CRT and NOM
Who Guards the Name
Who actually protects the promise that what's on the bottle is really what's inside? The Consejo Regulador del Tequila checks every batch according to the NOM-006 standard and leaves a number on every label that can be easily decoded.
The Consejo Regulador del Tequila
Since 1994, the Consejo Regulador del Tequila, or CRT, has overseen compliance with Tequila regulations. It inspects agave fields, distilleries and bottling plants, certifies every batch, and can also revoke licenses. Without CRT certification, a product from the protected zone cannot be sold as Tequila. For producers, this means an ongoing relationship with oversight, not a one-time inspection at founding.
This oversight rests closely on the NOM-006-SCFI-2012 standard, which sets out cultivation, plant, cooking method, distillation and aging down to the last detail. Changes to this standard are negotiated jointly by authorities, industry association and producers, usually over the course of years. Smaller distilleries sometimes find this process cumbersome, as their voice can easily get lost next to large export brands.
What Does the NOM Number on the Label Mean?
Every Tequila bottle carries a four-digit NOM number, usually printed small near the alcohol content information. This number doesn't identify the brand, but rather the specific distillery where the Tequila was produced. Two completely different brand names can therefore carry the same NOM number. The digits themselves follow no recognizable system based on region or founding year; they are simply assigned in sequence.
This happens regularly: there are considerably more brands than distilleries in the Tequila region, and quite a few smaller brands have their Tequila made at larger, established facilities. Anyone who compares the NOM numbers of two bottles may thus discover that supposedly competing labels actually come from the same facility. Some brands prefer to keep this quiet, while others now openly advertise which well-known distillery bottles their product.
Why This Transparency Matters
Anyone who searches online for a NOM number gets, for a moment, a glimpse behind a bottle's marketing. Usually, you quickly find out which distillery is behind it and what else it produces. This says nothing about the quality of an individual Tequila, but it says a lot about its origin in the narrower sense. Specialized online forums and databases have been collecting such NOM numbers for years and make them freely accessible to everyone.
This kind of check is especially worthwhile for new, heavily marketed brands. A young brand with an elaborate bottle can still come from a decades-old traditional distillery, or conversely from an operation that will bottle virtually any recipe for a fee.
Mezcal and Its Own Control System
Mezcal has a comparable but independent oversight body in the Consejo Regulador del Mezcal, CRM, which works under NOM-070-SCFI-2016. Here too, every bottle carries its own NOM number, which points to the respective production site. The two systems run in parallel and independently of each other, even though both spirits come from the same plant family. Buyers who know both numbers can thus find out whether a Tequila and a Mezcal happen to come from neighboring facilities.
A NOM number alone, however, says nothing about the category, Blanco, Reposado or Añejo. It only shows where something was made, not how long it was aged or how it tastes.
What Happens in Case of a Violation
If the CRT finds deviations from the standard during an inspection, it can revoke a distillery's certification or block individual batches. Without a valid certificate, a bottle may no longer carry the word "Tequila," even if it was produced in the protected zone from the right agave.
In practice, there have been cases in the past where independent lab tests found more foreign sugar or more additives than a bottle's label suggested. Such cases show that oversight exists, but not every single bottle on the market can be monitored without gaps. That's exactly why the NOM number, despite all its limitations, remains a useful, if incomplete, tool for attentive buyers.