Meet the Spirits Whisperer

Iván Saldaña is the developer of more than 60 spirits brands across every category, including Montelobos Mezcal, Abasolo Whisky, Lost Irish whiskey, Defrente tequila and bitter orange liqueur Alma Finca. He’s the co-founder of Casa Lumbre, a kind of creative agency specializing in booze, particularly in products with a Mexican inflection and some within the celebrity realm; for F1 driver Lewis Hamilton, he rustled up a non-alcoholic drink by the name of Almave, which followed hot on the heels of Nocheluna, a sotol developed for Lenny Kravitz.

Contrary to the myth that devising spirits is all about nosing and sipping from age-old barrels in dank cellars, Saldaña spends most of his time in a white coat and pristine laboratory. This befits someone whose doctorate is in biology, specializing in tropical ecology and the study of how plants sense and adapt to harsh conditions; his PhD was awarded based on his work at the Plant Stress Unit at the UK’s University of Sussex.

It might seem like an odd background for spirits creation. But credit fortunate timing, including a crisis in the tequila industry, that made Saldaña realize “how little the industry knew about its raw materials.” That led to several job offers and his career being deflected away from academia and toward the position of research and development director for Pernod Ricard.

“I spend a lot of time isolating compounds but felt that after a few years of the corporate world, there wasn’t a lot of room for creativity,” says Saldaña, who consequently went independent. “Sometimes people come to you knowing what they want and we create something around that, sometimes it’s intuitive — you sense there’s room in the market to revive an old recipe — and sometimes it’s about trying something new. When we launched Alma Finca, we thought it was incredible that there was no orange liqueur from Mexico, given it’s an ingredient of a classic Margarita.”

But Saldaña stresses that a new idea doesn’t always work. Sometimes an idea goes nowhere “because you can’t work out a context for the end product. The timing isn’t right,” he says. And that’s not the only challenge — the drinks market is rarely keen on the radically original. “If you offer real innovation, you also have to offer familiarity, otherwise it’s hard to connect to consumers, and sometimes a product has to be readjusted so that it does,” he adds. That might mean something as subtle as putting a new drink in a traditional bottle.

Saldaña spends much of his time going through multiple iterations of a possible new launch. He’s typically working on five or six ideas at a time, “some to meet a very clear target, some very much more exploratory,” he says.

That’s the benefit of today’s drinks industry labs, as they allow brands to take even the most outrageous idea and produce it on a small scale to test if it works. The process can be slow; it took five years of work before Saldaña was able to find a way of incorporating the processes used to make traditional tortillas into the manufacturing methodology for Mexican whisky, for example. And it can require a serious commitment to the idea — his company had to build its own distillery.

But those experiments can also pay off big time and bring the likes of Lewis Hamilton to your door. “The first challenge was just finding the opportunity for [Hamilton] to present what he wanted to us,” Saldana says. “He came to our HQ in a very secret operation, we clicked and then followed several prototypes and lots of chasing him around the world.” It was also a reminder, Saldana adds, that while celebrity attachment “gives you awareness, it’s not enough. The actual product has to have a life of its own.”

Saldaña has worked all his life with agave plants, but Hamilton’s Almavel was the first time he had been asked to “take all I know about the flavor of agave but incorporate that into an industry first, a blue agave drink without alcohol,” he says. “It opened doors for me to think about an ingredient I’ve worked with for so long in another way. There’s always something new to learn about making spirits.”