Film Star Takes Shine To Tequila

0

Why create your own brand of tequila? For starters, to be able to import the stuff without running afoul of liquor laws.

That’s part of the motivation behind Casamigos Tequila, a line of agave liquor created by actor George Clooney and night life entrepreneur Rande Gerber that hit BevMo stores in California and Arizona last month.

Clooney and Gerber own neighboring homes in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and drink tequila when they visit. Bartenders would suggest new brands, but neither Gerber nor Clooney ever settled on a favorite.

“There was nothing really great,” Gerber said. “So we said we should do our own house blend.”

They found a distiller, Finos de Agave in Jalisco, and started tinkering. Two years and 800 bottles of samples later, they found a batch they loved and started having cases of it shipped to their homes in Cabo and Malibu. They liberally gave bottles to friends and associates.

Gerber said they never intended to sell the stuff, until their distiller called to say they were importing so much tequila to the United States that they needed to get licensed. So they started working with an importer to make it an official operation. Gerber and Clooney brought in a third partner, Arizona land developer Mike Meldman, a friend who built their Cabo houses.

They named the brand Casamigos – loosely translated as “house of friends” – after their adjacent Cabo homes, which share a plot of land. And they came up with the core of a marketing campaign after a boozy night out at Cafe Habana in Malibu last year.

After returning from the restaurant, Clooney fell asleep in the guest room at Gerber’s house. In the wee hours of the morning, Gerber’s wife woke up and thought her husband had gone to sleep in the guest room to avoid waking her.

So she climbed into bed, and Clooney turned around to find himself in bed with Gerber’s wife – model Cindy Crawford.

“We were all laughing hysterically,” Gerber said. “Then we realized, that’s the campaign. ‘Drink a bottle of Casamigos, and you might wake up with Cindy Crawford.’”

Casamigos will be on sale in 33 states by March, and Gerber said the young brand has already sold 60,000 cases to distributors. Bottles go for $44 for unaged silver tequila and $49 for aged reposado, about the same price as the upscale Patron brand.

– James Rufus Koren

No posts to display