The Suburban surged and swerved, rattling across potholes and rocketing over heaves in the sun-scorched asphalt. At the wheel, Adolfo Murillo smiled with pride. “This road we’re on here,” he said, “for years and years and years was never paved.” Going back to the 1940s, local politicians had run on promises of laying down tarmac but never made good. The highway was only leveled and tarred about a decade ago, in part to accommodate the truckloads of agaves traveling the 16 miles from Murillo’s fields near the dusty village of Agua Negra to the tequila distilleries in Arandas, Jalisco, in central Mexico. Murillo steered with one hand and twisted the cork of a bottle of tequila with the other. The rubber stopper squeaked then popped, like a wet kiss, and the cab instantly filled with the smell of baked agave.

In just eight years on the market, Murillo’s brand, Alquimia, has won 35 gold medals in international contests, including best in show for its extra añejo—the classification for tequila aged in an oak barrel for more than three years—at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition in March. The key, Murillo told me, is in the high sugar content of his plants. Many larger distillers have embraced the extra añejo category, because strong oaky flavors can mask poor-quality tequila, but the natural flavor of the plant is overwhelmed. “If you age tequila too aggressively,” Murillo told me, “you lose the agave characteristics.” To demonstrate the contrast, he poured his añejo into plastic tasting cups perched on the armrest between our seats, somehow topping off each shot as he braked and eased around craters in the blacktop.

Watching the red-clay hills slip by, I sipped the shot, relaxing a bit into my seat, the rich vegetal sweetness of agave mixing with the smokiness of toasted oak.

The 58-year-old Murillo was born in Agua Negra, where his grandfather was a small-plot farmer, but in 1961 his parents moved their family to Ojai, California, where his father, who later became a US citizen, oversaw a poultry operation. Adolfo returned to his grandparents’ farm every few summers, until he went to UC-Santa Barbara to get a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences. He got his doctorate in optometry at UC-Berkeley, and on weekends, he and his wife would drive up to the Napa Valley and fantasize about owning a winery. But when his grandmother died, Murillo began to dream of blue agaves instead.

Locals thought he was nuts. Agua Negra is within the official zone for tequila production, but no one had ever tried cultivating agave in this high-desert region. Everyone told Murillo it was too cold, there was too little rain, and the soil wasn’t red enough—not enough iron to sustain agave. But Murillo turned to science: He had the soil tested and found that it had a very similar chemical composition to the highly productive fields of Arandas, to the southwest. And because it had been generations since the area around Agua Negra had been used to raise large-scale cash crops, the soil could be quickly restored to its organic state.