What does it take to calm a fourth-generation tequila maker before the microphones go hot?

At the Bourbon Orleans Hotel in New Orleans, the possible answer was already sitting on the table.

The tropical storm expected near the city had the good sense to remain dramatic from a distance. The sky kept changing its mind. Sunlight appeared, retreated behind the clouds and returned just long enough to remind us that the French Quarter was still humid and undefeated.

The Bourbon Orleans sits behind Jackson Square between Bourbon and Royal Streets. Its heated saltwater pool occupies a lush courtyard framed by leafy palms and French Quarter architecture, a surprisingly secluded setting considering the noise waiting just outside the hotel.

Grace Gonzalez sat across from me on a matching couch during Tales of the Cocktail. She was polished, warm and slightly nervous. That made two of us, though I had no intention of admitting it first.

I considered channeling my inner charm monster, the version of myself built for tense rooms, stalled conversations and guests who suddenly remember cameras are real. Then I looked down.

Three bottles of El Mayor Tequila were sitting between us.

There are worse ways to find your courage.

Before the microphones got serious, I suggested a shot. Gonzalez laughed, agreed and the breeze moved through the courtyard right on time. Nervous energy gave way to jokes, tequila and enough looseness to make the afternoon feel like a conversation rather than an examination.

Gonzalez described the El Mayor range as smooth and elegant without losing the earthiness, spice and punch she expects from tequila.

The tequila helped. Her humor did more.

While discussing an El Mayor and chocolate seminar at Tales, Gonzalez explained that her friend and mixologist Tiffany Barriere would handle the cocktails.

“I cannot make drinks, but I can make tequila,” Gonzalez said.

Her full name is Graciela. She goes by Grace because people have butchered Graciela often enough that practicality won. There is also one variation she rejects completely.

“It’s not Gracie,” she told me.

Her mother is named Graciela. So were both grandmothers. In a Mexican family where several women shared the same name, nicknames were inevitable. Some survived. Others needed to be retired. Grace made her preference clear.

The conversation about her own name led naturally to the one printed on the bottles between us.

El Mayor means “the eldest” in Spanish, and Gonzalez described the tequila as deeply tied to her father, Rodolfo Gonzalez. He remains master distiller for the core Blanco, Reposado and Añejo expressions, while Grace leads limited editions and innovations.

This is a living family business rather than a ceremonial succession story. Her father has not faded into the background while his daughter assumes a throne. Their authority overlaps. The tradition remains active while Grace tests where it can go next.

El Mayor is made at Destiladora Gonzalez Lux near Arandas in the highlands of Jalisco. Its production begins with 100% Blue Weber agave grown in volcanic soil, without additives, and includes an heirloom yeast maintained for more than 125 years. The Gonzalez family’s tequila work spans four generations, with Grace working across innovation, education and international ambassadorship.

Long before she represented tequila around the world, she experienced it from the passenger seat of her father’s car. As a child, Gonzalez accompanied him to the agave fields and distillery. He showed her how the plants grew, why mature agave mattered and how production could either preserve what came from the land or waste it.

Her career plans formed unusually early. In kindergarten, while classmates talked about becoming nurses, police officers and firefighters, Gonzalez announced that she wanted to make tequila.

Her teacher understandably called home. There was some concern that Gonzalez’s father might have a drinking problem. Her mother had to explain that he produced tequila for a living and that their daughter was fascinated by his work.

Kindergarten career day rarely ends with a discussion about distilled spirits. Still, the story captures Gonzalez neatly. Other children were imagining careers they had seen from a distance. She was describing the world she already knew.

By 13, that world had become sensory. During a visit to a barrel warehouse, she was allowed to smell wine, place a small amount on her palate and spit it out. Her father would pour different spirits and ask what she noticed. He wanted the appealing aromas, the flawed ones and everything in between.

Before Gonzalez had the professional vocabulary to explain a spirit, she understood the pleasure of paying attention to one. However, her enthusiasm did not guarantee a position in the family business. After college, Gonzalez went to her father and asked for a job. He told her she had no experience. She reminded him that he had instructed her to concentrate on school rather than work.

“That sounds like a you problem,” she remembered him saying.

She found experience elsewhere, returned and entered the family operation through the warehouse. Where she counted cases, cleaned bottles and handled the work that rarely appears in polished stories about multigenerational companies.

Loving the family business did not excuse her from learning how it functioned. By the time Gonzalez earned her place, tequila had become one of the most valuable categories in American spirits. Tequila and mezcal generated $6.4 billion in U.S. supplier sales in 2025, placing the category second behind vodka by revenue. Sales were down 4.1%, however, a reminder that even a culturally dominant category is not immune to a more cautious market, according to the Distilled Spirits Council.

The category also remains unusually dependent on American drinkers . Mexico produced 495.8 million liters of tequila in 2024 and exported 400.3 million liters. The United States received 334.9 million liters, nearly 84% of all exported volume.

The scale suggests tequila has already conquered America. Drinking behavior makes the picture more nuanced. Gallup found that 54% of U.S. adults said they consumed alcohol in 2025, the lowest level in its nearly 90-year trend. A record 53% considered moderate drinking harmful to health, while drinkers reported an average of 2.8 drinks during the previous week, the lowest average Gallup has recorded since 1996.

For Gonzalez, a more selective consumer makes education more valuable. Her job is not simply to convince people to drink more tequila. She wants them to understand what is in the glass before deciding what the category is worth. That begins with clearing tequila of a few old charges.

When I asked what people do to tequila that she finds disrespectful, Gonzalez went directly to the hangover prosecution. Someone drinks wine, moves to beer, adds tequila at the end of the night and wakes up prepared to blame the final spirit poured.

She would like the rest of the evening entered into evidence.

Gonzalez also refuses to accept “I don’t like tequila” as the end of a conversation. She asks what the person normally drinks. A vodka or gin drinker may respond to Blanco. Someone who prefers Scotch might find a comfortable entry through Reposado. A bourbon drinker may appreciate Extra Añejo.

Then she offered a line worthy of a tasting-room wall.

“Taste buds are just like muscles,” she said. “You can train them.”

Her approach is patient rather than evangelical. Gonzalez does not promise everyone will fall in love with tequila. She believes most people can learn why a well-made version deserves appreciation.

The respect she asks people to show the spirit echoes the respect she had to demand for herself.

There is no authoritative public census showing how many women currently hold master distiller positions in tequila. Broader figures offer context, though they should not be mistaken for a tequila-specific count. Of the 2,235 U.S. craft distilleries operating in 2022, fewer than 8% were woman-owned, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy .

Gonzalez did not need a percentage to tell her that the room had not been designed with her in mind. People shut doors in her face and asked, “Where’s your father?” She heard that she was only working until she married, that she would eventually leave and that she was merely the owner’s daughter passing through the business.

She called her father when the resistance became difficult to navigate. He reminded her that the path she had chosen would not please everyone. Before they hung up, he gave her the sentence she needed.

“If somebody can do it, it’s you.”

When I asked whether a family legacy stretching across roughly 150 years could become a trap, Gonzalez answered by widening the frame. Her father taught her that the business existed for more than Grace, Rodolfo and her brother Paul, the trio he calls the Three Musketeers. It also supports the people working in the agave fields, at the distillery and inside the offices.

She estimated that the wider operation includes almost 600 people working in the fields and roughly 150 across the distillery and offices. Gonzalez does not have children. The company, she said, is part of what she intends to leave behind.

Responsibility has not made Gonzalez solemn. Curiosity remains the more playful part of her inheritance. She runs and works out largely because she loves to eat. During her travels, she will sit alone at a restaurant, whether it is a neighborhood dive or an ambitious dining room, and ask the staff what she has to try. She treats cities with the same appetite. Art can be inside a museum, but it can also be a building, a dive bar or a street with enough character to make her stop walking.

The meals become research, even when she is supposedly off duty.

Her pairing philosophy rejects the automatic marriage of tequila and heavily spiced Mexican food. Both can arrive with enough force to fight for control of the palate. Gonzalez prefers more space between them. Blanco can work with sushi or sashimi. Reposado suits grilled shrimp. Tequila can stand up to barbecue.

When I asked for a casual pairing, she offered caviar with Blanco.

Grace and I apparently define casual differently.

She eventually landed on chips and mild salsa, though the caviar had jokingly already told me everything I needed to know.

The same curiosity follows her into the distillery. Her role becomes clearest in the limited editions, where inheritance gives way to decisions that are distinctly hers. She has worked with single-estate agave and Chardonnay, rum and Cabernet Sauvignon cask finishes. For El Mayor Café Reposado, Blanco rests for three months in bourbon barrels that previously held coffee beans, producing vanilla and a restrained coffee finish while leaving the agave recognizable.

At Tales of the Cocktail, she took a similar approach to education. El Mayor hosted pool gatherings at the Bourbon Orleans, followed by a tequila-and-chocolate seminar with Barriere, whose palate Gonzalez described as remarkably similar to her own. The first session sold out. Chocolate gave her another route into the argument she had been making all afternoon. Tequila can travel far beyond the settings drinkers assign to it.

Before we wrapped, I asked the question what is she on her way to now, and what does she refuse to leave behind?

Gonzalez talked about education, new markets and the surprising size of the world. Tequila may feel familiar in the United States, yet she continues to meet people who know little about how it is made. She wants to keep teaching them about what she calls the most important drink in Mexico.

She also wants to preserve the company for her father, her brother, herself and the people whose work sits inside every bottle. When she returns to Mexico, she tells the team how drinkers are responding in other cities and countries. Few things satisfy her more than seeing an agave plant growing in Jalisco, then later finding the finished bottle on a shelf somewhere like Orlando.

The storm never really came. The breeze stayed. The shot helped. Gonzalez relaxed, or at least she was polite enough to let me believe I had something to do with it.

By the time we finished, the bottles on the table felt less like props and more like evidence. They carried the work of a father who made his daughter earn her place, a woman who returned after doors closed and an industry whose enormous American audience has not cured its misunderstandings.

The little girl who unsettled her teacher by announcing that she wanted to make tequila now travels the world explaining why the spirit deserves patience, respect and better company than somebody’s worst college memory.

Grace Gonzalez does not want tequila to become precious.

She wants it to be understood.