar is, what it can and cannot tell you, and which of them is actually feeding a score today.
The first pillar, and the only one that is all or nothing: a bottling either holds an organic certificate we have checked against the certifier's public register, or it does not. There is no partial credit and no credit for being made at a certified distillery, because a certificate covering a facility does not cover a product bottled there. We weight it heavily because it is the one thing on this page that a reader can independently verify in a public database in under a minute.
Competition results are evidence, not verdicts. They tell you a bottle was submitted, poured for a jury, and judged well on that day. They do not tell you what it costs, whether it contains additives, or whether the expression on the shelf this year is the one that won.
So awards are weighed rather than counted. A Best in Show at a major competition is worth ten times a bronze at a minor one, a result published by the competition itself outweighs one reported only in trade press, and an award loses weight as it ages. Medals bind to the expression that won, never to the brand: a gold for a blanco earns the anejo beside it nothing. A house that never enters anything scores zero here and is not otherwise penalised, because plenty of the best tequila in Mexico has never been submitted to a competition.
Everything in the glass starts in the ground, and then passes through one building. Every tequila carries a NOM, the number of the distillery that made it, and distilleries differ enormously in what they are willing to do. We place each NOM in one of seven bands using the Agave Matchmaker distillery ranking, an independent leaderboard we do not compile and cannot influence.
One rule overrides the bands: a distillery known to run a diffuser cannot take more than 10 of the 16 points on this pillar, however highly it is ranked. That is a stated preference of this publication rather than a law of production, and we say so here rather than burying it. A NOM the leaderboard has not ranked scores nothing on this pillar, which is a gap in the data and not a finding about the distillery.
The other three pillars describe a house, not a bottle. A distillery ranking is the same number for every expression a distillery makes, and an organic certificate covers a brand. On their own they cannot tell a blanco from the anejo beside it, and for most houses they did not: every expression scored the same. This pillar is what separates them.
A note on the arithmetic: 40 plus the four maxima (16, 16, 10 and 22) comes to more than 95. The published score is capped at 95, so a bottling does not need a perfect card on every pillar to reach the top of the scale, and summing the stated maxima will not reproduce a capped score.
One adjustment is applied before publication: bottlings without an organic certificate currently receive 5 points, so certification separates bottles by 11 points in practice rather than the full 16. It keeps a certificate from outweighing everything else a bottle does. Hand-set scores are never adjusted.
We do not publish a numeric sub-score for each pillar. We would have to invent most of those numbers, and an invented number is worse than no number. When we can measure a pillar honestly at the bottle level, it will appear on the dossier and this page will say when that started.
| Range | Band | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 85 and above | Exceptional | Our panel treats it as a reference for its category. |
| 78 to 84 | Outstanding | The panel found it excellent throughout, with minor quibbles only. |
| 72 to 77 | Excellent | We recommend it with confidence at its price. |
| 64 to 71 | Recommended | We recommend it with the reservations the review names. |
| Below 64 | Fair | The review explains what the panel did not get on with. |
Verified Organic records that a third party has certified a bottling as organic and that we have checked that certificate against the certifier's public register ourselves. Every marked bottling carries the certifier, the date we checked, and a link to the register. We make no assertion of our own about what is in the bottle: we point at a document somebody else issued. A certificate covering a distillery does not carry to a product bottled there, and the word organic in a brand or product name is not a certificate. The absence of the mark means only that we have not found a certificate covering that bottling.