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Don Julio 1942 Tequila: Old vs. New – Which is better?

Grover October 24, 2013 Our Videos

Don’t you just love change? Let’s face it, most of us don’t, which is why it can be downright scary when theres a change to your favorite tequila. When the bottle changes you can’t help but worry if the tequila has changed as well. One such case is the mega-popular Don Julio 1942, which saw a change to its bottle AND recipe a few years ago. I first tasted Don Julio 1942 back around 2006. It came in a cool wooden “coffin” box and the bottle was tall and slightly rounded with an agave leaf shape blown into the glass. It had a blue label and a screw top. I drank this like a mad man for several years.

When they changed the bottle to the taller, darker brown design of today, I smelled it and realized it was different! To be honest, I got angry, and I childishly refused to drink it ever again!

I thought to myself: “Why did they mess with such a good thing?!”

Years go by, and after we launched the Tequila Matchmaker, we saw Don Julio 1942 shoot right up the charts to become the most popular tequila according to our users. All these people can’t be wrong, so we decided to give it another try. We wanted it to be absolutely fair, so we used the “blind rating” tool within the Tequila Matchmaker. This is a cool feature built into the app that makes it possible to rate a tequila without any biases.

We were shocked to discover that Scarlet and I both liked the NEW version better!

This was totally unexpected. When a tequila brand changes a bottle or recipe, it’s usually because they are trying to save some money at the expense of quality. But this was clearly not the case here.

The new Don Julio 1942 has a little more vanilla, and slightly more caramelized baked agave to the aroma. The older formula smells great, but the new stuff smells even better. The flavor is deeper, richer, rounder, and has a slightly cleaner finish.

We were so surprised by this that we had to get other people involved. So over the course of several months, we invited 12 different tequila enthusiasts to our house and gave them 2 glasses marked “A”, and “B”. We didn’t tell them what it was, and asked them to tell us “which do you like better?”

Only 8% said they liked both equally, while 25% said they liked the old stuff, and 67% said the new Don Julio 1942 was better. Validation! Afterward, we told them what they had just tasted, and almost everyone was surprised.

So, the next time your favorite tequila changes something, don’t panic! Just remain calm, do your own blind taste test, because you may be pleasantly surprised.

We’d love to know what you think, too. Log into the Tequila Matchmaker and share your ratings with us!

— Grover




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