Volcán de mi Tierra has decided that tequila should no longer arrive in something as modest as glass. No, glass is for people who still buy economy flights and pretend they enjoy mezcal.
This new release, called Colección La Gavilana I, comes in Italian marble, the sort of cool, white stone you usually find in Roman temples, celebrity bathrooms, or the foyers of luxury hotels that make you feel underdressed the moment you step inside.
The brand has always leaned toward aspiration, but this time it’s taken a running jump.
Ever since Moët Hennessy joined forces with the Gallardo family in 2017, Volcán has been positioning itself as tequila with a passport and an expense account. It’s made at NOM 1523 in Jalisco, naturally, with all the reverence expected from people who use the word “heritage” without irony.
But Gavilana is their newest attempt to create something that looks less like a drink and more like the sort of artwork a museum installs behind glass with a plaque explaining how civilisation lost the run of itself.
Inside the marble, though, there is an actual Volcán spirit, and a pretty exquisite one on paper: an añejo first tucked into European oak for 18 months before being moved, rather pointedly, into sherry casks for 414 days.
That’s long enough for the tequila to develop a complicated personality and for the marketing department to practice saying “four hundred and fourteen” with solemn gravity.
We didn’t taste it (because let’s face it, nobody hands out samples of something priced like a used hatchback), but it sounds lush, dense, a little theatrical. A tequila that wants a velvet curtain drawn before you sip it.
The bottle, however, is the real star here. Carved from Bianco Carrara marble, the same quarry that kept Michelangelo in business, this bottle arrives with a weight that suggests you could defend someone with it.
ARCA, the stone company brought in for the project, treats marble reverently, with the occasional artistic flourish designed to remind you how expensive this all is.
The bottle makes its debut at Art Basel in Miami, where it will sit in a showroom pretending it’s unaware of the attention, like a model who insists she hates being photographed.
The brand’s CEO, Santiago Cortina Gallardo, spoke about fine craftsmanship and intention behind this release, and ARCA’s founder added a line about marble becoming a vessel for purpose.
These are the sorts of sentences that float gracefully through high-end product launches — beautiful, meaningless, full of good tailoring.
But then we arrive at the price: a cool $2,900. It’s not outrageous, especially when we’re looking at the world’s most expensive tequilas.
Outrageous requires surprise, and anyone looking at a marble tequila bottle knows what’s coming.
This is the cost of owning something that exists purely to make everything else on your bar tremble with inadequacy.
It’s rolling out now, though “rolling out” is generous. It will appear, discreetly, in the kinds of shops where the floor is always too shiny and the staff never blink.
