Diageo moves to dismiss ‘implausible’ 100% agave Tequila lawsuit

Diageo has filed its second motion in a matter of days to dismiss class actions alleging its Casamigos and Don Julio Tequilas contain non-agave alcohol. The drinks giant calls the New York case “implausible” and “manufactured”, standing firm on its claim that both brands are “proudly made from 100% Blue Weber agave”.

On 1 November, Diageo filed its motion to dismiss a New York class action that accuses the company of mislabelling its Casamigos and Don Julio Tequilas. The lawsuit, first reported by the drinks business in May, alleges that both brands are falsely advertised as “100% agave” despite allegedly containing alcohol from other sources.

The motion follows a similar filing in Florida last week, where Diageo also moved to dismiss a parallel class action concerning the same Tequila brands.

In its latest filing, Diageo argues that the plaintiffs’ claims lack factual and scientific foundation. “We have moved to dismiss this complaint as the allegations are implausible, lacking legal and logical merit,” a Diageo spokesperson told db. “All bottled Casamigos and Don Julio tequilas labelled as ‘100% agave’ are just that, proudly made from 100% Blue Weber agave.”

“A Bermuda Triangle of pleading”

The company’s motion describes the plaintiffs’ complaint as incoherent and unsupported. “The manufactured nature of this litigation is obvious,” Diageo’s legal team writes. The document goes on to call the case “a Bermuda Triangle of pleading”, alleging that the plaintiffs claim to have bought more than 73 bottles yet rely on “partial and unintelligible results from five unidentified samples”.

According to the motion, “a plausible reading of the Amended Complaint is that none of the Plaintiffs’ 73+ bottles was ever sampled or tested.” The filing further contends that if any testing did occur, “only five samples came back with inconsistent results which have been disingenuously cherry-picked, as if, in an election with 73 precincts, Plaintiffs polled only five, examined a single ballot in each, and then declared Dewey defeats Truman.”

“Rumour, speculation and conjecture”

Diageo’s lawyers say the plaintiffs’ case “rests entirely on vaguely described, unintelligible results from ‘tests’ performed by someone else (never identified), somewhere else (never alleged), at some time (never disclosed).” They also claim the tests were “arranged through a longtime industry antagonist who faces criminal indictment in Mexico and civil litigation in the United States for making and promoting false statements about Tequila.”

The filing accuses the plaintiffs’ counsel of “trafficking in the same flawed allegations” across multiple jurisdictions, citing a near-identical case filed in California two months later. “By pursuing duplicative actions with overlapping putative classes in two federal courts on opposite coasts,” it says, “Plaintiffs’ counsel are hedging their bets that they can survive dismissal in one court or the other.”

Diageo concludes that the complaint “relies on nothing more than rumour, speculation and conjecture,” adding that the plaintiffs “do not, because they cannot, allege any flaw or vulnerability in Diageo’s meticulous and rigorously monitored tequila-making process.”

The legal and industry backdrop

The case, filed on 5 May in the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York, claims that Don Julio and Casamigos Tequilas contain “significant concentrations of cane or other types of alcohol rather than pure Tequila.” Plaintiffs include several New York and New Jersey consumers who argue they paid a premium for products they believed were made solely from agave.

Under both Mexican and US law, as per the Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT) and the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), a Tequila labelled “100% agave” must be produced exclusively from sugars derived from the Blue Weber agave plant. Any spirit containing other sugars can only be labelled “tequila”, not “100% agave”.

Diageo maintains that all its tequila brands comply fully with these standards. “All bottled Casamigos and Don Julio Tequilas labelled as ‘100% agave’ are just that,” the company reiterated, citing CRT certification and TTB label approval.

Billion-dollar stakes in the premium agave boom

The lawsuit comes amid an era of booming demand for high-end agave spirits. Diageo acquired Casamigos, the brand co-founded by George Clooney, in 2017 for up to US$1 billion and has long owned Don Julio, a stalwart of the premium Tequila market. Together, the two brands rank among the top five best-selling tequilas worldwide, with Casamigos alone selling around three million cases in 2023.

Both brands trade on their artisanal credentials. Casamigos markets itself as a “small batch, ultra-premium tequila” made from “100% Agave Azul”, while Don Julio proclaims its dedication to “100% Blue Weber Agave”. Consumers, as the plaintiffs point out, pay a premium for authenticity, a value tied to the lengthy cultivation cycle of agave plants, which take up to a decade to mature.

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