There’s a dizzying number of tequilas on the market but only one brand is making a case for Mexico’s flagship spirit as a fragrance. On Wednesday, luxury lifestyle brand Maison Solís made its first foray into the eau de parfum space with a line of three tequila-inspired scents: Blanco, Reposado, and Añejo.
Spirits industry veteran Joseph D. Solís sought to dissect and rebuild the essence of the agave spirit with the help of African American fragrance consultant and sommelier-turned-perfumer Ethan Turner. The release comes just a few months after the January launch of the Maison Solís brand, which debuted with a line of luxury barware essentials handcrafted and painted by a fourth-generation family of coppersmiths in Michoacan, Mexico. Inspired by the cultural significance of agave and its transformative journey into tequila, the new fragrances pay homage to Solís’s Mexican-Filipino heritage and 25 years in the beverage industry.
“Filipinos played a big part in the development of agave spirits,” Solís says. “The Filipinos taught Mexicans distilling and techniques through Tuba and other indigenous spirits, which then became tequila, mezcal, etc.”
Even before he embarked on a career in spirits, Solís saw scent as a way to explore different parts of the world without having to get on a plane. “As a child, with humble beginnings, fragrance always served as an escape for me,” Solís says. “I remember working as a teenager and saving up my money to buy department store fragrances; one spray would transport me to another place.”
Now, Solís is giving others a means to escape to the homeland of agave spirits through the senses. Sight and feel come with his bar tools, scent arrives in the form of the fragrance line, and taste? Well, that’s whatever you decide is in your glass.
As Solís tells us, that final part — tequila — has largely morphed into something that’s straying further and farther away from its ancestral roots. “In the wine, spirits, and cocktail space, I think that Mexican ingredients that are holistic to the culture have been appropriated,” Solís says. “When you have all these different traditional flavors that are now being mass produced without acknowledging the source, heritage, story, and rituals around them, those stories aren’t being told.”
In crafting the three core expressions, Solís and Turner went to great lengths to ensure the fragrances didn’t just smell like three different tequilas. “I think the most challenging aspect of this fragrance line was finding a great balance between creating an agave expression that was true to the nature of the three different representations of tequila, while still aiming to make it a parfum,” Turner tells VinePair. “With Blanco we wanted the fresh, earthy, yet light fruit and floral balance that we see in a blanco tequila, but marrying that to a perfume meant getting creative. The same can be said with the deeper honeyed and smokey scents found in reposado and añejo expressions.”
Of course, the process did begin with a number of different tequilas as points of reference. “I took 12 of my favorite tequilas in the world, broke them down with [Turner], and built them back up in the form of a scent,” Solís says. One of those tequilas, a Cognac-aged expression from Excellia Tequila, was a crucial point of inspiration for the project.
After six months of R&D, and a meticulous 25 rounds of trial and error for the Añejo expression, the brand settled on three fragrances, and now plans to launch a different line of “scent stories” annually. Each of this year’s expressions arrives in a 30-milliliter bottle. The Blanco retails for $110, and features a depth of aromas from coconut and cedar to Cognac, lime, and bergamot. The Reposado comes in at a slightly higher price point of $120. It strives to capture more whiskey barrel-adjacent notes, with scents of caramel, teakwood, and cinnamon. Finally, the Añejo retails for $140, and leans heavily into scented expressions of leather, vanilla, and aged rhum.
For those who want to get a small taste of everything in the collection, the brand also offers a Discovery Set, which features a 5-milliliter bottle of each eau de parfum for $60 MSRP.
