Tasting Table published a roundup this week debunking six common tequila myths, drawing on interviews with three industry professionals: Greg Perez, owner of the Houston cocktail bar Concrete Rose, Chessie Keebaugh, general manager of Tropa Tequila, and Sofía Paloma Juárez, founder and CEO of CASA J Tequila.
The piece covers familiar ground: hangovers, the tequila worm, the agave plant's water storage, salt and lime rituals, and mixto labeling. What stands out for trade readers is a line from Keebaugh noting that even bottles labeled 100 percent agave are still legally permitted to contain certain additives, a detail that matches Mexico's own production standard rather than contradicting it.
The rule the listicle only gestures at
Mexico's tequila standard, NOM-006-SCFI-2012, sets the actual floor. To be sold as tequila at all, a spirit needs a minimum of 51 percent fermentable sugars from Blue Weber agave, with the remainder legally allowed to come from cane or corn sugar in what the industry calls mixto. <cite index="2-12">Legally, mixto can contain as little as 51 percent of agave-based tequila, and 49 percent of basically anything else.</cite> None of that has to appear on a US label.
The more useful detail, and the one Tasting Table's sourcing gets closest to, is that clearing the 100 percent agave bar does not mean a bottle is free of additives. Mexican regulation permits small allowances of caramel coloring, oak extract, glycerin and sugar based syrups even within that top tier, which is precisely the distinction our own purity flag is built to catch. A label can say 100 percent agave and still not be what we classify as Verified Pure.
The worm gets a real answer, for once
The worm myth is the oldest chestnut in the genre, and outlets have been debunking it for over a decade with little new to add. What is new is a DNA study covered by ScienceDaily roughly a month ago that finally settled the species question. Researchers testing larvae pulled from mezcal bottles <cite index="13-1">found that all sampled larvae were actually agave redworm moth caterpillars, not a mix of species as once believed</cite>. The practice itself remains recent by spirits standards: <cite index="13-7,13-8">the tradition feels ancient, but it is actually much more recent than mezcal itself, appearing to have begun in the 1940s</cite>. It has never applied to tequila, which the CRT's own standard prohibits from containing any inserted organism.
Why this keeps recurring as content
Myth roundups like this one are evergreen traffic plays for lifestyle outlets, timed loosely around National Tequila Day and built on quotes from bartenders and small founders rather than regulatory filings. That is not a knock on the sourcing so much as a note on genre. The useful signal for buyers is not the worm or the hangover folklore, it is the reminder buried in the piece that agave percentage on a label is a floor, not a purity guarantee.
None of the three sources quoted run brands currently in our database, so we have not blind scored Concrete Rose's house pours, Tropa Tequila, or CASA J Tequila. We can say that the additive gap they are describing in general terms is the same gap that separates our Verified Pure ratings from bottles we mark Unverified: houses that disclose sourcing and avoid legal additive allowances score differently from those that rely on the 100 percent agave claim alone.
What we are watching
Whether Tropa Tequila or CASA J Tequila publish third party lab results or additive disclosures that would let us evaluate them against our Verified Pure standard.
Whether the CRT or Mexico's economy ministry moves to tighten the additive allowance inside the 100 percent agave category itself, closing the gap this story only hints at.
Whether further DNA or entomological work on mezcal's gusano changes how mezcal houses market the practice, given it has no bearing on tequila regulation.