Don Julio Blanco Tequila

Don Julio Blanco is Don Julio’s standard unaged tequila, with a bottle and label so familiar it can be easy to overlook it.

It isn’t always easy, being one of the biggest tequila brands in the world, your name found in virtually every liquor store in the country. In among the jumble of tequila bottles and labels, old and new, all competing for the customer’s attention, eyes can glance over the old and familiar names. After all, the original Don Julio, or Don Julio Gonzalez-Frausto Estrada to give him his full name, started making tequila in the 1940s.

Cutting blue agave plants for cooking in ovens at the Don Julio tequila distillery. — Getting Blue Agave Plants Ready for Cooking at the Don Julio Tequila Distillery

Touring the Don Julio Tequila Distillery

After almost 80 years in business, and with success all around the world, it would be easy for a brand to become complacent. Not Don Julio, though, as I discovered when I did a distillery tour and tasting in the town of Atotonilco El Alto in Jalisco, Mexico, a few years ago. It’s a truly remarkable rags to riches story, and you can read about it here in the first piece I ever wrote for the Drinkhacker website.

You obviously don’t go from rags to riches by making bad tequila, but the trick is to keep up those standards year after year. It also gets harder as you expand. Making good tequila in small batches is a lot easier than when you grow to factory-size proportions.

On my distillery visit I did a tasting of several of Don Julio’s tequilas with Master Distiller Enrique de Colsa. Here’s what he had to say about their blanco.

‘When smelling a tequila, you should first take a short sniff, then wait a few seconds and take a longer sniff. Sometimes the results are different, but in our blanco it smells the same whether you sniff it short or long. It’s herbal, you can smell the alcohol, and smell citric lime. Sip it and you get the harshness of a real tequila. That is a blanco!’

He said it with real pride, because a blanco is the basis of everything else they go on to do, and it makes no pretense of being more sophisticated than what it is.

Tasting Don Julio Blanco Tequila

So, a few years later, here I am again tasting Don Julio Blanco Tequila, but this time in the comfort of my own home rather than sitting round a table with the Master Distiller in Jalisco. The tequila is crystal-clear, and the bottle the now-familiar pear-drop or tear-shaped short and stocky bottle. Don Julio Blanco is bottled at 40% ABV, 80 proof.

Fun Fact: Don Julio was the first company to produce tequila in short bottles.

On the nose, yes, you can smell the alcohol, that typical tequila earthy and agave aroma, with some lemon/grapefruit citrus, and perhaps a dash of sweet pineapple. Blanco may be your basic workhorse tequila, but a good blanco is not unsubtle.

Tasting the tequila, the result is similar. It has a rough edge to it, but it has some subtleties too – more earthiness, a dash of peppery spice, still plenty of lemon and grapefruit, and a vanilla sweet element as well. The finish was smooth and lingering.

Judging Don Julio Blanco Tequila

Don Julio Blanco Tequila is a good, reliable tequila which you can certainly sip with pleasure or use as a base for your margaritas, palomas, or other tequila cocktails. My only quibble would be that at around $40 a bottle, it’s a little on the pricey side compared to some.