On October 1, US District Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall in Brooklyn dismissed a class action lawsuit accusing liquor giant Diageo of selling adulterated tequila.
The class action-lawsuit was filed in May of 2025 by Hagens Berman’s consumer rights legal team, who alleged that Diageo’s flagships tequila brands, Casamigos and Don Julio, were not “100% Blue Weber Agave” as marketed.
At the time we asked the law firm for comment and attorney Nathan Tarnor responded, “Hagens Berman filed a class action lawsuit against Diageo because independent laboratory testing showed its tequila was adulterated and falsely labeled. It’s not fair to consumers if they pay a premium price for tequila but receive an inferior substitute product. It’s also not fair to agave farmers because major tequila brands are using cheap substitute alcohols rather than 100% agave as required by United States and Mexican law.”
In her dismissal of the case, Judge Hall stated that the plaintiffs, which included individual tequila buyers and restaurants, had failed to show how they were harmed.
“The court struggles to find how it could find that a study that looks at five samples would allow a court to reasonably infer that a defendant was engaging in ubiquitous, systemic mislabeling,” Hall said.
Hagens Berman, which has a track record of winning class action lawsuits against corporate giants such as Exxon, is unlikely to give up that easily. We reached out to managing partner Steve Berman, who responded, “We respect the court, but this decision gets the record wrong, and we intend to ask the court to correct it.”
He went on to elaborate: “The ruling rests on the assumption that our clients ‘conceded’ they never tested any tequila they purchased. That simply isn’t so. The complaint alleges that the bottles tested were purchased by clients in our case. The lead client even swore under oath that he poured tequila from his own bottle of tequila into a test tube and sent it to an accredited lab, which found it did not match authentic 100% agave tequila. The court’s own opinion acknowledges that Plaintiffs tested products ‘that Plaintiffs purchased directly’. You can’t concede something you’ve argued, sworn to, and pleaded.”
This wasn’t Berman’s only criticism of the way things were handled.
“The court also said plaintiffs never alleged that Diageo’s tequilas come from a common production process,” he stated. “But the complaint says exactly that: the testing shows Diageo’s ‘entire tequila line relies on the same adulterated base spirit.’ And the court dismissed the case without addressing our request to amend the complaint and without saying whether the dismissal is with or without prejudice. Importantly, the court never decided whether Diageo’s ‘100% agave’ labels are true. It ruled only on a threshold standing question.”
So what are the next steps?
“We may ask the court to reconsider its ruling and allow us to move forward, and we are prepared to take this to the Court of Appeals if necessary,” Berman stated.
Please do not use these quotations without crediting Mezcalistas.
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