Canadian Geographic published a 2,245-word travel feature on November 2, 2026, following writer Bill Arnott through the Los Altos highlands of Jalisco, Mexico, with stops at a Clase Azul ceramics atelier and the Arandas distillery Tequila Centinela.
Arnott, a Canadian Geographic ambassador and the author of the Gone Viking travelogues, wrote and photographed the piece himself, tracing a route that moves from Guadalajara into the red-clay hill country northeast of the city before ending in the Highlands town of Arandas.
What the feature covers
The piece situates its travel through Los Altos, the Jaliscan Highlands, a region Arnott notes was home to the Coca and Guachichile peoples before the Spanish arrived. A central stop is La Hacienda Clase Azul, a campus near Capilla de Guadalupe, a town of about 15,000 people in the municipality of Tepatitlán. There, Arnott describes touring a ceramics workshop where artisans shape and hand paint the clay vessels before the pieces are fired in kilns, part of the campus where Clase Azul also runs its tequila production. He writes of tasting four expressions in sequence, described in the piece as joven, reposado, añejo and an extra-aged pour finished in whisky or sherry casks.
From there the route continues east to Arandas, where a staffer identified only as Sergio pours a flight of Los Altos tequilas for Arnott in a cellar setting at Tequila Centinela. The feature also folds in cultural asides, including Mexico's Pueblos Mágicos program, a federal designation for towns of historical and cultural note that now covers 177 towns nationwide, 12 of them in Jalisco. Arnott references D.H. Lawrence's 1927 travel collection Mornings in Mexico, written during Lawrence's time in the country, and describes the customary way tequila is served in the region: a shot glass of blanco alongside lime and sangrita, a spiced tomato based chaser, sipped rather than thrown back.
Who makes the tequila at the center of the story
Tequila Centinela traces its founding to 1904, when José Hernández established the distillery at Hacienda Centinela in Arandas, according to the company's own account of its history. The brand remains family controlled through Grupo Gran Casa Centinela, with heirs identified in Mexican business press as José, Sandra and María de Gracia Hernández Fonseca. The company has been expanding its footprint outside Mexico: an October 6, 2026 release distributed through PR Newswire announced new U.S. distribution agreements with Republic National Distributing Company covering Florida and Texas, markets the release described as accounting for a significant share of national tequila volume. The same materials put Centinela's barrel inventory at roughly 60,000 to 68,000 American white oak barrels, a figure supplied by the company and not independently audited.
Why the Highlands get treated as a separate tequila region
Mexico's Denomination of Origin for tequila dates to 1974, when the government restricted production of the spirit to designated territory concentrated in Jalisco and limited portions of four neighboring states. Within that territory, Los Altos is generally described as producing a fruitier, sweeter style tied to its red, iron-rich clay soil and cooler nighttime temperatures, in contrast to the earthier, more peppery profile associated with agave grown in the lowland valley around the town of Tequila itself. Arandas, where Centinela is based, and the smaller town of Atotonilco el Alto are the two principal production centers inside the Highlands.
What this means
This is a travel narrative, not a transaction or a regulatory filing, and its factual weight sits with the places and people Arnott describes rather than with any company claim about process. Readers comparing Highlands producers can find other Arandas area houses already in Tequila Watch's database, including G4, made a few kilometres away in Jesús María, though Centinela itself is not yet a tracked entry.