The story of El Arquero’s naming sounds like something out of a founder's biopic. Mates sitting around the table in an Italian bistro, tossing around names, scrawling English to Mexican translations on a paper napkin. Until Adam Gilchrist —yes, that Gilchrist, of Australian cricket fame — typed ‘the keeper’ into Google Translate.
“That’s where I took a bit of license,” laughs Gilly. The exact translation is closer to the goalkeeper, but according to Gilly “if they played cricket in Mexico, I reckon the goalkeeper would be the wicketkeeper. So I'm going with The Keeper, El Arquero.”
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When Gilly talks tequila, it’s without bravado. Straight shooting, to the point, just how he likes to drink it. As we chat, it’s with a glass of his newly minted El Arquero blanco sitting between us, poured neat into a flute-style glass, not a tumbler, the way they do it in Mexico he tells me. There’s no limes. No salt. No shot glasses slamming on the table.
While the project has lived in Gilly’s mind for 15 years, it’s only been in the last two that, alongside his wife Mel and a group of close friends and industry insiders, he’s gone all in.
“That's when we said, right, let's do it and the first thing we’ve got to do is get to Mexico to meet with as many distillers as we could to work out who to partner with.”
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That was early 2024, when the El Arquero team ventured to Mexico for the first time, and Gilly saw how this decades long idea could become a reality. There, he found an immediate kinship in the red clay highlands of Jalisco, an ethereal landscape that reminded him of the red dirt of childhood home in northern New South Wales.
That unexpected common ground between Mexico and Australia became a pillar that would underpin the brand. It was the moment that Gilly knew he was on to something with creating a tequila that blended the best of Australian and Mexico’s Jalisco, that there was something intangible that could connect these two differing cultures in an authentic way. And seeing the rows of carefully cultivated agave, that distinctive blue green hue stretched before him for the first time? “Magic,” he tells me.
“Tequila is life in that region, and it's so important for so many people, from an industry point of view, and just from a livelihood point of view for the farmers who grow it.”
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Like many, Gilly’s first taste of tequila wasn’t exactly transcendent. “Yeah it was bad tequila,” he laughs of his first sip of the spirit as a late teen. But being reintroduced to the drink years later started a slow burn, and quickly taught him that when it comes to tequila, quality matters. Now, it’s informed how El Arquero is made, with the distillation process determined by the intention to create a smoother spirit that comes without the punch to the back of the throat. No added sugar, no preservatives, a nod to the more authentic heritage of tequila production.
With this in mind, the El Arquero team hit Jalisco’s Guadalajara, visiting eight different distilleries in the Jaliscan Highlands and Tequila Valley. It was challenging, Gilly tells me, separating eight distilleries, all beautiful and welcoming. They finally partnered with third-generation distillers Destiladora de Los Altos.
“I think there was a particular interest that it's some Aussies out there doing it. There's a lot of Americans that head down into that region trying to make their own tequila, but not many Aussies turn up, so I think they liked our story.”
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With a clear vision in mind, the team was able to get hands-on with the production process, working with Destiladora de Los Altos to create a bespoke recipe and flavour profile for El Arquero’s tequilas. Six rounds of sampling occurred before the group landed on what they felt was the perfect profile.
“That wasn't saying the first ones were bad,’ says Gilly. “But we were really keen to create a liquid that was a bit less aggressive. We wanted something a bit smoother.”
All, of course, with no additives. In order to achieve that smoothness, Destiladora de Los Altos uses only the ripest agave pina, slow-roasting the fruit in brick clay ovens for around 36 hours for maximum flavour. Once the blanco is distilled, a portion of the liquid is extracted from the batch, rested in oak barrels for 20 days, and then blended back into the original distillation.
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“We take that time just to allow about a fifth of our batch to get rounded off in oaks barrel and then reblend it back in. So it's still a blanco, it doesn't become a reposado, but we found that it seemed to round off the taste beautifully.”
The same base is aged for up to twelve months for El Arquero’s reposado. They also rely on tighter distillation cuts to ensure a premium drinking experience. After a second distillation, they extract only the mid section of the liquid, avoiding any impurities at the top and bottom. The result is indeed a smooth tequila, with naturally occurring vanilla overtones.
Now, less than two years later, El Arquero blanco and reposado are landing on shelves around Australia, carefully packaged in glass bottles, and featuring a rubber band tag inspired by the handwritten distillery samples the team was sipping from in Jalisco. The anejo is still sitting in American oak barrels, but will be hitting the market in coming months. With the Australian palate in mind, Gilly’s talking about partnering with a local winery to ship barrels over to Mexico, adding local flavour to the distillation through the resting process. Wineries of the Margaret River region are, of course, the obvious choice.
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In the meantime, as they launch the bespoke tequila this summer, Gilly and the El Arquero team will be popping up in local venues to share their love for the spirit and their signature drink, the Maximo. Why the Maximo?
“We were in the agave plantations, and we met one of the farmers, one of the jimadores and we called him Max, but in Spanish his name was much more sexy than Max,” laughs Gilly. “And I asked him, how does he drink it?”
With soda and pineapple, he was told. Back in Australia, Mel worked on their own variation. Tequila, soda, pineapple, salt on the rim and a fresh lime wedge. Tall glass, plenty of ice, says Gilly. “And we're calling it the Maximo, The El Arquero Maximo, named after Max over there.”
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A little bit Australian, a little bit Mexican, it’s the perfect full circle moment, the liquid metaphor that answers how these two countries can overlap. The question that started the whole venture. Afterall, we’re all in this tequila, says Gilly. And while El Arquero’s name might harken to Gilly’s life on the cricket field, it’s also about much more than that.
“It's a little nod back to my past. But I say it's the keeper of the spirit, keeper of good times, that's what this tequila is. “
El Arquero is available from select independent bottleshops, or online at elarquero.com, with bottles starting at $100.