Alto Canto

Alto Canto (“high song”) is a wildly unique and ambitious new project driven by the dogged pursuit of purity and excellence in tequila. There are few tequila brands with such high-minded aspirations as Alto Canto and even fewer who commit to them so fully.

Daday Suárez grew up in Mexico City blessed with a curious intellect and a keen passion for learning. A successful entrepreneur with degrees in mechanical engineering and philosophy as well as a sommelier certification (initially pursued as a hobby to better understand wine menus), Daday decided in 2018 that he wanted to create something more tangible as a legacy for his three children. He had fallen in love with the raw production of tequila—the conversion of the agave and its complex sugars into unique and compelling sprits—as a profound symbol of transformation and Mexican heritage and identity, so he set about the deceptively simple goal of producing the highest-quality tequila possible.

He began by tracking down his ideal collaborator, maestro tequilero Juan Reyes, a long-term industry veteran with an interest in pursuing new ideas. Together, they constructed a micro distillery and lab (including small forty-kilogram ovens and tiny twenty-liter copper pot stills) to experiment with formulations, eventually landing on a distinctive, powerfully aromatic agave spirit which became the beating heart of Alto Canto.

The next step was to recreate their desired profile consistently through low-intervention, environmentally minded means rather than industrial production methods. Juan determined that the best conditions to achieve this involved low temperature and high humidity—conditions which could be found in the 9,000-foot-high-altitude mountains of Jalisco’s Sierra del Tigre. This remote site brought the added benefit of environmental purity—the process of spontaneous fermentation here was entirely free of possible contamination and could offer unique flora and yeast compared with even the next-highest elevation producer in Jalisco (El Pandillo, at 6,800 feet in Los Altos). Daday and Juan set about to build and register a brand-new distillery in the mountains.

All other aspects of production have embraced the most time-intensive, laborious, and integral methods of artisanal tequila-making: certified organic agaves are cooked using a unique stone oven, milled with a traditional stone tahona, fermented naturally involving malolactic fermentation in traditional wooden vats (tinas), and finally distilled using small alembic copper pot stills.

Alto Canto is as distinctive as the minds who created it—a tequila unique for both its obvious talking points (did you say 9,000 feet?!) and the subtle but undeniable passion which led to its creation. The legacy is being secured.