Can Tequila Compete With 50-Year Scotch? All Signs Point to This $2,300 Bottle
When Carmen Villarreal took over Casa San Matías in 1997, she wasn’t stepping into a role she’d been preparing for. She was stepping into a void.
Her husband, Don Jesús López Román — the master distiller who helped pioneer long‑aged tequila — had just died unexpectedly, leaving one of Mexico’s oldest family‑owned distilleries without a leader.
“It wasn’t really the plan at that time,” she says. “But it was something that was needed.”
Villarreal had studied marketing earlier in her career and had been involved in the business in the ’80s and early ’90s, but running a distillery was different. After taking over, she enrolled in a high‑level management program and built a board of advisors. “I needed to prepare myself better,” she says. “Two of my classmates became really my mentors.”
Courtesy The Last Drop
Nearly three decades later, that unplanned transition is the reason she’s now at the center of one of the most interesting tequila releases in recent memory. This fall, The Last Drop Distillers — the London outfit known for bottling some of the rarest spirits in the world — selected one of her long‑aged blends as its first‑ever tequila.
The release, No. 40, wasn’t a forgotten barrel discovered by chance. It came from Casa San Matías’s own reserves, the result of years of patient aging and careful blending. Villarreal and her team prepared several samples. The Last Drop’s panel chose a blend of a seven‑year tequila aged in French Limousin port casks with two ten‑year-old tequilas aged in American oak barrels. Given that you can understand why there are just 435 bottles of tequila and that it has a suggested retail price of $2,300.
Courtesy The Last Drop
“Being the first tequila signature creation that they launched, it was really an honor,” she says.
For The Last Drop — whose previous releases include 50‑plus‑year Scotch and Cognac — choosing tequila at all was a statement. Choosing Villarreal was another one.
Casa San Matías, founded in 1886 in the Highlands of Jalisco, is one of the first distilleries to explore extended aging. Long before extra añejo became a formal category, Don Jesús was experimenting with time, wood, and the expressive potential of agave. Villarreal absorbed that ethos and expanded it.
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She still insists on traditional production: slow cooking agave in brick ovens, tahona extraction for certain lots, and a mix of copper and stainless‑steel distillation. But she’s also pushed the distillery into deeper experimentation — especially with exploring different types of yeast and fermentation. “The yeast has been very important,” she says. “It is fun, interesting, and really an eye‑opener to see that there are opportunities to innovate in our industry, respecting tradition.”
Her barrel program is even more ambitious. Casa San Matías now maintains more than 22,000 casks from different forests and cooperages, including French, American, and ex‑wine barrels. The port cask used for the Last Drop release was one she initially doubted. “We were skeptical at the beginning because the raw material there was too sweet,” she says. But over seven years, the tequila evolved. After blending, she and master distiller Rocío Rodríguez let the combined liquid rest again for more than a year “to become one instead of three.”
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That patience is central to her worldview. Tequila, she reminds people, is not a fast spirit. Agave takes six to seven years to mature. Aging takes as long as it takes. “You need time. You need patience. You need love and passion to achieve something meaningful,” she says.
Her leadership has also been defined by stability. Casa San Matías is the main employer in its small town, and she’s proud of the company she’s built. “We have a solid team, and we have almost zero rotation,” she says. Remaining family‑owned in an era of conglomerates wasn’t a business strategy so much as a commitment. “We are not going to be a big company,” she says. “We want to be a great company.”
For all the attention the Last Drop release has drawn among collectors and spirits insiders, Villarreal still talks about tequila the way someone talks about a family member, with affection, protectiveness, and a sense of responsibility.
“I would love to sit with Jesús,” she says. “And say, look how we have been taking care of the company after all those years.”