In California's Napa Valley, along the central spine of Baja California and in other wine growing regions, you'll find scores of boutique wineries. Microbreweries everywhere sprout like mushrooms, producing exceptional beers and ales for local tastes.

Germany has its Rhine wines. The French have many wine and spirit regions that give a distinctive name to their world class beverages, such as cognac and champagne. And in each instance, the appropriate government tightly controls appellation and production. Even if a bottler uses identical grapes and the methode champenoise, only wineries in that region can use the trade name champagne.

In Jalisco, along the Sierra Madre mountains sits the bigger and perhaps more famous of these “controlled” regions: The Tequila Region. Like its counterparts in other countries, Mexico tightly controls and regulates the standards and production of what many consider its national beverage. The country allows only two types of tequila to be produced: Tequila 100 Percent Agave and the more generic tequila.

Tequila 100 Percent Agave must be produced and bottled only in Mexico by state regulated fabricas. Operators in Jalisco produce this purer and often more expensive beverage from juice processed from the blue agave plant. In Tequila 100 Percent Agave, this is the only juice allowed in each batch. On shelves names like Blanco, Gold, Reposado, or Añejo, the last which may be categorized further as aged or reserva, distinguish Mexico's licensed and rigidly controlled types, or sub-genres, of the purest tequila produced.

Tequila, without the longer and more distinctive appellation, must contain at least 51 percent of blue agave juice, but can be bolstered by other products; and it can be shipped to producers almost anywhere for final production and bottling, even outside Mexico.

Tequila aficionados know the major labels: Patron, Cuervo, Sauza and Grand Centenario, all of which dominate the top ten most requested brands in the world. But, what about the burgeoning mom and pop fabricas, many of which dot the landscape, adjacent to fields of the distinctive blue agave plants? In many villages throughout this state that sits in Western Mexico local distilleries borrow a page from the wine and beer industry by producing some very fine tequilas, mezcal and spin-off beverages.

Where can you find them? And, do they, like their brothers and sisters in the beer and wine industry, allow sampling?

Some of the closest to the major population centers of Jalisco ring Guadalajara, the second largest city in Mexico. Another group sits nestled in the hills barely an hour's drive from the major tourist destination, Puerto Vallarta. And depending on the marketing spirit of the owners, they may or may not be open to the public for sampling and, more importantly, retail sales.

Just as winery tours in Napa Valley and elsewhere vary, so, too, do tours and sampling opportunities in the Tequila Region, which encompasses the state of Jalisco. At the very least, expect to see variations on the basic production process that range from almost completely automated operations to traditional hand cutting, processing and brewing.

Workers called jimadoras harvest the heart of the plant, a large core weighing from 40 to 70 pounds and then use a coa or machete type tool with a long handle to shape it into a round ball a foot or more in diameter. At the fabrica the cores, or pinas, are popped into ovens called hornos for cooking. A cooking pina reminds many of a prominent kitchen aroma around Thanksgiving, the delightful smell of sweet potatoes.

They cut the cooked pinas and reduce the pulp into a mash. In more traditional fabricas, the proprietor pounds the fibrous pina meat with either a wooden device that looks like a battering ram or uses a tahona, the traditional stone wheel. Mosto, the unfermented juice from the cooked pina, makes a short journey over to the distileria, often a home-grown looking lash-up that resembles an American moonshiner's still. Fabricas call the first run of processed juice ordinario, a raw and often unfiltered product. Fortunately, many fabricas pass the pulpy juice through as many as two more distillation processes before they store the resultant tequila in oak or synthetic barrels.

The Mexican government certifies each tequila fabrica, and attaches the official NOM (Norma Official Mexicana) imprimatur only to tequila produced from blue agave cores grown in the Tequila Region.

Sampling often results in immediate sales, so most fabricas have limited bottling operations on their premises and allow visitors to taste various “juices” from the first crush through final bottling. Because these mom and pop fabricas have relatively low barriers to entry, their presence can be volatile, with distilerias coming and going rather quickly. To find the more popular boutique operations in an area where you plan to visit, consult the local tourist bureau or tour operators who specialize in taking visitors into the higher altitude back country of Jalisco where the blue agave plants thrive.