An exciting little spirit launch happened earlier this year, bringing Mexico and the East End just a little closer together.
Part-time Orient resident Sofia Paloma Juárez went on quite a journey to found her tequila brand, Casa J — but it was one that not only released a super premium, artisanal tequila into the world, but wove a path for Juárez from the North Fork to Jalisco and back again.
Juárez’s parents divorced when she was only three, and she was raised by her Italian-American mom; her dad, a native of Guadalajara in Jalisco, moved back to Mexico after the divorce and Juárez and he were, save for some phone calls and letters, mostly estranged for two long decades.
She found herself wanting to reconnect with the father she never had the opportunity to connect with. She traveled to Jalisco to spend time with him — a chef, who introduced her not only to the culture she never really knew, but the food of her family via recipes passed down through generations, all paired with artisanal tequila.
“Here we were reconnecting over tequila and over culture and over history, and him really sharing that connectivity of his family and passing it on to the female lineage,” Juárez says. “This really sparked something.”
Over the next eight years, she visited whenever she could and began work in earnest to figure out how to express this new-found connection and passion for the other half of her history. She wanted to dig in and build her own tequila brand — but most of the examples she found were all full of machismo; masculine identities fronting the brands that take up most of the shelf space.
“Whereas females make up more than 70% of tequila consumers,” she says. “They deserve a community to feel a part of as well.”
She visited over 50 distilleries before finding the right one in which to make the spirit that she and her maestro tequilero, with whom she’s worked closely for the last five or so years, wanted to bring to the world: sourced from the lowlands of Amatitán and Los Vallas in Jalisco (the Mexican state where all blue weber-based tequila must be sourced by law) and made in small, small batches, with the agave hand-crushed and then cooked in ancestral, stone pit ovens.
It’s quite a full-circle moment for Juárez — as a young entrepreneur coming into her own, but also as a daughter finding her father and the common ground between them.
“I told him: We want to bottle a memory of the first time I smelled that scent of Jalisco.”
Who else is pulling out all the stops and bringing some serious savory (and sweet) bite and beverage action this year? Our list is growing by the minute:
- Aki’s Kitchen
- Atlantis Banquets & Events
- Bake Me Healthy
- Borghese Vineyards
- Casa J Tequila
- Cuisine By Colleen
- Fauna
- Flora
- Grace & Grit
- Goomba Johnny PIzza
- Jamesport Vineyards
- Justin’s Chop Shop
- Justin Vineyards
- Land and Sea Smokehouse
- Lewis Cellars
- Oysterponds Shellfish Co.
- Painters Restaurant
- Palmer Vineyards
- Paumanok Vineyards
- Pellegrini Vinyeards
- Poboy Brewery
- Sannino Vineyard
- Seaside Grill
- Seastar Ballroom
- Sweet Vegan
- Sydney’s “Taylor” Made Cuisine
- Take Two Brewery
- Tonino’s
- The Village Cheese Shop
- Twin Fork Beer Co.
- Westhampton Beach Brew & Grill
- Uncle Giuseppe’s
As is tradition, plenty of toe-tappin’, shoulder-swayin’ live tunes provided by funk master band In the Groove.
Tickets for the event start at $135 for general admission. This is a 21+ all-inclusive event.
