Campari's latest numbers show me where the American tequila drinker is putting money in a flat market. Not into exclusivity, and not into whatever is cheapest, but into a widely available brand that makes trying a new bottle easy and talks to people without pretension. Espolòn is growing at double digits while most of Campari's US portfolio shrinks, and I think that gap says more about where tequila is heading than any headline about a category slowdown.
Shanken News Daily reported on October 29 that Campari Group's sales for the first nine months of 2026 rose 2.9% to about €2.3 billion. North America did far less, up 1% to €831 million. Inside the US, Espolòn's volume rose 16.2% in control states through August. Campari credits a new 200 ml bottle, an Extra Añejo expression and a new campaign, "Ride the Rooster," built around authenticity and inclusivity rather than status.
The rest of the US range tells the opposite story. Skyy vodka fell 9.9% in control states, Wild Turkey dropped 4.0%, Grand Marnier 4.5% and Courvoisier 4.2%. Aperitifs and agave now make up half of Campari's US sales, and the company still expects a marginal topline decline in the US for the full year because of a softer second half and a tough fourth-quarter comparison. One tequila brand is carrying a portfolio that would otherwise be going backwards.
The size of that dependence is easy to work out from the table Shanken published. Espolòn sold 1,667,000 nine-litre cases in the US in 2025, out of 6,931,000 for Campari's nine leading brands combined. Dividing one by the other, Espolòn is about 24% of that volume on its own. It is also now 222,000 cases bigger than Skyy (1,667,000 minus 1,445,000). And its 16.2% growth is close to three times the 5.9% volume growth the whole US off-trade tequila category posted in the Nielsen data I wrote about last week, even allowing for the different datasets.
That earlier report found craft, self-declared additive-free brands growing 18.6% while celebrity labels struggled. Put the two together and a pattern appears. The brands gaining are either specific about what is in the bottle or easy to buy into, and ideally both. What is losing ground is the expensive story without much underneath it. Campari's marketing choice is a direct bet on that: it is telling drinkers that Espolòn is for them, not for a velvet rope.
The 200 ml bottle matters more than it looks. A smaller format lowers the cost of a mistake, and in a category with hundreds of labels, the cost of a mistake is what stops people experimenting. This is the behaviour MezcalSearch is designed around. People use a discovery app to find and compare bottles by what they want to drink, an extra añejo, a reposado, a specific producer, rather than by who endorses it. When trying something new costs less, discovery turns into purchases faster, and the brands that are easy to find and easy to try collect that demand.
What I will watch next is whether Espolòn's growth holds as Campari leans on it harder, and whether competitors answer with their own small formats and plainer messaging. My expectation is that they will. Tequila in the US is not running out of drinkers. It is running out of patience for paying extra just to be told a bottle is special.