Tequila Additives and the “100% Agave” Scandal (2026)

By Vim, Editor of 12×75. Last reviewed: July 2026. This piece reports allegations that are contested and unproven in court. Where a brand has responded, its denial is included.

Here is a phrase that is supposed to mean something and increasingly does not: 100% agave. I have spent weeks reading lawsuits, lab methods and regulatory filings to work out what is actually going on with tequila additives, and the short version is that the label on your bottle is no longer the last word. Some of what follows is a legal loophole hiding in plain sight. Some of it is the most serious fraud allegation the category has ever faced. Almost every article you will read smashes the two together into one panic. The whole point of this one is to pull them apart, show you the evidence on each, and tell you what you can actually do about it. If you just want to know which bottles to trust, my guide to the best tequila to buy right now does the shopping for you. Otherwise, stay with me.

Nearly every panic headline you have seen mashes two completely separate issues into one. Keep them apart and the whole story snaps into focus.

Hold that split in your head. The rest of this piece walks through both, the evidence on each, and how the regulator sits awkwardly in the middle of them.

Start with the rule most people think they understand. To be sold as tequila at all, a spirit has to be made from blue Weber agave grown in one of five Mexican states, and certified by the Consejo Regulador del Tequila, or CRT. If a bottle says only “tequila,” it is a mixto: up to 49% of its fermentable sugars can come from cane or corn. If it says 100% agave, all of its sugars must come from agave. So far, so reassuring.

Here is the part the marketing never mentions. Under the CRT standard known as NOM-006, a 100% agave tequila can still legally contain up to 1% of four additives, together nicknamed abocantes, with no disclosure on the label. As Tasting Table lays out, those four are glycerin, caramel color, oak extract and jarabe, or simple syrup. One percent sounds trivial until you learn what a fraction of it can do.

So “100% agave” is an honest statement about the source of the sugar and tells you nothing about whether the finished spirit has been sweetened, colored or flavored after the fact. That is the legal loophole. It is why a bottle of Fortaleza and a bottle of a big celebrity brand can both wear “100% agave” and taste like they came from different planets. If you want the bottles that skip the shortcuts entirely, I round them up in the tequila buyer’s guide.

Additives are not automatically evil, and I want to be fair about that before I list them. Distillers have long used tiny corrections to keep a product consistent from batch to batch. The problem is when they are used to fake quality and hide shortcuts, and when nobody has to tell you. Here is what each one does.

Put those together and you can see the trick. Caramel color plus oak extract can make a barely rested spirit look and smell like it spent a year in oak. Syrup and glycerin can turn a thin, hot distillate into something that drinks smooth and sweet. According to figures cited by transparency advocates, a striking share of all tequila, some estimates put it near 70%, carries undisclosed additives of some kind. That is scandal one: legal, quiet, and everywhere.

This is the part that made headlines, and it is important to be precise, because these are allegations that are being contested and nothing has been proven. Starting in 2025, the law firm Hagens Berman and others filed a wave of class action lawsuits accusing several brands of something far beyond the 1% additive allowance: selling tequila labeled “100% agave” that plaintiffs claim was cut with cheaper, non-agave cane alcohol.

The specific numbers in the filings are what made people sit up. As reported by KTLA, plaintiffs in the New York case allege that independent lab testing found Casamigos Blanco contained only about 33% agave-derived ethanol, and the Reposado around 42%. A California case makes similar claims about Don Julio Blanco and Don Julio 1942. To put that in context: if those figures were accurate, the spirit would fall below even the 51% agave that a basic mixto legally requires, never mind a 100% agave bottle.

The suits did not stop with Diageo. Over the following months, similar cases were reported against 818, the brand backed by Kendall Jenner, and Cincoro, co-founded by Michael Jordan, as The Spirits Business covered, followed by a case targeting Costco’s Kirkland Signature tequila. 818, for its part, has challenged its lawsuit, arguing among other things that it is CRT-certified and that private lawsuits should not override the official regulator. Reporting by Robb Report and others suggests industry insiders believe as many as 15 brands could ultimately be implicated, with roughly six named so far, and new filings arriving at a steady clip.

Table reflects publicly reported allegations as of mid-2026. All are contested and none has been proven in court. Inclusion here is not a statement that any brand has done anything wrong.

This did not appear overnight. It is the collision of a transparency movement, a defensive regulator and a wave of litigation, building over several years. Here is the sequence.

Here is the part almost nobody explains to normal drinkers, and it is genuinely fascinating. How can a laboratory tell whether the alcohol in a bottle came from agave or from sugarcane, when both are just ethanol? The answer starts with photosynthesis.

Plants fix carbon from the air in three different ways, and the route they use leaves a permanent chemical signature in everything they build, including their sugars. As Mezcalistas explains it well, there are three families:

• C3 plants (wheat, rice, most trees) fix carbon one way.
• C4 plants (corn and, crucially, sugarcane) fix it another way, built for hot, sunny climates.
• CAM plants (cacti, orchids and agave) open their pores at night to survive arid ground, and carry a third, distinctive signature.

That signature lives in the ratio of two forms of carbon, carbon-13 and carbon-12. Agave, as a CAM plant, carries a different carbon-13 fingerprint from cane, a C4 plant. Run a bottle through isotope analysis and you can read the fingerprint of the ethanol inside it. Agave even stores its own signature sugar, the fructan called an agavin, and when researchers matched the isotopic signature of agavins against the ethanol in authentic tequila, it lined up almost perfectly. As one isotope scientist quoted in the coverage put it, isotopes do not lie.

The thread running through both scandals is the CRT, and its position is genuinely awkward. It is the body that certifies tequila as authentic and polices the standard. It is also, in effect, funded by and answerable to the industry it regulates. So when the transparency movement started independently testing bottles and publishing which brands were clean, the regulator did not embrace it. It reportedly raided the testers’ lab, banned the words “additive-free” from labels, and took the verification program to court.

You do not have to pick a side to see the tension. A regulator that allows undisclosed additives, then bans the one label that would tell consumers a bottle has none, has made a choice about whose interests come first. And the pressure is now coming from below too: Mexico’s own agave farmers, the growers watching cheap cane alcohol allegedly stand in for the crop they raise over six to eight years, have publicly demanded a criminal investigation of the council. When the people who grow the plant are the ones shouting fraud, that is not a niche complaint.

Let me steelman the other side, because a piece that only prosecutes is not worth linking to. Two points deserve a hearing. First, tequila is not uniquely guilty: plenty of other spirits categories permit small additives, and some permit them with even less disclosure than tequila requires. Singling out agave spirits can feel selective. Second, on the legal 1% additives specifically, a tiny, competent correction to keep a product consistent is a normal part of distilling, not a con. The outrage is really about scale, secrecy and intent, using additives to fake age and quality, not about the existence of a glycerin drop.

The adulteration allegations are a different weight class, and there the counter-argument is simpler and stronger: nothing has been proven, the accused deny it firmly, and the science is being actively contested in court. A responsible reader holds both truths at once. The transparency problem is real and documented. The fraud allegations are serious, unresolved, and may or may not hold up.

You cannot run isotope analysis at home. You can still stack the odds heavily in your favor with four habits.

Do those four things and the additive question mostly takes care of itself. For the bottles that pass all four with room to spare, my guide to the best tequila ranks twenty I have tasted, and if you are mixing rather than sipping, the best tequila for margaritas covers which clean bottles make the best drink.