From KCRW, I'm Evan Klyman, and this is Good Food.

Who hasn't heard of Jose Cuervo? The brand is ubiquitous, but the man? Well, few know his story.

In Tequila Wars, Jose Cuervo in the bloody struggle for the spirit of Mexico,

award-winning journalist Ted Genoves turns his eye on

Cuervo himself and chronicles how he transformed a struggling family business into an

agave kingdom, all while navigating death threats from Pancho Villa and being branded a public

enemy of the United States. Welcome back to good food, Ted.

It's wonderful to be here. I'm really excited.

So let's get into it.

Your book starts out in the tumultuous late 1800s,

which is rife with violence,

there's a lot of social backstabbing,

there are political coups. And there are two

family names that are prominent in the valley of tequila, Cuervo and Sausa. Give us some background for

these two families and how they gained a foothold in this budding tequila industry.

Right. So the Cuerrebo family is really the first to come into the tequila valley and make an empire of making the spirit that was then called Beno Mascall, which is to say a wine made from the mescal plant,

the agave plant. And they were really the lords of the tequila valley for a century before

Jose Cuervo was born. But at the same time that he was a child and was learning to make tequila on the

neighboring estate was a young man named Sonobio Sousa, who was also learning the trade

and was starting to build an empire of his own. And so through the late 19th century and the early 20th

century, the leaders in the industry were the Cuervo and Salsa families, and those brands

remain at the top of the industry today.

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