The most famous basketball player in history has a tequila, and this holiday season it has a new bottle. Cincoro Tequila, the luxury tequila brand co-founded by Michael Jordan and a group of NBA team owners, launched a limited-edition Añejo Reserva on November 4, priced at $149.99 for a 750 ml bottle.
What is in the bottle
The tequila starts with Blue Weber agave from both the highlands and lowlands of Jalisco, the Mexican state at the heart of tequila production. It is aged for 28 months in Tennessee whiskey barrels and then blended with Cincoro’s Extra Añejo, the brand’s oldest expression, and bottled at 40% alcohol. The brand describes aromas of oak, cooked agave and maple, with toasted oak, baking spices and dark chocolate on the palate and a finish of cooked agave, dried fruit and warm spices. It arrives in a white-and-gold bottle and gift box with an agave design and is available online and at retailers including Total Wine & More and Binny’s, as well as selected restaurants and cocktail bars.
Jordan says he is proud of the result and happy to share it with friends and family. His fellow co-founder Emilia Fazzalari says that they personally taste every batch before bottling. Cincoro has said it has won more than 36 awards at spirits competitions, and Robb Report reports it has sold more than 1.5 million bottles since launch.
The price ladder
At $149.99 this is neither a casual purchase nor a collector’s trophy. Cincoro’s range starts with a blanco at around $70 and climbs with age to about $1,700 for the Extra Añejo. The Añejo Reserva sits in the comfortable middle, the sort of bottle that is priced to be given, and it is described as limited-edition without a stated quantity, a convention we have noticed this autumn from supercars to cigars.
Reading the bottle
Borrowing from whiskey. Ageing tequila in Tennessee whiskey barrels is a nod to American whiskey, whose barrels are a common tool for adding warmth and sweetness. It speaks to a drinker who knows bourbon and is curious about agave, and it shows how categories in premium spirits are blending. The producer has not said which distillery supplied the barrels.
The celebrity question. Celebrity spirits are a crowded field, and the best ones have to prove that the liquid is more than a famous name. Cincoro’s answer is a blend of star power and structure: co-owners who are sports-team owners, awards, and a pricing ladder that looks like a real portfolio. The company’s story is about the people who taste each batch, which makes the product feel handmade even at scale.
The Map to Modern Luxury
THE CURATED CALENDAR
Discover the world’s most prestigious gatherings & exhibitionsAdditives, quietly in the background. Tequila rules allow certain additives, up to one percent of volume, without disclosure, a practice that is common among popular brands, leaving it to consumers to taste and decide. We looked at this debate earlier this year, when Patrón launched a campaign about what is actually in a bottle. Nothing in Cincoro’s materials says whether the Añejo Reserva uses additives; a buyer who cares can ask. As the clean-label conversation grows, we expect more brands to be asked.
A gifting calendar. A white-and-gold gift box released on November 4 is a holiday product by design. Limited-edition releases at holiday time are now one of the main ways spirits brands compete for the shelf next to the cheese board, as we saw with the wine and bourbon backgammon sets.
None of this takes away from the pleasure of a well-aged añejo, and 28 months is long enough to show real character. But a bottle like this works best when it is treated as a good gift and a good conversation, not as an investment, and a drinker who wants to understand tequila would do well to taste it beside a few other añejos and see which one they actually prefer.
That, in the end, is the right test for any celebrity spirit: not whose name is on it, but whether the glass is empty by the end of the evening.
