Founder's Story
Tequila, Tradition, and Triumph: How Charley Pavlosky Built Aguadios into a Collector’s Dream | S2 Ep. 152
Tue, 19 Nov 2024
In this episode, Charley Pavlosky dives into his extraordinary journey into the world of rare spirits, sharing how a chance experience in Jalisco, Mexico, inspired the creation of Aguadios Tequila. From exploring tequila's rich history to crafting some of the rarest and most exquisite spirits, Charley delivers a compelling story of passion and innovation.Key Topics Discussed:The Origins of Tequila: Charley’s discovery of a family-run Jalisco operation featuring rare organic blue Weber agave with exceptional sugar content.Crafting Perfection: How Aguadios Tequila is aged in 200-year-old Japanese Mizunara oak barrels, creating a spirit that blends tradition and rarity.Tequila as a Collector's Item: The growing trend of tequila as an appreciating asset, with limited-edition bottles becoming highly sought-after investments.Overcoming Industry Challenges: The hurdles of navigating legal and logistical processes across Mexico, the U.S., and Japan to bring a premium product to market.The Celebrity Influence: The role of high-profile celebrity tequilas in popularizing the spirit, while Aguadios focuses on authenticity and exclusivity.The Role of Humor: Charley’s background in comedy, working with legends like Robin Williams and Richard Pryor, and how humor has been a guiding force in overcoming challenges.Takeaways:Tequila is not just a drink; it’s a vessel for storytelling, tradition, and shared human experiences.Scarcity and authenticity make rare spirits like Aguadios Tequila truly remarkable.Perseverance, humor, and passion are essential to navigating challenges and achieving success.Connect with Charley Pavlosky:Trending Spirits Inc.AguadiosVisit these websites to explore Charley’s story, purchase limited-edition bottles, and inquire about private tastings or events.Our Sponsors:* Check out Indeed: https://indeed.com/FOUNDERSSTORY* Check out Northwest Registered Agent and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: https://northwestregisteredagent.com* Check out Plus500: https://plus500.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: https://www.rosettastone.com
Chapter 1: What inspired Charley Pavlosky to start Aguadios Tequila?
That's a great question, Daniel. Thank you. It happened by accident, like a lot of great things in life. I had made many journeys to Mexico throughout the 80s and 90s at the behest of family and friends who I had down there who asked me to come and travel to their location they were living in, spend time with them.
And one particular friend of mine in Los Angeles at the time had a family down in Jalisco, and he asked me to go visit them while I was hiking around the local region. And one day I hiked up the side of this volcano called Volcanda Tequila, outside of the town of Tequila. And it turns out it's an ancient volcano, had been dormant for 220,000 years.
Halfway up the slope, I happened upon a ranchero, which was my friend's family. And they welcomed me in, had a meal with them. And when I left for the rest of my journey, they gave me a bottle with a cork in it and said, take this with you. So I took that back to Los Angeles and I had never tasted anything so amazing in my life.
And it was tequila made the old fashioned way through family methods that went back to this family settled this land in 1835. And it turns out that they had the rarest blue Weber agave in all of Mexico, organic, and had the highest Brix content of any agave anywhere. The usual Brix content, which is a sugar content in the plant, is about 27 for all your premium tequilas.
Their bricks content was 53, which is almost double. And they had been making their own tequila for many years. And that sort of started me on this journey of rare, unique, unbelievable spirits that were unlike any of the run-of-the-mill tequilas.
So what do you think in terms of the reception around when you talk to people about the rarity and people, are they open to like, oh, I want to try something that's more rare? Do people not care so much about it because they think, you know, tequila is tequila? What are you finding in terms of what are people saying when you tell them the story?
Depends upon who you talk to. The one thing I hear all the time is, oh, I had an experience with tequila in college and I drank too much and I got sick. I know that they were drinking, you know, some Blanco cheap tequila that they got, you know, in college. We all drank cheap booze in college.
But after I started learning about rare spirits, and this was 35 years ago now, I realized that life was too short to drink cheap booze. So I dedicated myself to only bringing the finest and rarest spirits to the table. And as I've sampled people on the new release we have, which is our inaugural release of only 1,350 bottles, and this will never be made again because there is no more.
When people sample it, the first reaction is, wow, I've never tasted anything like that in my life. What is that? They know it's tequila, but they don't know the origin story. And that's what's so impactful is the effect it has on people, storytelling, sharing our lives with each other. And that takes a whole different flavor because we're not making mixed drinks.
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Chapter 2: How does Aguadios Tequila achieve its unique flavor?
Well, what we've done is we've created the only tequila with the rarest Lueber organic agave that's been aged in Japanese mizunara oak. Now, this tequila is 46 years old by the time it gets to the glass in your hand. That's more than half a human lifetime. The barrels it was aged in are 200-year-old Japanese mizunari harvest, but were planted on Hokkaido, Japan in just around the year 1790, 1795.
So 200 years later, they're harvested and formed into barrels. The journey has been extraordinary insofar as we're bringing something to market that People have never had before, and they'll never have again. Once it's gone, it's gone forever. And that's something that connects us on a spiritual level. It's almost like we are sipping with our ancestors, because the stories are ancestral.
When you go back 200 years just for the barrel wood, and then you're going back to 1834, just for the family founding this plantation. And then you look at the volcano, which became dormant 220,000 years ago, that fed through the alluvial rains, this rare blue-web agave. We're looking at an historic event that we're capturing in a bottle, capturing in a glass.
And it's like capturing lightning in a bottle. It happens once in a lifetime. We never anticipated this. It's just been a journey of curiosity for me and of learning and of education, of course, and gratitude. But from the ground to that glass, there's only two things in the tequila, water and agave. The yeast comes from the air. It's naturally fermented and there's no additives.
And someone who has never had an additive-free tequila, and I mean a pure tequila like this, will notice the difference. The first thing that comes to mind is how clean it is. And you're right, it's not to get drunk. It's to sip a little and enjoy life a lot more.
It's always amazing going back to understand how things were created. Like you just said, hundreds of thousands of years ago, something needed to happen for us to be here today. I mean, that's amazing. Talk about rarity and history. Why do you think the last few years tequila has become so popular? Because I feel like if I really look at all of the alcohols, I think people are drinking less beer.
I'm not sure exactly on wine. I know people are drinking less alcohol. you know, less alcohol overall, I'd say, but I feel like tequila though has really, really taken off and it's become even more mainstream. Why do you think that is?
Well, I can tell you why it is, and your assertion is correct. Tequila, for the first time ever in 2024, outsold whiskey in the United States of America. It is the spirit of choice. The reason that has happened is because of celebrity. A lot of celebrities have taken a fascination to tequila, and they've decided to make their own tequila.
and there's probably about a dozen known celebrity tequilas out there right now. It started with George Clooney. Clooney's a tequila guy. He loves tequila. He enjoys a good drink of tequila, and he and his partner, Randy Gerber, decided to start with a third partner whose name I do not know at the moment.
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Chapter 3: What makes tequila a collector's item?
Chapter 4: Why has tequila gained popularity in recent years?
Chapter 5: What challenges did Charley face in the tequila industry?
Chapter 6: How does the aging process influence tequila's quality?
As the years go by and there's no more left, the bottles you have increase in value. I have a collection at home with some bottles that I bought for as little as $500 or $600, and now they're worth $10,000, $12,000 each because the scarcity creates the rarity, the rarity escalates the price. And they go for auction at very high prices, these bottles.
So that's kind of a little snapshot of how it's become so mainstream and on many people's lips, literally and figuratively, the spirit of tequila.
I'm always interested about the alcohol that almost becomes an asset that appreciates. We had someone on before that talked about wine, like these rare wines, like you said, it's only made one time that it's scarcity. And there's a lot of these collectors that want to, you know, You also mentioned George Clooney.
I'm sure their huge exit inspired a lot of people that want to just create to exit, exit the company for billions or whatever they hope. How do you see the exit or what is the long term goal of building these spirit companies?
Well, a lot of people do look at that exit. They all made a lot of money exiting that company. We didn't do it for that purpose. We did it to maintain and curate the purity in the process, the brands, and most important, the traditions of the families behind it. Because without family traditions, tequila would not be anywhere that it is now.
The great families of Mexico, the grandmaster distillers, Well, the one that comes to mind for me is Enrique Fonseca, who makes Fuente Seca. To me, not to plug somebody else's tequila, but I love their tequila. I've been a huge fan for years and years and years. And everything that guy makes, everything he touches is world-class, state-of-the-art.
I've tasted every tequila he's ever made, and they're all extraordinary. And that's inspiring to me. And I think some people who are in a celebrity tequila, yeah, they're looking at the exit. They're looking for a pension. We're looking to curate the rarest of the rare, the best of the best. And we'll leave that as a legacy for this company. that we wouldn't compromise on quality.
We wouldn't overmarket. We sell by hand. The batches we have coming out after this 1300 bottles are 286 bottles of an extremely rare tequila, 300 bottles of another extremely rare tequila. We're sort of in a niche all of our own. There's no one else out there that I know of that's doing what we do, which is only curating the rarest, the most unobtainable spirits in the world.
And I aspire to find the best spirits like those that are created by people like Enrique Fonseca. He partly inspired this journey for me because he made an amazing tequila, an ensemble tequila in 2013 and 14. And I'm lucky to still have two bottles of it unopened in my case. It was some of the best tequila ever made on the planet. And it happened by accident.
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Chapter 7: What role do celebrity endorsements play in tequila's success?
into the Lampoon on April 3rd, and Aguadillo is sponsoring that event, and it'll be lovely to see Lewis again and be part of that. So humor comes naturally to me, and the challenges and the journey have to be met with humor, because in order to get the Mexican government, the United States government, and the Japanese government in accord to allow us to create this product the way we did,
Took a lot of patience, a lot of challenge, and a lot of lawyers, and of course, some good old hard-earned money to pay all the certificates we had to acquire, all the liquor licenses. And All the fees we had to pay just to get it across the border. It was an arduous time, and we were bringing the tequila across the border during COVID.
So the Mexican CRT, the regulatory body in Mexico that governs tequila, they were pretty much shut down as was the rest of the government. So it took a year and a half longer. We had to be really patient. We started this journey 35 years ago, and I decided to bring it to market in 2020. 2017, 2018, we founded the company in 2019, and only now this year, 2024, have we released it.
So we had a lot of challenges. Everything you could imagine from border problems, transport problems, governmental problems. I had to hire attorneys in Mexico. I had to hire three different sets of attorneys just to get the booze. Across the border to the United States. And there were times, you know, I was furious with how slow the process was. But in the end, humor always saved me.
So very grateful for the humor behind it all.
My last question, because I'm very curious, has nothing to do with tequila, has more on the comedy side. So I've always felt that comedians, they're funny because they're overcoming what they had to go through growing up. They're overcoming something inside them that is not funny.
Like, I feel like they're almost like many times, I don't want to say tormented individuals, but, you know, they're not like the humor is like a byproduct of maybe something that they went through, maybe traumas that they had, and then they become funny and then they want the world to feel better.
How do you feel about that in terms of like, was there something that you see like a reason why people were going into comedy or maybe a similarity between all of these incredible people that you got to deal with? Oh, you're bang on, Daniel.
I mean, the thing that always amazed me about working with these incredible comics, and I have stories that you wouldn't believe. And sometime we get together off camera, we'll talk about them. I'll share them with you. I was always amazed that the people that were the most damaged and the most traumatized and had the toughest upbringings became comics.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of Aguadios Tequila?
They can go to the website, which is aguadios.com, A-G-U-A-D-I-O-S.com. And there'll be a buy page there. They can buy it on Reserve Bar. They can buy it through K&L. they can get in contact with me and I can talk to them about the origin story and I can set up special events for them at their clubs. We're in a bunch of private clubs, but we're publicly available to anyone.
And we just love sharing the story and we have a great crew that works with me on this project. So the website is the way to go. And I hope to meet you personally and share some of the comedy stories because now your interest piques my interest. And yeah, the ones I've worked with, amazing human beings, amazing stories.
Well, Charlie, thank you so much for all that you do, all the inspiration to other people out there that maybe they have some rare spirits that they want to bring to the world. I think they're going to be inspired to do so. I'm really interested to learn more about this, investing in these tequila that will even gain money over time. This is really open to my mind.
I didn't even know this existed, but I super appreciate you joining us today on Founder's Story.
It's my pleasure, Daniel. And you have a great rest of your day. And thank you for having me on. I'm really grateful.
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