Inzalo Agave Spirits, a Cape Town label distilled from agave grown in South Africa's Klein Karoo, has won four international awards including a Double Gold, News24 reported on July 19, 2026.
The spirit, sold as Inzalo Agave Spirits Batch One, is produced by Hope Spirits and was founded by Diego Avila and Sebastian O'Keefe together with Lucy Beard and Leigh Lisk of Hope Distillery in Cape Town.
Where the agave for Inzalo comes from
The founders spent more than two years travelling South Africa in search of a usable agave crop before settling on plants growing in the Klein Karoo, a semi-arid region roughly three and a half hours from Cape Town near Ladismith. The variety they chose, a rare red agave, has grown wild in the area for generations, having originally arrived during the colonial era and since been used mainly as cattle feed rather than as a distilling crop. Avila, described as a trained biologist, has pointed to the region's intense sunlight and mineral-heavy soils as shaping the spirit's character, comparing the effect to terroir in winemaking. According to Avila, the pair examined four separate agave species before settling on the profile they wanted, a process he has said took two and a half years of scouting and tasting.
How the awards were judged
Inzalo's first documented honor was a Gold Medal at the Agavos Awards, a competition dedicated exclusively to agave spirits and founded by the team behind Tequila Matchmaker. That competition requires entries to be purchased anonymously at retail rather than submitted directly by producers, and judges them blind, a format the trade has treated as unusually rigorous. As of early June 2026, Time Out Cape Town reported that results from further international competitions Inzalo had entered were still pending. By mid July, News24 reported that the tally had grown to four international awards in total, including a Double Gold, though the outlet did not name all four competitions in the reporting reviewed for this story.
Why the label avoids the words tequila and mezcal
Inzalo is deliberately not marketed as tequila or mezcal, because both names are legally protected designations tied to specific production zones in Mexico. Instead, the founders have positioned the brand as the first entry in a new, distinctly South African category of agave spirit. O'Keefe has said the ambition expanded over time, from making the best agave spirit produced outside Mexico to establishing an entirely new class of spirit unique to South Africa. Inzalo Agave Spirits Batch One retails for R1,049 per bottle through the company's own website.
What this means
Because tequila is restricted by Mexican law to specific regions and to Blue Weber agave, Inzalo sits entirely outside the category this publication scores, and none of its medals maps onto any bottle in the tequila database. It is also one of several South African ventures, alongside distillers working with Karoo agave further east near Graaff-Reinet, betting that non-Mexican agave spirits can win serious competition attention. Which three competitions beyond Agavos produced Inzalo's other three medals is not yet public, and worth watching for.