Tequila, Tradition, and Triumph: How Charley Pavlosky Built Aguadios into a Collector’s Dream | S2 Ep. 152

0:05Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder Story. Today, we have Charlie Pawlawski. Charlie, you are the founder and CEO of Trending Spirits and Agu. Dios tequila, which tequila to me is very fascinating. I remember going to this special tasting in Cabo a few years ago, and they were really teaching us all about the history of tequila. It's very intricate. So I'd love to learn from you what is the origins or the interesting facts about tequila that brought you into the industry, and why are you really deciding to go all in? That's a great question, Daniel. Thank you. It happened by accident, like a lot of great things in life.

0:44I 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, spent 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.

1:35So 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 bricks content of any organic agave or any agave anywhere. The usual Bricks 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.

2:17And 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 uh 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.

3:00We 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.

3:38And 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. We're pouring this straight and we're sipping and we're talking and we're sharing our lives with each other. And that's the great connecting point. And that's the reaction we've been getting from this. I remember the same. I had this tequila maestro and he was telling me about the differences, like you're saying, between cheap, more rare, better tequila. And as I was sipping it, I almost felt like I was being brought back in history to ancestors of people, ancestors of myself.

4:17We were all probably sitting around drinking together dipping, it wasn't about getting drunk. It was really about enjoying the experience with each other. So I'd like to understand how has it been since you started this? I know you're doing a lot of different things. Where have you gotten in this journey with tequila and what's next? Well, what we've done is we've created the only tequila with the rarest Blue Weber organic agave that's been aged in Japanese mizanera 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 mizunori harvest, but were planted on Hokkaido, Japan, in just around the year 1790, 1795.

5:06So 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 ebber agave.

5:54We'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 the 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.

6:30And 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 i 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 are drinking less beer. I'm not sure exactly on wine. I know people are drinking less, 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.

7:16Why 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.

7:57They decided to start Casamigos. And that sort of started the trend among a lot of celebrities when they had the kind of success they did. But bear in mind, those guys took their time. They made a good product. And a lot of the people that followed them followed the trend. We're very, very strict in our sourcing. So we are very selective about the agave, the process, the bottling, the packaging, the story behind it, the origin, everything that leads to that. And that's what's led to this incredible flourish in tequila activity. So there's a lot out there. A lot of it's good. Some of it's not so good.

8:36But people's awareness has been raised by folks who are known, you know, either through their work or through their celebrity status. and that's really brought it to the forefront. And so it's also brought an attention on the finer tequilas. And that's kind of where we fall and that's our wheelhouse. And so it's been great for us and we're grateful for everybody who's in the market and we're grateful that it's become a collector's item. I mean, rare tequilas like ours appreciate in value. So they're like a rare watch or a rare painting. As the years go by and there's no more left, the bottles you have increase in value.

9:12I 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.

9:54And there's a lot of these collectors that want to get in on this. 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.

10:40The great families of Mexico, the grandmaster distillers, well, the one that comes to mind for me is Enrique Fonseca, who makes Fuentesca. 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 at 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 leave that as a legacy for this company, that we wouldn't compromise on quality.

11:25We wouldn't overmarket. We sell by hand. The batches we have coming out after this 1 ,300 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 Ponseca. 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.

12:08It was some of the best tequila ever made on the planet, and it happened by accident. And it was released by K &L in California, and I was lucky enough to have a few bottles. and there's another brand called Uno Dos Tres, and they have a tequila that they bring out in limited quantities every year called Diablito. Numbers 001 to 1000 were the most unbelievable tequila I've ever had in my life, bar none. And I actually own bottle 033. And I don't even want to mention what that's worth now. But my God, I enjoyed several bottles of that while the rum was going. and the flavor profile was extraordinary and that inspired me.

12:52So I'm inspired by the giants whose shoulders I get to stand on and hopefully bring something to the market that is just as extraordinary, just as rare, just as memorable, and just as inspiring when people get together. We only have one set of parents and Father's Day comes around and Mother's Day comes around and weddings come around and we want to celebrate those with the people we love in a special way. and I cannot think of any better way than involving ourselves in the tradition of the great families from Mexico and being grateful of the great cultural things they brought to to the United States and the spirit really is well well named it is a spirit and it's in the bottle and we sip it but there's a there's something living behind it that gets inside all of us and connects us as people and that's the magic for me of it yeah I love this story and I love the bottle.

13:44I mean, even your website too, but the bottle is something that I could see after you drink it, you want to keep it like that. That's what really draws me to spirits because I don't drink a lot. I don't really drink much, but I like to buy it for the bottle. Like you say, I like to let it sit there because it really looks good. It's like a, it's almost like a piece of art that you have when you have people over and they're going to see it. I'm curious from the personal perspective, I know you're into humor. So I imagine when you drink tequila, you're even funnier than you are when you're not drinking tequila.

14:16But what are some of the challenges or maybe one challenge that you've had to overcome growing this organization? Ah, well, I'll speak to the humor first, then I'll speak to the challenge. Allegedly, I'm funny. If you ask my friends, they think I'm pretty funny. I'm a little subdued in this interview because we're talking about another topic, but I had the pleasure in one of the past lives I've had. I've had many lives in this one where I was a producer of comedy in Los Angeles and I got to produce shows with and for artists like Richard Pryor and Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall and Sam Kinison and Dice Clay, amazing revolutionary comics and Lewis Black, who we're doing a special event with Harvard at the Harvard Lampoon is inducting Louis Black into the Lampoon on April 3rd.

15:10And Iguodios is sponsoring that event. And it'll be lovely to see Louis 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 patients, 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.

15:54It 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 were 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 2017, 2018. We founded the company in 2019, and only now this year, 2024, have we released it. And 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.

16:42I had to hire three different sets of attorneys just to get the booze across the border to the United States. And there were times I was furious with how slow the process was. But in the end, humor always saved me. So I'm very grateful for the humor being I do. 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.

17:36How 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. That so much of their personal lives were sad and miserable and broken.

18:20But when they got on stage, they channeled all that into a dark humor, which became light and happiness and joy and brought joy to so many people. the fact that someone's job is to make people laugh is such a great mirror to hold up to ourselves in society but you're absolutely right they were holding up the darkest mirror of themselves and through that lens they were reflecting light so that they could heal and the audience could take humor and otherwise awful situations sometimes and and that's the that's the fine edge that comedians walk. They're walking a razor's edge every day of how our lives are, how our society is, and reflecting it back to us through their own upbringing.

19:05And you're absolutely right. Their upbringings were tragic. Every one of them that I got to know had these very, very, very difficult and challenging and traumatic upbringings. And not ironically, as did I. So we so related to each other as brothers in arms, you know, in the trenches together. That's why probably I was drawn to that world, because it helped me to purge a lot of my own demons, because laughter is the best medicine, and we have to be able to enjoy our lives in every aspect that they've been delivered to us, even the ones that we might not feel so good about. That's what makes the difference between survival, happiness, thriving, joy, and all the other stuff.

19:52and all the other stuff, we have a choice to go that route. We have a choice to live in jealousy and hatred and envy of darkness. We have a choice, but happiness is also a choice. And that can be achieved by reflecting back to us gently who we are and learning to love each other regardless of it and regardless of our differences and regardless of how we see each other sometimes, because we're all the same inside, man. We really are. Wow, Charlie. I never thought at the beginning of this conversation, we were going to dive into something I've been thinking about for years, many years, because I always wanted to be a comedian.

20:25And I just, I've heard a lot of stories about people and I heard things about some of the individuals that you brought up and, you know, in personal meetings with them. And I'd love to hear more one day offline with some of this tequila that you have, some rare tequila. So if people want to get in touch with you, they want to find out how they can go along for the journey, how they can purchase, how can they do so? 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. I 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.

21:07We'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, you know, 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.

21:40So I'm really interested to learn more about this, you know, investing in these tequila that will even, you know, gain money over time. I mean, this is like really opened up my mind. I didn't even know this existed, but I super appreciate you joining us today on Founder's Story. That's my pleasure, Daniel. And you have a great rest of your day. And thank you for having me on. I'm really grateful.