A generation ago, tequila was still widely treated as a shot spirit, mezcal as a smoky village liquor sold in plastic jugs, and Kerala’s vaatte as an informal distillate that existed mainly in sheds, family recipes, and cinema. That hierarchy has collapsed. Consumers now pay premium prices for spirits defined by place, plant, and method rather than by a generic category name. Heritage craft spirits and native artisanal distillates have become one of the clearest premiumisation stories in global drinks. The question is no longer whether rural distillates can become luxury categories. Mexico has already answered that. The more useful question is whether an unaged Kerala spirit such as Vaatte can travel the same path.
The comparison is not ornamental. Tequila, mezcal, and Vaatte begin in the same economic position: an agricultural surplus transformed in small stills by communities that already knew how to ferment. They diverge in law, industrialisation, and marketing. Those differences explain why two Mexican categories now command billions of dollars, and why Vaatte remains, for the moment, a diaspora and craft experiment rather than a regulated national export.
Three native distillates, three different stages
Tequila is the industrialised end of the spectrum. It is an agave distillate produced under a denomination of origin centred on Jalisco, overwhelmingly from blue Weber agave. The modern category split from the broader family of mezcales when producers around the town of Tequila industrialised cooking, fermentation, and distillation, then secured legal exclusivity for the name. Global tequila sales are now measured in the low-to-mid tens of billions of dollars, with recent market estimates clustering around USD 12–16 billion in 2025 and forecasts pointing toward USD 20–25 billion or more by the early 2030s. Premium and super-premium bottles account for a large share of value. In the United States, tequila and mezcal together sold 32.2 million nine-litre cases in 2024. Blanco still dominates volume because it is the cocktail workhorse; reposado and añejo expressions are growing faster among drinkers who treat agave as a sipping spirit.
Mezcal is the artisanal sibling that refused full industrialisation and then sold that refusal. It can be made from dozens of agave species, often roasted in earthen pits, crushed by tahona, fermented in open wooden vats, and distilled in copper or clay. For much of the twentieth century it was a low-status rural drink. Production then exploded: Mexican output rose from roughly one million litres around 2010–2012 to more than 11 million litres by 2024. The global mezcal market remains far smaller than tequila—generally estimated below USD 1 billion in 2025, with forecasts toward USD 1.1–1.8 billion later in the next decade—but its premium tier is growing faster than the mass market. Most certified volume comes from Oaxaca; a large majority of exports go to the United States. Joven (unaged) still leads volume; ancestral and artisanal designations, village names, and rare agaves do the prestige work.
Vaatte occupies the stage mezcal occupied before its export boom. It is Kerala’s traditional unaged distillate—naadan vaattu charayam—made from fermented coconut or palmyra toddy, jaggery, sugarcane, fruit, and spice. It was never a protected denomination. In 1996 the state banned arrack after repeated adulteration tragedies. The craft survived in informal production and in family memory. In the 2020s it reappeared as a legal bottled product mainly through Malayali founders in Canada and the United Kingdom: Mandakini (Malabari Vaatte), Taika, and Manavatty. These are small-batch, unaged spirits sold to the diaspora and to curious craft buyers at prices in the CAD 40–55 range for 750 ml. One Canadian brand has publicly cited sales above CAD 1 million. That is commercially meaningful for a start-up and negligible beside Mexican agave. The category comparison is therefore structural, not numerical.
The useful Mezcal vs Vaatte contrast is this: both are smoky or rustic only by association, both were socially coded as working-class liquor, both depend on a perishable agricultural wash, and both become valuable when the story of method is made legible to drinkers who do not live in the producing village. Tequila is the warning as much as the model. Once a native distillate is standardised, it can grow enormous—and lose the very irregularity that later drinkers pay to recover.
How Mexico turned village liquor into luxury
Mexico’s playbook had several repeating moves.
First came legal geography. Tequila’s denomination of origin concentrated production, created a certifiable product, and allowed exporters to claim authenticity. Mezcal received its own denomination in 1994, with later categories for ancestral and artisanal methods. Protection did not automatically enrich small producers, but it gave buyers a vocabulary: 100 per cent agave, village of origin, species of maguey, pit-roasted versus autoclave.
Second came a change in taste-makers. Ron Cooper’s Del Maguey, founded in 1995, did not invent mezcal; it translated palenque production into the language of bartenders and collectors. Single-village bottlings, hand-painted labels, and trips to Oaxaca recoded a rural spirit as terroir. Cocktail bars and restaurants completed the conversion. Once mezcal was no longer “the one with the worm,” it could sit beside whisky and cognac. Multinationals followed. Bacardi’s acquisition of Ilegal is one marker of the moment when a former village category became a portfolio asset.
Third came premiumisation inside the bottle. Consumers who first met tequila as a mixable blanco later paid for reposado, añejo, extra-añejo, and cristalino. Mezcal drinkers who began with espadín joven moved toward wild agaves and limited lots. High-end and super-premium tequila already account for a majority of value in several industry breakdowns. The same drinkers who once wanted volume now want scarcity, process, and a named landscape.
Fourth came a contradiction that every native category eventually faces. Boom economics favour the easiest plant. In mezcal country that has often meant cultivated espadín rather than slow wild species, plantation expansion into former forest, and intermediaries who buy cheaply and sell expensively. Production in Mexico rose more than tenfold in a little over a decade. The cultural story that made mezcal valuable—small families, ancestral method, many agaves—is now under pressure from the scale that story created.
That sequence is the template behind phrases such as “Tequila of India.” It is not a claim that toddy tastes like agave. It is a claim about market formation: rural feedstock, suppressed or low-status domestic image, diaspora and bartender discovery, then a premium price justified by heritage rather than by industrial consistency.
Where Vaatte sits on the same curve
Vaatte already possesses several of the assets Mexico later monetised.
It has a distinct agricultural base. Coconut and palmyra sap, jaggery, and sugarcane are not interchangeable with blue agave, but they are equally local and equally tied to a coastal ecology. Toddy must be used quickly; that perishability is a production constraint and a authenticity claim. The village alembic—earthen pots, bamboo or metal condensers, cloth-sealed joints—is as specific as a palenque’s pit oven and tahona. Unaged spirit is not a defect in this comparison. Mezcal joven still dominates mezcal volume; tequila blanco still dominates tequila volume. Aging is a later luxury layer, not the origin of the category.
It has a suppression story that markets understand. Colonial abkari systems taxed and channelled local liquor; independent Kerala prohibited arrack in 1996. Mezcal, too, lived through restriction, contempt, and informal survival. In global spirits marketing, a banned or disregarded village drink is easier to elevate than a drink that was never constrained. The risk, of course, is romanticising illegality. The commercial opportunity is to separate the method from the adulteration that justified the ban.
It has a ready first market. Mexican mezcal needed American bartenders. Vaatte already has a large, affluent Malayali diaspora in Canada, the Gulf, the United Kingdom, and the United States—people who recognise the name, the bottle languages, and the occasion. Mandakini’s early sell-outs at a Canadian craft distillery and Manavatty’s arrival in a Kochi duty-free shop are the equivalent of first export footholds, not of a finished category. They demonstrate demand among people who already know the reference. The next, harder step is the drinker who does not.
It fits a wider Indian and global turn toward native artisanal distillates. Goan feni has a geographical indication. Mahua and other Adivasi spirits are being recast as heritage rather than as illicit country liquor. Cachaça, pisco, singani, and West African palm and grain spirits are all being repositioned from local necessity to export prestige. The consumer pattern is consistent: drinkers fatigued by interchangeable industrial spirits pay more for a plant, a place, and a method they can name.
Why the trajectory is possible—and why it will not be identical
Vaatte is positioned for premiumisation because the market now rewards exactly what it is: an unaged, place-specific distillate with a long vernacular history. The Mexican analogy is strongest at the beginning of the curve. A spirit can leave the village, keep its name, raise its price, and still be understood as itself. Mezcal proved that unaged need not mean cheap. Tequila proved that a native distillate can become a global cocktail and sipping category.
The analogy weakens at scale. Agave is a branded national plant with decades of export infrastructure, denominations of origin, and corporate capital. Kerala toddy and jaggery distillation has none of that inside the producing state. Arrack remains prohibited in Kerala. Any large domestic industry would require a legal redesign that does not recreate the public-health failures of the 1990s. Without a protected name and a lawful production base at origin, Vaatte risks becoming a flavour style made in Ontario or Poland rather than a Kerala category in the way mezcal is a Mexican category.
There is also the quality problem that mezcal is already living through. If “Vaatte” comes to mean any unaged cane or toddy-like spirit with Malayalam on the label, the word will inflate and then empty. Mezcal’s value depends on the difference between ancestral and industrial methods remaining visible. Vaatte’s future value depends on the same discipline: transparent wash, honest distillation, no methanol shortcuts, and a refusal to let the name detach from the coast that produced it.
A final constraint is ecological and social. Mexico’s boom showed that demand can outrun the plant and the village. Coconut tapping is already a skilled, declining labour. Sugarcane and jaggery supply chains are industrial. If Vaatte ever grows quickly, the question will not be whether drinkers like it. It will be who captures the margin—tappers and village distillers, or bottlers far from the palms.
What “falling for native spirits” actually means
The world is not falling for novelty flavours. It is falling for spirits that still look like agriculture. Tequila made agave a luxury crop. Mezcal made method and village a luxury signal. Vaatte, if it follows, will have to make toddy, jaggery, and the Malabar still legible in the same way: not as nostalgia for banned hooch, but as a precise native artisanal distillate with rules, origin, and a price that funds the people who climb the trees.
That is the real Mezcal vs Vaatte comparison. One category has already completed the journey from palenque to global back bar, with all the wealth and distortion that journey brings. The other is at the first exportable chapter. Calling Vaatte the Tequila of India is useful only if it is treated as a map of stages—legal recognition, quality control, storytelling, premium pricing, then the fight to keep the village inside the brand—rather than as a promise of instant billions. Mexico did not invent the appetite for heritage craft spirits. It proved that a rural distillate can satisfy that appetite at luxury prices. Kerala’s unaged Vaatte now stands where mezcal stood when the first single-village bottles left Oaxaca: known at home, newly visible abroad, and not yet decided.
A jimador in a blue-agave field in Jalisco. Tequila’s luxury status began with this plant and with the legal decision to treat a regional distillate as a national category.
Pit-roasted agave at a traditional palenque. Mezcal’s premium price is inseparable from a method that industrial tequila largely abandoned.
Open-vat fermentation in Oaxaca. The same logic—visible, local process—underpins the case for Vaatte as a native artisanal distillate rather than as generic country liquor.
A Kerala toddy tapper at work. If Vaatte is to follow mezcal’s premium trajectory, this labour, and the sap it yields, will have to remain at the centre of the category rather than become a label motif.
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