The Lunazul Tequila Is A Lie.

The Non-Financial Ledger

There is a specific kind of consumer who buys 100% agave tequila. They have stood in the aisle and read the label. They have paid $5, $7, sometimes more, over the cheaper bottle next to it because they wanted the real thing. They have handed a glass to a friend and said, this is the good stuff, this is pure agave, no fillers. They have made that claim with confidence because a corporation printed a promise on the label and they trusted it.

That trust, multiplied across tens of millions of bottles, is what this lawsuit is about. The economic injury is real and calculable. But what sits underneath the dollar figures is the quieter harm of being deceived by something you thought you understood. The phrase “100% agave” is not marketing language open to interpretation. It is a number. One hundred percent. It leaves no room for ambiguity, no room for a footnote, no room for “mostly agave.” When a company prints that number and charges a premium for it, they are making a categorical promise: every drop came from agave, nothing else, no shortcuts, no substitutes.

The people who bought Lunazul Tequila could not have known they were being deceived. The adulteration is invisible. You cannot taste the difference between agave-derived ethanol and cane-derived ethanol with enough precision to detect blending. You cannot see it through the glass. The only tool that reveals it is an internationally accredited isotope laboratory running carbon-13 analysis at specific molecular positions in the ethanol. No one does that at a liquor store. The playing field was not even close to level.

Consumers who sought out a purer, more authentic spirit were handed a product that, according to the lab, was not what was promised. The premium they paid went directly into the pockets of defendants who, the complaint alleges, extracted over a billion dollars in U.S. retail sales from a label claim that independent science says was false.

Legal Receipts

These are direct quotes and documented findings from the complaint and the scientific testing it cites. Every word below comes from the source document.

“Accredited laboratory analysis confirms what the label denies: Lunazul Tequila products bearing the ‘100% agave’ designation contain ethanol that derives, in material part, from sources other than agave.” Complaint, ¶ 11

• This is the central factual allegation of the lawsuit. It is not a characterization; it is a finding from a COFRAC-accredited laboratory, Eurofins Analytics France. The phrase “in material part” is significant: the complaint is not alleging trace contamination, it is alleging a meaningful proportion of the ethanol came from non-agave sources.
• The word “confirms” is doing important legal work here. The plaintiffs are saying the science settles the question, the label was false.

“Across all four tested expressions, two Blanco batches, one Reposado, and one Añejo, the independent laboratory reached the same conclusion: ‘Not compliant.’ That finding directly refutes Defendants’ ‘100% de Agave’ label claims.” Complaint, ¶ 60

• “Not compliant” is the laboratory’s own language, not the plaintiffs’ characterization. Every tested expression across every aging category failed.
• Because Reposado and Añejo are produced by barrel-aging the same Blanco base spirit with no separate fermentation, the complaint argues the non-agave ethanol found in the Blanco contaminates every Lunazul expression sold.

“The magnitude and direction of the deviation are inconsistent with natural variation in agave-derived ethanol and are instead diagnostic of adulteration with non-agave fermentable sugars.” Complaint, ¶ 62

• This language forecloses the defense that isotope variance is just natural biological fluctuation. The scientists determined the deviations point specifically toward C4-plant derived ethanol, which means sugarcane or corn.
• “Diagnostic” is a term of art in isotope science. It means the pattern is characteristic enough to identify the source, not merely suggestive.

“The sole U.S. commercial laboratory capable of performing SNIF-NMR testing on tequila declined to perform the analysis for Plaintiffs, citing a conflict of interest.” Complaint, ¶ 74

• The complaint does not name this laboratory or specify the nature of the conflict. What it establishes is that U.S.-based verification of this type of claim is effectively monopolized by a single lab, and that lab had a reason not to test Lunazul for these plaintiffs.
• This is why the testing had to go to France. The structural unavailability of independent U.S. testing is itself part of the consumer harm story: ordinary consumers had no domestic recourse to verify what they were drinking.

“Defendants’ official website prominently advertises the product as ‘[h]andcrafted with 100% Blue Weber agave and zero additives’ under the tagline ‘All Agave. No Extras.'” Complaint, ¶ 41, citing lunazultequila.com

• The “zero additives” and “No Extras” claims compound the core deception. A consumer reading this marketing is receiving a double assurance: the sugar source is exclusively agave, and nothing else has been added to the product.
• The complaint characterizes this as compounding the deception because it reinforces the purity narrative that drives the premium price, beyond even what the front-label “100% agave” claim alone would establish.

“Upon information and belief, during the Class Period (May 2021 through the present), Defendants sold approximately 54 million bottles of Lunazul Tequila in the United States, representing approximately 4.5 million nine-liter cases… At a retail price of $19.99 per 750ml bottle, Defendants generated in excess of $1 billion in US retail sales during the Class Period.” Complaint, ¶ 26

• These figures frame the scale of the alleged price-premium extraction. If every bottle carried a false “100% agave” claim that drove a $5 premium, the total overcharge on 54 million bottles exceeds $270 million. The complaint’s own conservative damages estimate uses $2 per bottle and arrives at $108 million.
• Sales data cited to Impact Databank and The Spirits Business shows rapid growth: 620,000 cases in 2021, 918,000 in 2022, 1.27 million in 2023, and 1.7 million in 2024. The brand was accelerating while the alleged deception continued.

Public Deception

The complaint documents a specific and documented gap between what Heaven Hill and Tierra de Agaves told consumers and what accredited laboratory analysis found inside the bottle.

• What they claimed: Every bottle of Lunazul Tequila bears “100% de Agave” on the principal display panel and the cap seal. The documented reality: COFRAC-accredited isotope analysis of four tested expressions, Blanco (two batches), Reposado, and Añejo, returned “Not compliant” across the board, with isotope deviations “diagnostic of adulteration with non-agave fermentable sugars.”
• What they claimed: The Lunazul website advertised the product as “handcrafted with 100% Blue Weber agave and zero additives” under the tagline “All Agave. No Extras.” The documented reality: The complaint alleges ethanol in the product is derived in material part from non-agave sources, meaning the “zero additives” and “No Extras” assurances are as unsupported as the base “100% agave” claim.
• What they claimed: Marketing describes a process in which agave piñas are slow-cooked, shredded, rinsed “leaving only the pure agave sugar,” fermented with proprietary yeast, and twice-distilled. The implication is an entirely agave-derived product. The documented reality: The complaint alleges non-agave fermentable sugars were introduced at the fermentation stage, the precise step the marketing describes as leaving “only the pure agave sugar.”
• What they claimed: The TTB COLA (Certificate of Label Approval) was obtained, signaling federal clearance of the label. The documented reality: The TTB does not test products, does not verify compositional claims, and does not certify that any label statement is true. COLA issuance is a formatting review only. Courts in the Seventh Circuit have consistently held TTB approval does not preempt state consumer-fraud claims.

Regulatory Gray Zones

The complaint identifies specific structural gaps in U.S. federal alcohol oversight that created the conditions for this alleged deception to persist undetected at scale.

• The TTB COLA gap: Under 27 U.S.C. § 205(e) and 27 C.F.R. Part 5, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau issues Certificates of Label Approval as a formatting compliance check only. The TTB does not test the product, does not verify botanical-origin claims, and does not certify the truth of any statement printed on the label. A “100% agave” claim on a COLA-cleared label carries no federal verification whatsoever. The complaint explicitly notes that COLA issuance “confers no immunity from state consumer-protection actions challenging the accuracy of label representations.”
• Mexican certification does not guarantee U.S. consumer protection: The complaint acknowledges that Lunazul is produced at a CRT-certified facility in compliance with NOM-006-SCFI-2012 in all respects other than composition. The Consejo Regulador del Tequila (CRT) is the Mexican certifying body. The complaint does not challenge the CRT’s certification; it argues the certification does not answer whether the specific bottles sold to U.S. consumers contained exclusively agave ethanol. Mexican regulatory compliance and U.S. consumer truth-in-labeling are separate legal questions, and no U.S. agency bridges them.
• No private right of action under federal alcohol law: The complaint explicitly states consumers “have no meaningful recourse through federal channels.” The TTB’s process provides no private cause of action, no damages remedy, and no class mechanism. This means the only avenue for deceived consumers is state consumer protection law, creating a patchwork enforcement regime that the complaint invokes across 24 jurisdictions simultaneously.
• SNIF-NMR testing monopoly: The scientific method capable of distinguishing agave ethanol from cane or corn ethanol at the molecular level is COFRAC-accredited C13 SNIF-NMR analysis. The complaint documents that the sole U.S. commercial laboratory capable of running this test on tequila refused to do so, citing a conflict of interest. The testing had to be conducted in France. This technological bottleneck means industry-wide non-compliance would be exceptionally difficult for regulators, journalists, or consumers to detect domestically.