A journey into the history of alcohol consumption millions of years in the making.

Welcome! I’m Winston, Señor Rio’s keenest history buff. I’ve been a devoted scholar on the lineage and development of societies. These strands in the fabric of history have led to everything, good or bad, that exists in our world. We can enjoy tequila because of a series of societal and geographical planets aligning in a way that makes the etched glass top of a bottle of Señor Rio an event that is hundreds, thousands, even millions of years in the making.

We, in the United States, are all required by law to fill out our 2020 census forms. It happens every ten years and from it we learn how many hospitals, schools, government workers, congress men and women we need to keep us healthy and safe. It also helps determine how much funding our community requires to provide the services we need every day. One other thing comes from this that may not be immediately apparent…our descendants will one day have access to this information. They will be able to easily tell where we come from and what our lives are like.

In the future our great-great grandchildren, because of a computerized society, will find information about our lives. Details such as what foods we liked, the music that made our toes tap, and maybe even what tequila made us close our eyes and enjoy the sensation it gave us, can be found with the touch of a finger.

It’s a natural human condition to identify our history and place ourselves within it. Ancestry and genealogy websites are as busy as they’ve ever been. In small communities across the United States, you see festivals harkening back to our past. Be it the Frontier Days, in Cheyenne Wyoming, the Dia de los Muertos Festival in Mesa Arizona, or the various German, Danish, or Polish days held in small or large towns across the country. We all celebrate the past and endeavor to ascertain our connection to it.

Join me as I lead us together, over a series of blog posts, on a journey from the earliest days of alcohol consumption in Europe, Africa, Asia and Meso-America. We’ll journey to Persia where a process called distillation was refined and applied to the making of spirits for drinking. From there we’ll see how the Spanish conquest of the Americas led to the changes in society that began in the earliest days of tequila production to the day on Cinco de Mayo 2009, when the brand Señor Rio was founded.