Tequila Fortaleza, bottled under NOM 1493 at Destileria La Fortaleza in the town of Tequila, Jalisco, was called the bar trade's benchmark tequila by former MGM Resorts International beverage director Craig Schoettler in a Chowhound feature published November 1, 2026.

Schoettler, now chief executive of Dharma Indian dry gin, told Chowhound that Fortaleza is the undeniable industry standard and the north star, pointing to steady bartender demand set against a small, fixed annual output. The outlet Taste Tequila separately ranks NOM 1493, the distillery where Fortaleza is made, first among what it counts as 152 licensed tequila distilleries in Mexico.

What Schoettler told Chowhound

Schoettler framed the brand's standing as a function of restricted supply meeting constant trade demand rather than a marketing push. Chowhound writer Robert Haynes-Peterson also quoted an unnamed industry colleague who compared Fortaleza's scarcity to that of Pappy Van Winkle, the rare Kentucky bourbon, arguing that neither bottle's demand traces back to a single viral moment. Schoettler separately told the outlet that everyone wants to pour it, and everyone wants it in their margarita, underscoring the brand's reach from high end cocktail programs down to everyday service wells.

Who runs Destileria La Fortaleza

Fortaleza is produced at NOM 1493, a site historically registered as Destileria La Fortaleza and also known by the name Tequila Los Abuelos, in the town of Tequila, Jalisco. Guillermo Erickson Sauza, a fifth generation member of the Sauza family, founded the brand and still distills there. His great great grandfather, Cenobio Sauza, built the family's first distillery, La Perseverancia, in 1873. A later generation built a second site called La Fortaleza, which the family shut down in 1968 after selling the main Sauza brand name in 1976. Guillermo began restoring the dormant distillery in 1999 and released the first bottlings under the Fortaleza name in 2005.

How the tequila is produced

Production at La Fortaleza follows methods that predate large scale industrial distilling. Agave is harvested only after at least eight years of growth, with some of the supply coming from estate grown fields, according to Chowhound's reporting. The harvested hearts are steam cooked in a masonry oven for roughly 36 hours, then crushed using a tahona, a rolling stone wheel method most large producers retired decades ago. Fermentation and distillation run through two copper pot stills that are themselves around a century old, a physical bottleneck that limits how much tequila each batch can yield.

What this means

Fortaleza's standing among bartenders is not new, and nothing in the Chowhound piece changes what trade readers have tracked since 2005. What the story does not supply is a production figure: neither Chowhound nor the distillery has published an annual case count, so the scarcity claim remains a qualitative read rather than a documented number. Tequila Watch's own database lists several current Fortaleza expressions, with the standard Blanco scoring 80 of 95 and the Blanco Still Strength bottling scoring 87 of 95 under the published four pillar method, a score rather than a tasting verdict.