The Three Houses of Clase Azul

For most of the years I have been bringing people to Mexico, Clase Azul was a bottle. You knew it across a dining room before you knew what was in it: the tall white ceramic, the blue feathering painted by hand, the little bell on top that someone at the table always rings. It was the thing a host opened when the evening had gone well, and that was more or less where the story ended.

Then, almost without anyone noticing, the company stopped thinking of itself as a tequila and started thinking of itself as a place. In the autumn of 2022 it opened a house in Los Cabos. This February it opened a second one behind the gates of an old mansion in Polanco, and in May a third, on fifty acres of volcanic ground in the highlands of Jalisco, an hour out of Guadalajara, where the agave is actually grown and the decanters are actually made.

I have now been to all three, and I find them interesting less as tasting rooms than as a map. Between them they trace the Mexico I spend my year moving through, from the Pacific tip of Baja, where I have worked for a decade, to the quiet streets of Polanco, to the red earth of Los Altos where the whole thing began. Each house behaves differently because each part of the country behaves differently, and that is the part I want to tell you about.

Los Cabos, where it started

The first house is the one people are least likely to notice, because it sits inside The Shoppes at Palmilla in San José del Cabo, which is not where you expect to find anything that matters. It opened in the autumn of 2022, and I remember thinking at the time that it was an odd place for a tequila company to plant its flag. Ten years of working in Baja Sur have since taught me that it was exactly the right one. Cabo was the first place that understood what the brand was trying to be, long before Mexico City or Jalisco did, and the house is a thank-you note to that.

What you walk into is really three rooms wearing one roof. There is a boutique at the front with the full run of decanters, including the editions you cannot find at home. Behind it is an oval bar, and around the bar, a restaurant called La Terraza with an omakase counter that looks out over the desert hills rather than the sea, which I think is the better view in that part of the peninsula. The kitchen belongs to the company’s creative chef, Iván Arias, and the menu wanders from Jalisco down to Baja, so you can eat a torta ahogada with birria, a very Guadalajara thing to do, with the Pacific a few minutes away. Apart from the white and blue marble, which came from Brazil, every surface in the place was made in Mexico: the woodwork, the tiles, the mosaics, even a kind of leather made from agave.

PhotoClase Azul México

The part I like best has its own door. A dark gallery leads to a small tasting room that seats eight, where five of the house tequilas are poured alongside things you would not think to put next to tequila, a sour beer, a fortified wine, a few drops of cocoa bitters. There is a discreet door through to the restaurant for afterwards, which tells you everything about how they expect the evening to go. More recently the boutique added something called Cosmos, a twenty-minute questionnaire that ends with a decanter glazed and marked for you alone. It is the only place in the world they do it, and it is the kind of small, slightly theatrical thing that works wonderfully at the end of a week in Baja when everyone has stopped checking their phones.

Polanco, behind the gates

Casa de los Leones is a different animal, and it has to be, because Mexico City is. It opened in February of this year at Luis G. Urbina 104, on one of those quiet Polanco streets where the houses were built in the middle of the last century for families who had done well and wanted everyone to know it. The mansion kept its stained glass and its bones. Everything else was handed to C Cúbica, the studio of Andrea Cesarman, Emilio Cabrero and Marco Coello, who treated the commission less as an interiors job than as a group show of Mexican design, and that is what makes the place worth an afternoon of anyone’s time, tequila or no tequila.

You enter through a tunnel lined in ceramic, which sounds gimmicky and isn’t, because clay is the material the whole house is built around: the same earth that grows the agave is the earth the decanters are made of, and the lobby makes that argument with a celosía of ceramic by ACOOCOORO that is meant to keep growing over the years. From there the house is a sequence of rooms by people whose work I follow anyway. Thierry Jeannot did the chandeliers in the lounge and the cocktail bar. Raúl de la Cerda’s chrome tables and bars turn up everywhere, catching light the way the bottles do. In the lounge, Beatriz Morales hung the largest rug she has ever woven, its blue made entirely from agave fiber, and underneath it is a sofa that took the best part of a year to make and carries the feathered pattern from the decanter. You take your shoes off before you sit on it, which is the first clue that this is a house and not a bar.

There is, of course, a bar. The Blue Bar downstairs is a dark, curved room with a small stage, and upstairs there is a floor given over to collectors, with a library, a terrace off the library, and a private tasting room where the vault editions live. The public experience is a ninety-minute tasting called Taste of Time: five tequilas, each with a bite from the kitchen, walking you through the house and the garden and ending in the cocktail bar for what the company, quite correctly, calls the sobremesa. It runs by appointment only, which in Mexico City is simply good manners.

PhotoCasa de los Leones

The first time I went I spent more time looking at the rooms than drinking in them, and I suspect that is the point. When we take a group there for an evening, the house will hold seventy people, but it was never built for a seated dinner. What works is four hours of drinks and passed plates moving through the rooms, with music downstairs in the Blue Bar, so the evening behaves the way a good party in a private house behaves: nobody is assigned a chair and everybody ends up in the kitchen. One thing to know: it is a house for adults, so children stay with the nanny, and there are no bedrooms, so you sleep somewhere else and arrive, as you should in Polanco, by car.

Los Altos, where the agave is

The third house is the newest, and the one that takes the most effort to reach, which is part of why I like it. La Hacienda opened on 22 May in the highlands of Los Altos de Jalisco, an hour’s drive out of Guadalajara, on fifty acres of the red volcanic ground that gives the agave from this part of the state its particular sweetness. It took more than ten years to build, which in Mexico is either a scandal or a sign that somebody cared, and having walked it, I can tell you it is the second. A friend from my hotel years now runs the restaurant side of it, which is as good a reason as any to keep driving out.

The idea is to let you watch the whole thing happen, and it does. You arrive at a pavilion for a cocktail and something to eat, then walk through the agave to a visitor center built as a modern reading of the main house of a traditional hacienda, where a retrospective tells the story of a bar owner in Guadalajara who in 1997 decided his tequila deserved a bottle worth keeping. From there you go into the tequila factory itself and see the piñas cooked, milled under a tahona and distilled, and then into the ceramics workshop, a working atelier where the decanters are thrown, fired and finished by hand. They used to keep this part out of sight. Now it is the center of the visit, and I think that is the most honest decision the brand has made.

PhotoClase Azul México

The tastings happen in the cellar among thousands of aging casks, and the Live version ends with six courses at OYA, the estate’s restaurant, which cooks its way through different eras of Mexican food with the tequilas alongside. The whole day runs five to seven hours depending on which journey you book, and they take no more than ten people at a time, which tells you they have understood something that bigger distilleries have not: the agave fields are not a theme park, and the people who travel this far to stand in them do not want to be herded.

What I like most about La Hacienda is that it closes the circle the other two houses only gesture at. In Cabo you drink the tequila by the sea. In Polanco you drink it surrounded by the designers who have made it an object. Here you drink it a few meters from the plant it came out of, with the kiln still warm.

Three ways of being Mexican

I do not think of these as tequila stops, and I would rather you didn’t either. What Clase Azul has done, at considerable expense, is build three arguments about Mexico in three different accents. The Cabo house argues that the peninsula has a culture of its own and is not just somewhere to be warm in February. The Polanco house argues that Mexican design is a serious contemporary movement with names worth learning, which anyone who has walked through the fair with me already knows. And the Jalisco estate argues, more quietly than the other two, that none of it means anything without the land and the people who work it.

In practice each one fits a different kind of week. The Cabo tasting room is a last-night thing, when the group has spent days in the desert and the sea and is ready to sit still with something complicated in a glass. Casa de los Leones belongs to an evening in the capital, ideally after a day of galleries, when the conversation about objects and makers can simply continue over a drink in rooms made by the people we have been talking about. And the highlands are for the smaller party that wants to go further than the city and has a day to give to the drive, the fields and a long lunch. None of these places is ours. They belong to the brand, they open their doors to anyone who books, and that is as it should be. What we bring is the rest of the week around them, and the twenty years of knowing which door to walk through first.

Three arguments about Mexico in three different accents.