The Rock’s Tequila Empire Is Bigger Than Most People Realise

By Vim, Editor of 12×75. Last reviewed: July 2026. This piece reports allegations that are contested and unproven in court. Where a company has responded, its position is included. All valuations marked as estimates are illustrative modeling, not audited numbers.

Everyone knows The Rock has a tequila. Almost nobody knows what it actually is.

Search for it and you will find the same sentence, regurgitated approximately four thousand times: Teremana is worth $3.5 billion. It appears in net worth listicles. It appears in YouTube thumbnails next to a man pointing at a bottle with his mouth open. It is repeated with such total confidence that it has calcified into fact, in the way that “we only use 10% of our brains” is a fact.

So I went looking for where the number came from. Ladies and Gentleman, I found it. It is held together with sellotape and vibes.

What I found instead was a considerably weirder and better business: a brand shipping roughly 13 million bottles a year out of a distillery built inside another distillery, run by the same three operators who built and sold Avión, launched Conor McGregor’s whiskey, and now sell more men’s face wash at Target than anybody else on earth. A brand that grew last year while the tequila everyone compares it to fell down a lift shaft. And a brand that is currently being sued over the three words printed on its own front label.

Teremana is bigger, stranger, and much harder to value than the internet thinks. Pour something. This is going to take a minute.

Part one: what Teremana actually is

Teremana launched in March 2020, which was, in fairness, the single worst month to launch anything in the history of commerce, with the possible exception of a cruise line.

It turned out to be perfect. Bars closed. Off-premise liquor sales went vertical. And the most-followed human being alive spent lockdown filming himself building margaritas in a kitchen the size of a Wetherspoons. The tequila did not launch into a pandemic. It launched into an audience of 400 million people with nothing to do.

What happened next has no real precedent in American spirits.

Year	US volume (9L cases)	The context
2020 (first ~9 months)	~230,000	Casamigos sold to Diageo at ~170,000
2021	~640,000	Billed as the biggest US spirits launch ever
2022	~915,000	Company put US retail value near $330m to $350m
2023	1,000,000+	Fastest premium spirit to a million cases in the US
2024	~1.09m	Up 10.5%, nearly doubled since 2021
2025	~1.1m	Up an estimated 1%. Everyone else fell over.

Volumes to 2022 are Impact Databank estimates reported in trade press. 2023 is the company’s own milestone announcement.

Three expressions. No flavored versions. No pink one. No ready-to-drink cans, no cristalino, no limited-edition collab with a rapper. Blanco at $29.99, Reposado at $32.99, Añejo at $39.99 on original US pricing, though you will now find the Blanco under $25 in the right chain. That is the entire range, six years in. In a category with more than two thousand expressions sloshing about, that restraint is not modesty. It is strategy bordering on stubbornness.

Abroad, the brand went from nowhere to everywhere at unseemly speed. Per Global Travel Retail Magazine, Teremana has entered around sixty markets since 2024, with roughly twenty more incoming, including Brazil, Spain, France, South Africa, Japan and Indonesia. In airports, where spirits brands go to become real, it reached over 23 million consumers across 16 markets in its first year, with the aged expressions selling best. Delhi, of all places, cracked its top ten.

The scale is real. The number attached to it is not.

Part two: the $3.5 billion figure is a magic trick

Let me be scrupulously fair first, because I am about to be quite rude.

Siete Bucks Spirits, Teremana’s parent, is private. Mast-Jägermeister, its co-owner and global distributor, is a private German family firm and about as chatty as a Wolfenbüttel Tuesday. No stake has changed hands publicly. When Mast-Jägermeister took its equity position in 2022, neither the size of the holding nor the price was disclosed. There is no audited valuation of Teremana anywhere in the public domain. Anyone quoting $3.5 billion is guessing.

So where did the guess come from? Reverse-engineer it and the method is so simple it is almost sweet.

Diageo agreed to pay $700 million upfront for Casamigos, plus up to $300 million on a ten-year earn-out, at a point when the brand was expected to top 170,000 cases. Divide $1bn by 170,000 and you get roughly $5,880 a case. Knock it down to a nice round $3,500. Multiply by Teremana’s nice round one million cases.

$3.5 billion. That is it. That is the whole model. Two round numbers going for a drink.

Why the comparison collapses

Diageo did not buy 170,000 cases. It bought a growth curve. Casamigos was compounding at 50% to 100% a year with essentially zero international distribution, and Diageo was paying for the empty half of the map. It structured the deal to say so out loud: $300 million of it was contingent on the brand living up to its potential. The $1bn headline was a ceiling, not a price. Nobody reports the ceiling. Everybody reports the ceiling.

Teremana is a different animal entirely. It is a maturing brand growing at 1%, in a category growing at 0.5%, at precisely the moment the big acquirers stopped paying celebrity multiples. How do we know they stopped? Because they are busy writing the last ones off.

And the benchmark brand itself is having a shocker. Per The Spirits Business Brand Champions report, Casamigos volumes fell 19.8% in 2025 to 1.9 million cases, the worst result in the top ten, its lowest in five years, with US sales down 30.9% in the second half. It had already dropped 19% in 2024.

So the $3.5 billion number is derived from a 2017 deal whose subject has lost a third of its volume in two years, using a method that, applied to the same buyer’s next celebrity acquisition, would have been wrong by over ninety percent. Other than that, flawless.

A more honest number, with my working shown

Illustrative modeling. Stated assumptions. Not gospel, not a valuation, do not staple it to a term sheet.

Step one, revenue. At 1.1 million cases and a blended shelf price near $32 a bottle, Teremana moves roughly $420 million of tequila at US retail. That squares with the company’s own $330m to $350m figure at around 900,000 cases, so we are not inventing anything. Under American three-tier distribution the supplier typically keeps somewhere around 45% to 50% of shelf after distributor and retailer take their cut. Call supplier-level net revenue $180m to $220m, plus a small international contribution.

Step two, comparables. Here is every relevant deal of the last decade, expressed per case. Look at the Patrón line and then look at the Teremana line and try to keep a straight face.

Deal	Year	Headline value	Cases at deal	Implied $ per case
Casamigos to Diageo	2017	Up to $1bn ($700m upfront)	~170,000	~$5,880 (~$4,120 upfront)
Patrón to Bacardi	2018	$5.1bn enterprise value	~2.6m	~$1,960
Aviation Gin to Diageo	2020	Up to $610m	Small base	Recoverable amount $51m by 2025
Proper No. Twelve to Proximo	2021	~$600m reported	~500,000	~$1,200
Teremana at the $3.5bn claim	2026	$3.5bn	~1.1m	~$3,180

Sit with that Patrón line. Bacardi valued the single most powerful luxury tequila on the planet at under $2,000 a case. The internet has valued a $30 workhorse at $3,180 a case.

Step three, the range. Apply Patrón’s multiple, you get about $2.2bn. Apply Proper No. Twelve’s, about $1.3bn. Apply a sober 4x to 6x supplier revenue, which is where slow-growth premium spirits trade when the category is flat and there is litigation in the air, and you get $0.8bn to $1.3bn.

My take: a defensible band is roughly $1bn to $2.5bn, with $3.5bn as a boom-era ceiling that assumes the global rollout lands and the category reflates. That is still a preposterous outcome for a six-year-old brand. It is also nowhere near what you have been told.

So how rich is he, actually

Johnson’s stake has never been disclosed. Published estimates run from 20% to 40%, which is a polite way of saying nobody outside the cap table has the faintest idea. There are at least six parties on it: Johnson, Garcia, Austin, Fagnan, the López family, and Mast-Jägermeister.

Take 25% to 30% of a $1.5bn to $2.5bn business and you land somewhere between $375 million and $750 million. Enormous. Almost certainly his single largest asset. Also completely illiquid, because he keeps saying he will not sell, and because the one obvious buyer is already sitting on the register drinking his coffee.

The gap between “billion-dollar tequila stake” and “several hundred million of paper in a private company with exactly one plausible acquirer” is the gap between a headline and a balance sheet. Both are impressive. Only one is real.

Part three: the empire is not the man

Here is what almost every profile gets backwards. Dwayne Johnson is the equity anchor and the megaphone. He is not the machine.

The machine is three people, and one of them has a better CV than most CEOs.

Ken Austin created Tequila Avión in 2009, watched it become a plot device on Entourage, then sold it to Pernod Ricard. He then co-created Proper No. Twelve with Conor McGregor. Forbes calls him the celebrity spirits whisperer. He says he turns celebrities down, which, given the last decade of celebrity tequila, means somewhere out there is a graveyard of brands we were mercifully spared.

Jenna Fagnan worked for the Japanese government, then Nike, then took an MBA at Harvard, then joined LVMH, where, per VinePair, her first assignment was rescuing a floundering little house called Dom Pérignon. Then Austin rang and told her to quit and start a tequila company. She rang Paris to resign. Paris told her nobody drinks tequila. That was 2010.

Dany Garcia is Johnson’s former wife, his business partner since long before the fame, and co-founder of Seven Bucks Productions.

Fagnan has described the origin plainly: she and Austin were sitting around debating what tequila needed next, Austin’s phone rang, and it was Johnson’s manager. They did not go hunting for a celebrity. A celebrity walked in with a decade-old idea and a genuine willingness to turn up.

Now track the pipeline and try to tell me the star is the variable:

Four consumer brands in fifteen years. Three category leaders. Two exits. Johnson appears in the last two. The operators appear in all four. The Rock is the rocket fuel. Austin and Fagnan are the rocket.

The corporate plumbing says the same thing. Teremana is not a brand Johnson endorses, it is a brand owned by Siete Bucks Spirits LLC, where he is founder and chairman, run day to day by CEO Richard Black, a former Gruppo Campari US marketing VP who also scaled Westward Whiskey. Above that sits Mast-Jägermeister as co-owner and exclusive global distributor, a relationship that existed before the brand ever came to market.

Read that again. The global distribution deal predates the launch. This was never a plucky garage project that got lucky. This was a heist, planned in advance, by professionals.

The Jesús María coincidence that is definitely not a coincidence

Now the bit I have not seen anyone properly join up.

Teremana is made at Destilería Teremana de Agave under its own registration, NOM 1613, in Jesús María, in the southern Jalisco highlands. The brand is rightly proud of this, and it should be. Your own NOM means you are not one of forty labels queuing outside a contract distillery with a clipboard.

But NOM 1613 sits on the property of Productos Finos de Agave, NOM 1416. And NOM 1416 is where Avión was made. It is also, before it moved, where Casamigos was made.

So: the men who built Avión at NOM 1416 later built a bespoke distillery for The Rock on the same land, in partnership with the same family, the López family, third-generation agave growers and second-generation distillers who also hold equity in the business. One patch of red volcanic dirt in a town most Americans could not find with a satellite has produced two brands sold to global drinks giants and one brand valued in the billions. Silicon Valley has garages. Tequila has Jesús María.

One more wrinkle, and it matters enormously for the lawsuit. NOM 1416 has a modern diffuser and a column still on site. A diffuser is the industrial shortcut that strips sugar out of raw agave with hot water and acid, and it is the thing tequila nerds cross themselves about. Tequila Matchmaker, an organization with roughly zero sentimentality about celebrity brands, has reported plainly that neither is used in the production of Teremana.

Hold that thought. It will be back.

Part four: the liquid, and the small-batch arithmetic

Teremana’s production story is unusually specific, which is genuinely to its credit. Most celebrity brands say “handcrafted” and then change the subject.

• Highlands agave at around 7,000 feet, slow-cooked in small 24-ton brick ovens for 72 hours at a lower temperature than most tequilas, then twice distilled in handmade 3,800-liter copper pot stills, per the company’s own release.
• Roller mill extraction, deep well water, stainless fermentation.
• Reposado rests in used American whiskey barrels. Añejo goes a minimum of twelve months.
• The expanded distillery adds more of the same small ovens, which the brand says are half the industry average size, and more handmade copper stills. It was designed to LEED criteria.
• All spent agave fiber is composted back into the fields, and waste water goes through filtration.

Johnson’s fingerprints are all over it, and not in the sinister way. Per The Spirits Business, the team went through 113 distillations before landing on the recipe, and the base of every bottle is embossed with “Tijasi”, the first two letters of his daughters’ names: Tiana, Jasmine, Simone. He insisted on a nutrition panel, which no tequila brand had ever wanted, because tequila brands would rather you did not think about calories. He has a cut agave tattooed on him. Whatever this is, it is not a man renting his face out.

Right. Get a calculator.

Nobody has published this, so let me be explicit about the assumptions before anybody sends me an email in capital letters.

At 1.1 million nine-liter cases, Teremana produces 9.9 million liters of finished tequila a year for the US alone. That is 13.2 million 750ml bottles. That is roughly 36,000 bottles a day. Every day.

Making one liter of 100% agave tequila at 40% ABV takes six to eight kilos of agave. The IWSR uses 7 to 8kg. Take seven, the friendly end. That is roughly 69,000 metric tons of blue Weber agave a year.

Now push 69,000 tons through those celebrated 24-ton brick ovens. That is about 2,900 oven loads a year, near enough eight a day. Each load cooks for 72 hours. Even ignoring loading, cooling and cleaning, you need north of twenty-four brick ovens running continuously, all year round, to make that number happen.

What the people who taste for a living say

I want to be fair here, because the aficionado consensus is more interesting than the internet’s.

The Tequila Matchmaker community is, and I am putting this gently, unmoved. The Blanco sits in the low seventies. The distillery ranks 94th out of 114. Reviewer after reviewer reports vanilla, caramel, artificial sweetness and something one person memorably described as tasting like a cupcake, which is precisely the profile you would expect from the additives I take apart in the tequila additives investigation. Teremana is not confirmed additive-free by that program.

And yet. In 2021 the same outlet ran a blind tasting pitting celebrity tequilas against unknown craft brands. Teremana finished second of seven, ahead of Casamigos, and the raters did not suspect it of containing additives. Co-founder Jenna Fagnan has publicly stated that Johnson insisted on a no-additives specification.

So the honest summary is this. Teremana tastes sweeter and softer than a purist wants. It has never sought additive-free certification, which is a choice, and an odd one for a brand this obsessed with proving it does things properly. And when a hostile panel tasted it without the label on, they could not find anything wrong with it. Everything else is inference, vibes, and people who dislike The Rock on principle.

My own verdict, having consumed more of it than my liver’s legal team would like: the Blanco is a very good $25 to $30 margarita tequila and a mildly boring sipper. The Reposado is the pick of the range and the one I actually keep. The Añejo at $40 to $50 is the weakest value in the lineup, and I would take almost any certified additive-free añejo over it. Full rankings live in the best tequila guide, and if you are only ever going to mix it, best tequila for margaritas will save you money.

Part five: the lawsuit

On 3 April 2026, a man named Andrei Tomescu walked into federal court in Chicago and sued Siete Bucks Spirits.

Tomescu v. Siete Bucks Spirits, LLC, case number 1:26-cv-03709, Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. It is docketed at Law360.

The complaint goes after the three phrases the whole brand is built on. Per Top Class Actions, it alleges Teremana is falsely marketed as 100% agave, small batch and handcrafted.

• On agave content: that independent lab testing using SNIF-NMR analysis, which identifies the molecular origin of ethanol, found isotope signatures in Teremana Blanco inconsistent with ethanol derived exclusively from agave.
• On price: that consumers pay at least $11 more, or 57.9% more, than for a comparable tequila making no premium production claims.
• On scale: that the size of the Jalisco Highlands distillery is itself evidence of large-scale industrial production, and that Siete Bucks sold at least 20 million bottles nationally in the class period, including 500,000 in Illinois.
• What it wants: a nationwide class covering every US purchaser since March 2020, an Illinois subclass, a 25-state multi-state subclass, plus compensatory, punitive and treble damages in excess of $5.5 million and disgorgement of profits.

What this is, and firmly what it is not

First, context. Teremana was not first. It was roughly seventh. Truth in Advertising has been tracking the whole wave: nearly a dozen suits, hitting Don Julio, Casamigos, Cincoro, Kendall Jenner’s 818 and Costco’s Kirkland Signature. A case against Heaven Hill’s Lunazul was voluntarily dismissed in April 2026. The California filing was covered by KQED, and the agave-farmer end of the story has been reported doggedly by Mezcalistas. I mapped the entire thing in the 100% agave scandal piece, and covered the Diageo cases in the Don Julio guide and the 1942 review.

Second, fairness. None of this has been proven. Diageo has moved to dismiss its cases, arguing the claims are implausible, that the plaintiffs lean on a scientifically unvalidated test, and that its tequilas labeled 100% agave are exactly that. 818 has argued it is CRT-certified and that private litigation should not overrule the regulator. Siete Bucks has not, at the time of writing, made a public statement, and Teremana continues to market itself as 100% agave, small batch and handcrafted.

Third, the weak flank. Two of the three claims will probably struggle, because there is no legal definition of “small batch” or “craft” for spirits in the United States. This is why Tito’s, one of the largest vodka brands on the planet, can and does call itself handmade with a completely straight face. Courts have generally treated that language as puffery. Expect Siete Bucks to argue precisely that, and expect it to work.

The adulteration count is the serious one, and it is a coin-flip that turns on science. SNIF-NMR and carbon isotope ratio analysis are real, established, and used across Europe to catch wine and fruit juice fraudsters. The defense argument, which is not stupid, is that the specific protocols compare the wrong things and have never been validated for finished distillates. Somebody is going to spend a great deal of money teaching a jury about isotopes.

Why it stings anyway

Here is the difference between this suit and the Casamigos one, and why I suspect it costs Teremana more even if it gets thrown out on a Tuesday morning.

Casamigos never claimed to be artisanal. Casamigos claimed to be delicious and expensive and adjacent to George Clooney, and it delivered on all three. Teremana’s entire proposition, its price, its promise, Johnson’s personal credibility, every word of it rests on the idea that a superstar refused to cut corners. Johnson has said as much, in public, repeatedly.

If you build a brand on “we did it properly”, then “you did not do it properly” is not a product recall. It is a character attack. And the brand’s own arithmetic, thirteen million bottles out of small ovens, hands the plaintiffs a headline before a single lab result reaches a judge.

The defensible answer, which Teremana has never quite bothered to make, is the obvious one: we scaled by multiplying small vessels rather than replacing them. That is a genuinely unusual and expensive thing to do. It just does not fit on a label, and it does not sound as good as “small batch”.

Part six: the rest of the empire

Tequila is the flagship. It is not the fleet.

Papatui. Launched 2024 with Jenna Fagnan. Māori for “fix it”. Products from $2.99. Within two years, the number one men’s skincare brand at Target by sales volume, per Circana. Now flogging three colognes at $40 a bottle, positioned to deliver what men expect at $100. If that pricing philosophy sounds familiar, congratulations, you have been paying attention.

ZOA Energy. Co-founded 2021. In November 2024 Molson Coors took a majority stake, assuming control of marketing, DTC and development. Johnson stays as the face. Read it as a partial exit, executed quietly, from a position of reasonable strength.

TKO Group Holdings. In January 2024 Johnson joined the board of the WWE and UFC parent. He received $30 million in stock and, in the single most elegant clause of his career, the trademark rights to the name “The Rock”, which WWE had owned since 2000. The man bought himself back. An SEC filing disclosed he had earned $491,000 in name and likeness royalties from WWE the previous year, which suggests he was renting himself off himself for two decades and finally noticed.

Seven Bucks Productions. Founded 2012 with Garcia, named for the seven dollars he had left after Calgary cut him. Its films have grossed billions, which is a fairly aggressive return on seven dollars.

Put it together and the shape is obvious. Johnson has systematically converted fame into equity: production company, tequila, energy drink, skincare, a sports league stake, and ownership of his own name. Teremana is the biggest single piece. But the transferable asset is the operating system: find an underserved mass-premium category, partner with people who have already exited one, price it 20% below where the celebrity premium says you could, and then, critically, actually turn up to the factory.

Part seven: the party ended and nobody told the listicles

None of this is happening in a bull market. This matters far more than the lawsuit, and it is the bit the net-worth blogs skip because it involves reading.

The agave crash. Blue Weber peaked near 32 Mexican pesos a kilo, then collapsed toward 2 to 5 pesos, with the IWSR expecting the bottom around 2026. Growers planted into a boom, agave takes six to eight years, and every single plant matured at once, directly into a slowdown. Mexico is now sitting on what the trade calls the tequila lake, a surplus running into hundreds of millions of liters. Somewhere in Jalisco there is a man staring at a field of perfect agave he will never sell.

Volumes have flattened. Per Impact Databank, US tequila grew just 0.5% in 2025 to nearly 32 million cases, decelerating for a second year, with drinkers migrating down to the middle of the range after super-premium drove the boom. Tequila has been among the categories worst hit by downtrading. Forbes calls 2026 a recalibration, which is what analysts say when they mean “the good bit is over”.

The premium end is bleeding. Casamigos down 19.8%. Six of the top ten selling tequilas posted lower volumes in 2025 than in 2024. The brand that took the crown, per VinePair’s ranking, was Lunazul, which sells for under $25 and has never once been photographed on a yacht.

Tariffs are noisy but survivable. Tequila is a protected denomination and USMCA-compliant, which has spared it from the tariff rounds that hammered other imports, and that exemption has held through the IEEPA and Section 122 chaos of 2026. Watch it. Do not panic about it.

Part eight: how this ends

Four scenarios, ranked by how likely I think they are.

1. Mast-Jägermeister eventually buys out the founders. The most probable ending, and the least dramatic. The German group is already co-owner and exclusive global distributor. Its CEO has talked about wanting Teremana as the next major brand in the portfolio, and the whole thing was framed from day one as a legacy deal. It is the only buyer with no integration problem, because it already does the integrating.

2. Johnson holds and globalizes, exactly as he keeps saying. He has been consistent for six years. He told CNBC in 2020 that it is a legacy play and that ideally the brand outlives his involvement. Sixty markets in two years suggests he means it. The risk is that global tequila outside North America remains a small and eye-wateringly expensive habit to build.

3. A major buys in at a repriced number. Possible, unfashionable. Diageo is currently impairing celebrity spirits, not shopping for them. Anyone buying now buys flat volume in a soft category and prices accordingly. Which is exactly why Johnson will not sell now.

4. The litigation reprices the whole category. Low probability, enormous impact. If any of the isotope cases produce an adverse finding against any major brand, the “100% agave” premium gets repriced across the board and the transparency brands inherit the earth. Nothing so far suggests this is close.

The genuinely annoying thing, if you are the sort of person who enjoys watching the mighty fall, is that all four of Johnson’s realistic outcomes are good ones. That is what a decade of turning fame into equity buys you.

Part nine: right, but should you buy the stuff

Enough balance sheet. Let us get down to the bottle.

Buy Teremana Blanco if you want a reliable, soft, citrusy tequila for margaritas at $25 to $30 and you would rather not think about it. It will not embarrass you. Make the People’s Margarita with it: Teremana Blanco, pineapple juice, lime juice, agave nectar. It is Johnson’s own serve, it is sweet as anything, and it is annoyingly good.

Buy Teremana Reposado if you want the best of the range. Used American whiskey barrels, oak, vanilla, easy company. This is the bottle worth owning.

Do not buy Teremana Añejo at $40 to $50. There are better añejos at that money and several of them are certified additive-free, which at this point in the category’s nervous breakdown is worth paying for.

Buy something else entirely if provenance is your thing. Cimarrón at around $18 and Espolòn at around $20 both beat the Blanco on quality per dollar, and Fortaleza and LALO are the proper step up. It is all ranked in the best tequila guide. If you want the celebrity comparison, the Casamigos review and the Don Julio range guide are the other two you need.

And whatever you pour, pour it into the right glass. A copita, not a shot glass. There is a whole argument about this in the glassware guide, and it is not snobbery: agave aromatics are volatile, and a shot glass hurls them into the ceiling.

The last drop

Teremana is not a $3.5 billion company. It is probably a $1bn to $2.5bn company, which is an outrageous thing for a six-year-old brand to be, and the number got inflated because somebody multiplied one round figure by another and four thousand websites hit copy.

Teremana is also not a celebrity vanity project. It is the fourth brand from a team that has exited two, built inside a distillery on the grounds of the one that made their last one, distributed by a company that signed up before a single bottle shipped.

And it is not, in the sense the phrase implies, small batch. It is thirteen million bottles a year made in small vessels, which is a genuinely unusual and expensive way to be enormous, and also now a matter for the Northern District of Illinois.

All three of those things are true at the same time. The empire is bigger than most people realize. Just not in any of the ways the headlines say.

Salud. Drink the Reposado.

Teremana FAQ

Who owns Teremana tequila?

Teremana is owned by Siete Bucks Spirits LLC, where Dwayne Johnson is founder and chairman. Co-founders are Ken Austin, Jenna Fagnan and Dany Garcia. The López family, who produce the liquid, hold a stake, and German drinks group Mast-Jägermeister is a co-owner and the exclusive global distribution partner. Richard Black is CEO. Johnson’s individual percentage has never been disclosed.

Is Teremana really worth $3.5 billion?

There is no evidence for it. No stake in Teremana has been publicly sold and no audited valuation exists. The $3.5 billion figure is a media estimate produced by applying a per-case value borrowed from the 2017 Casamigos deal to Teremana’s case volume. Given flat growth, a soft category and the collapse in celebrity-spirits multiples, a range of roughly $1 billion to $2.5 billion is more defensible.

How much Teremana is sold each year?

Around 1.1 million nine-liter cases in the United States in 2025, up about 1%, according to Impact Databank. That is roughly 13.2 million 750ml bottles a year, or about 36,000 bottles a day.

Is Teremana additive-free?

It is not certified additive-free by any independent program, and Tequila Matchmaker does not list it as confirmed additive-free. Co-founder Jenna Fagnan has publicly said Johnson insisted on no additives. In a 2021 blind tasting run by Tequila Matchmaker’s own outlet, panelists did not suspect Teremana of containing additives. Many community reviewers report sweet, vanilla-forward notes typical of additive-laden tequilas. Full detail in our tequila additives guide.

Is Teremana made with a diffuser?

No, according to Tequila Matchmaker. Teremana’s own distillery, NOM 1613, sits on the grounds of NOM 1416, Productos Finos de Agave, which does have a diffuser and column still on site. Tequila Matchmaker has reported that neither is used to make Teremana. Teremana uses brick ovens and copper pot stills.

Why is Teremana being sued?

In April 2026 a consumer filed a class action, Tomescu v. Siete Bucks Spirits, in Illinois federal court, alleging Teremana is falsely marketed as 100% agave, small batch and handcrafted. The complaint cites SNIF-NMR isotope testing and the scale of the distillery. The allegations are contested and unproven, and it is one of nearly a dozen similar suits filed against major tequila brands including Don Julio, Casamigos and Cincoro.

Is Teremana good tequila?

It is good value as a Blanco and Reposado, and unremarkable as an añejo. It is soft, sweet and citrusy rather than vegetal and peppery, which makes it excellent for margaritas and merely fine for sipping. Aficionado ratings sit in the low seventies out of a hundred. At $25 to $30 for the Blanco it is a sound buy. At $50 for the Añejo it is not. See our best tequila rankings.

What does Teremana mean?

It combines “tere”, from the Latin terra, meaning earth, and “mana”, the Polynesian word for spirit or life force, reflecting Johnson’s Samoan heritage. It is usually translated as “spirit of the earth”.

Is Teremana affected by US tariffs?

Not directly. Tequila is a protected Mexican denomination and qualifies under USMCA, which has kept it exempt from the tariff rounds applied to other Mexican imports through 2025 and 2026. Trade policy remains volatile, so the position is worth monitoring.

Will Dwayne Johnson sell Teremana?

He has said repeatedly that he will not, and that he wants it to become a legacy brand that can eventually run without him. The most likely long-term outcome, if he ever does sell, is a buyout by Mast-Jägermeister, which is already a co-owner and distributes the brand worldwide.

How this was reported

All litigation described here is unproven and contested. Valuation modeling is mine and is labeled as illustrative throughout. Sources, in full:

Volume and category data: Shanken News Daily (Impact Databank, 2025 volumes), Shanken News Daily (US category 2025), Market Watch Hot Brands, The Spirits Business Brand Champions 2026, VinePair, BevNET.

Company statements: Teremana, international expansion release, Mast-Jägermeister investment release, Guac on the Rock 2026, The World Table, Diageo on Casamigos, Diageo FY2025 annual report (SEC).

Interviews and reporting: The Spirits Business interview with Dwayne Johnson, VinePair on Jenna Fagnan, VinePair on Ken Austin, Forbes on Austin, Forbes on Richard Black, Just Drinks, CNBC, Fortune, Park Street, The Drinks Business.

Production and tasting: Tequila Matchmaker distillery record, Agave Matchmaker brand page, TasteTequila blind tasting, Difford’s Guide on NOM 1416.

Litigation: PacerMonitor docket, Law360, Top Class Actions, Truth in Advertising, The Spirits Business on Diageo’s motion to dismiss, KQED, Mezcalistas, Campaign US.

Market context: IWSR on the agave crash, IWSR on agave yields, Robb Report on the surplus, Forbes on 2026 trends, DISCUS, Consejo Regulador del Tequila, Park Street on tariffs.

The wider empire: Food Dive on ZOA, Billboard on Papatui, GTR Magazine, Moodie Davitt Report, TRBusiness, Spayne Lindsay.