The Tequila Curse

Every year on the Day of the Dead, Guillermo Erickson Sauza invites family and friends to join him at the graves of his great-great-grandfather, Don Cenobio Sauza, and great-grandfather, Don Eladio Sauza, in the Panteón de Mezquitán in Guadalajara. The streets outside are packed with vendors selling skull candles, skeleton dolls, and loaves of bread baked into the shape of crossbones. Visitors throng at the wrought iron gates, so Erickson Sauza sprinkles a trail of marigold petals for his guests to follow and drapes his ancestors’ crypts with bright-orange garlands and wreaths arranged to read “Familia Sauza.”

At the head of each grave, Erickson Sauza sets out bottles of his own tequila, made according to Don Cenobio’s recipe and distilled on the family estate in the very copper pots Don Eladio purchased in 1903. But Erickson Sauza’s adherence to tradition is shot through with a bitter irony. He does not hold the legal rights to the likenesses of his grandfathers; the Sauza family name belongs to Beam, the global liquor conglomerate headquartered in Deerfield, Ill. Erickson Sauza’s tequila is Fortaleza (“fortitude” in English), and his small, independent distillery produces only 8,000 cases of it a year.