Steve
McGarryruns on magic.

Read the back label of a Rosaluna bottle and the ingredient list runs out fast: agave, water. No sugar to round the edges, no additives to fake the smoke, no flavoring to do the work the agave should be doing on its own. That short list is the whole argument, and Steve McGarry is the one who has to make it stick across a U.S. spirits market that runs on shortcuts and shelf noise.

He is the CEO of Rosaluna Mezcal, a New York-headquartered brand distilled in Santiago Matatlan, Oaxaca, by a family with six generations of mezcalero experience. The product is USDA Certified Organic and additive-free. The day job is less romantic: distribution, financing, certification, and the unglamorous machinery of turning a hand-made spirit into something a bartender in Boston and a buyer in Texas can both find on a Tuesday.

McGarry came to this from an unlikely starting point. He holds a BSME in mechanical engineering from Western New England University, a credential that puts him closer to tolerances and torque curves than to terroir. Somewhere along the way he picked up a digital strategy education at Columbia, too. Engineers tend to distrust anything they can't measure, which is a strange temperament to bring to a category that sells mystery in a clay-fired bottle. It turns out to be the point.

Before Rosaluna, he spent years inside the machine he now competes against. He worked the floor early on at restaurants like Houlihan's and John Harvard, moved into the trade with Whitehall Liquors and Martignetti Companies, and then climbed the ladder at Pernod Ricard, where he ran prestige sales as National Sales Director of Prestige and later Vice President of Prestige Sales. Prestige is the part of a spirits portfolio where price is the smallest objection and story is the largest. He learned how the giants build a luxury label, and then he left to do it for a spirit most Americans still can't spell.

At Rosaluna he started as Senior Vice President and took the top job from there. What he inherited was a brand with genuine craft and a hard problem: mezcal is artisanal by nature, which is another way of saying it does not scale the way vodka does. Every liter is tied to a plant that took years to mature and a person in Oaxaca who knows the oven by feel. Growth that ignores that math breaks the product. Growth that respects it is slow. McGarry's entire job is the space between those two sentences.

In April 2025 he closed the bet that makes the next chapter possible. Rosaluna raised a Series A led by Sacha Lichine, the wine entrepreneur who created Whispering Angel and turned rose from a poolside afterthought into a global category. Lichine joined the board. The round came paired with a national distribution partnership with Shaw-Ross International Importers, a house that has been moving fine wine and spirits since 1968. The message was not subtle: the people who know how to build a premium beverage brand looked at Rosaluna and wrote a check.

Four months later, McGarry landed the achievement that says the most about how he runs the place. In August 2025, Rosaluna became the first mezcal brand ever to earn the Distintivo Verde, an environmental certification handed out by COMERCAM, the official mezcal regulatory body. It is not a marketing badge you can buy. It demands measurable progress on water conservation, renewable energy, organic cultivation, waste reuse, deforestation prevention, fair labor, and community contribution. President Abelino Cohetero Villegas presented it in Santiago Matatlan with a senator and state officials in the room. For an engineer who only trusts what he can measure, a certification built entirely on measurements is the ideal trophy.

The recognition has piled up around him. CEO Monthly named him Alcoholic Beverage Manufacturing CEO of the Year 2024 for New York. The brand's mezcal has been used to make what was crowned the World's Best Margarita. The tagline he repeats, "Mezcal is Magic," sounds like ad copy until you notice he treats it as a constraint: the magic only survives if nobody cuts corners between the agave field and the glass.

There is a quiet symmetry to the life. He lives in Duxbury, Massachusetts, a coastal town a long way from the agave hills, runs a company based in New York, and answers to a distillery in Oaxaca. On the Que Pasa Boston podcast he reconnected with a former liquor-industry colleague, Gabriela Salas, to talk through that distance and how a premium Mexican spirit earns trust in an American market that has historically reached for tequila first. He is, by every signal, less a showman than an operator who happens to be selling something poetic.

That is the tension worth watching. Mezcal's romance is real and the danger is equally real: scale it carelessly and you get the smoky vodka that purists fear. McGarry's whole approach is to put rigor underneath the romance. The agave and water stay on the label not because it photographs well, but because removing anything else would be a measurable downgrade. In a category that loves to talk about magic, he is the rare leader who can tell you exactly how the trick is done.