100 Per Cent Agave Is a Sugar Rule, Not a Purity Rule

The best-known claim on the shelf is about sugar

“100 per cent agave” is the phrase that carries the premium in tequila. It appears on the front of the bottle, it separates a USD 50 expression from a USD 25 one, and 71.19 per cent of Mexican production now qualifies — 415.4 million of 583.5 million litres in 2025, against 168.1 million litres of mixto.

Read the standard it comes from and the claim turns out to be narrower than the price implies. In NOM-006-SCFI-2012, the official Mexican standard for tequila, the definition of the product provides that the musts “may be enhanced and blended together before fermentation with other sugars up to a proportion no greater than 49% of total reducing sugars expressed in units of mass”.

100 per cent agave rules out that 49 per cent. It is a rule about what gets fermented. It says nothing about what happens to the liquid afterwards.

What the same standard permits after distillation

Two clauses sit a few pages apart and do most of the work here. The first defines mellowing — the “procedure to soften the flavor of the Tequila” — as the addition of one or more of: caramel colouring, natural oak or encino oak extract, glycerin, and sugar-based syrup.

The second is broader still. Tequila, the standard says, “may be enhanced by the addition of sweeteners, coloring, aromatizers and/or flavorings permitted by the Ministry of Health in order to provide or intensify its color, aroma and/or flavor.”

Neither clause is restricted to mixto. A bottle labelled 100 per cent agave may carry caramel, glycerin and syrup, and nothing in the labelling rules requires it to say so. So the premium claim on the front of the bottle verifies the agricultural input and is silent on the process — which is the half of the product a drinker is actually tasting.

There is one striking asymmetry in the same text. “Cold mixing” — adding or mixing any alcoholic beverage other than tequila at any stage, including the finished product — is prohibited outright. You may add glycerin and sugar syrup to a bottle of tequila. You may not add a splash of rum to it. The line the standard draws is not between pure and adulterated. It is between ingredients on an approved list and alcohol that did not come from an authorised producer.

Mezcal wrote the opposite rule

NOM-070-SCFI-2016, mezcal’s standard, does not stop at naming a plant and a place. It defines production categories, and the category travels with the bottle: ancestral, artesanal, and mezcal — the industrial class.

COMERCAM’s 2026 informe público shows how completely that definition binds the category. Of 6,912,256 litres certified in 2025, 91.03 per cent was artesanal and 8.20 per cent — 566,805 litres — was ancestral. The industrial class was 0.77 per cent, or 53,224 litres.

That is the real competitive difference between the two denominations, and it has nothing to do with smoke. Tequila regulated the input and left the process open. Mezcal regulated the process and made the input follow. A consumer choosing between them is not choosing between two flavour profiles; they are choosing between a category that certifies where its sugar came from and a category that certifies how it was made.

The demand signal exists and the certificate does not

“Additive-free” is not a legal category in tequila. There is no CRT certification for it, no standard definition, and no requirement that a producer declare an approved addition. It exists as a claim that brands make about themselves and third parties verify by other means.

Consumers appear to want exactly that. A brand-commissioned national study by Slingshot Tequila — 1,244 respondents across all 50 states, published May 2025 — reported that 95 per cent of frequent tequila buyers place great importance on the product being free of additives. That is a survey fielded by a company that sells tequila, so treat the number as a marketing claim rather than a measurement. But a brand does not spend money surveying a concern its buyers do not have.

Which creates a specific gap: a real and monetisable consumer preference, with no official instrument to certify it. The substitute is private verification — and the premium that a producer can charge for a claim nobody regulates is the premium that a competitor can claim without it.

Why the ancestral tier can outprice 100 per cent agave

Set the two claims side by side at their most credible. Mezcal’s ancestral category is 566,805 litres a year, legally defined, produced in earthen pits without an industrial route available at any price. Tequila’s 100 per cent agave category is 415.4 million litres a year, and the claim it makes is about the sugar.

One of those claims is checkable at the level of the process. The other is checkable at the level of the farm. Both are real; only one is what a discerning drinker thinks they are buying.

That is why the most expensive liquid in the agave category is not the oldest or the rarest. It is the smallest: a spirit whose production method is prescribed by law and whose annual output is measured in hundreds of thousands of litres rather than hundreds of millions. The premium is not in the plant. The plant is the same plant. It is in whether the producer was required to tell you what else went into the bottle — and in the fact that, for 71 per cent of tequila, nobody was.