On New Year’s Eve 2005, Richard C. Poe II and a group of his closest friends from Mexico were celebrating the holiday at the New Sheridan Bar in Telluride, Colorado. Poe and his friends noticed that when patrons ordered and drank tequila, they would “chug” it, then grimace and make faces like they were drinking medicine or poison.
Most people remember their college days, drinking cheap tequila shots on spring break with the salt and lemon-chasers. The headaches and hangovers the next day would be painfully excruciating. Tequila has always had a reputation of being an inexpensive, “easy-to-get-drunk-on” liquor from Mexico.
On that New Year’s Eve night, the 35-year old Poe, a successful Honda dealer from El Paso, Texas, decided that he wanted to create a premium brand of tequila that would taste good, and one that people would enjoy drinking, rather than frown afterward and have to bite into a lemon wedge to chase away the awful taste.
Richard Poe was determined to make a better tequila—a pure and smooth tequila that would taste good and not give drinkers a hangover and headache the next day.
For the next six months, Poe spent many days at the distillery, working with the master tequila maker and with laboratory chemists to produce the right “formula” and technique to distill an ultra smooth, chemical-free tequila. Poe insists that no glycerin or calcium chloride are used in making his tequila, as with other brands. Some popular tequilas, he discovered, will “speed up” the process of fermentation with chemicals and additives.
The key, as Poe found out, is to begin with the finest agave plants. The agave farm he and the tequila master visited and contracted was one of the few in Mexico that uses no herbicides or pesticides. All of the fertilizers are organic, and the agave plants are aged naturally from 8 to 12 years.
After harvesting the “penas,” or hearts of the agave plants, and slowly roasting the pulp in clay ovens to extract the juices, the liquid is placed in fermentation tanks and yeast is added. Poe and his master distiller “culture” their own natural yeast and have developed a unique, secret technique for the adding of the yeast. Yeast acts upon the sugars of the roasted pulp, turning it in to alcohol.
In November 2007, Poe launched his Dos Lunas Grand Reserve, an extra añejo that breaks new ground in the luxury tequila category. Dos Lunas Grand Reserve is aged over 10 years (in sherry oak casks), and is the only tequila bottled in hand-blown, individually numbered Baccarat decanter.
Dos Lunas Grand Reserve is the epitome of luxury. Its elegance is unquestionable and opulence undeniable.
Says Dos Lunas founder Richard C. Poe II, “In many ways Grand Reserve is closer to the finest single malts and cognacs than to other tequilas. We set out to create the world’s best tequila and that goal informed every decision that was made, from growth through production to packaging.” The result is an Extra Añejo of remarkable complexity, unparalleled smoothness and luxurious presentation – a tequila that sets a new standard for the category.
