Tequila, Tradition, and Triumph: How Charley Pavlosky Built Aguadios into a Collector’s Dream | S2 Ep. 152
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Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Founder's Story. Today, we have Charlie Pavlovsky. And Charlie, you are the founder and CEO of Trending Spirits and Aguadillos 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. 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 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. And that sort of started me on this journey of rare, unique tequila

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 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. I

But 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. And 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 rare 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. 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 and myself, we were all probably sitting around, you know, drinking together, sipping. It wasn't about getting drunk. It was really about, you know, 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 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 mizunara harvest, but were planted on Hokkaido, Japan, in just around the year 2000.

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 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. They 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 follow them follow 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. But 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 tequila is like ours, appreciating 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. 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 exploits 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, you know, on many people's lips, literally and figuratively, uh, 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 of

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. 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 run was going. And the flavor profile was extraordinary. And that inspired me. So I'm inspired by the Giants, you know, 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 the United States. And the spirit really is 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. I mean, even your website too, but the bottle is something that I could see, you know, 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

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. But 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. Um,

allegedly I'm funny. Uh, if you ask my friends, they think I'm pretty funny. Uh, I'm a little subdued in this interview cause we're talking about another topic, but I had the pleasure, uh, 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, uh, shows with, uh, and for artists like Richard Pryor and Robin Williams and Eddie Murphy. And, uh,

Arsenio Hall and Sam Kinison and Dice Clay, amazing revolutionary comics. And Louis Black, who we're doing a special event with Harvard at the Harvard Lampoon is inducting Louis Black into the Lampoon on April 3rd. And Ivo Dios 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, um,

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

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 being able to. 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, uh, you know, they're, they're not like the, the humor is like a by-product 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 that 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. But 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 situation sometimes. And 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. And 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

We have to be able to enjoy our lives.

Especially you. AT&T 5G requires a compatible plan and device. 5G is not available everywhere. See att.com slash 5G for you for details. HBCUs, they're more than just schools, right? They're where we learn, grow, and build. It's a place where we're free to be ourselves, innovate, and live our best lives while chasing those dreams. And yes, securing that bag. But the journey to success is not always easy. That's why Walmart is here for you every step of the way. From late night study sessions to game day celebration.

Walmart's got your back, helping you manifest those big, audacious dreams. Whether you're starting a business, climbing the career ladder, or figuring it all out, Walmart is here supporting Black excellence at HBCUs. At the end of the day, your hustle, your creativity, and your journey matter. Walmart matters.

We're all about empowering you with the spark to keep pushing forward. So let's get to it together. Learn more about how we are amplifying your story at walmart.com slash black and unlimited. It's your journey and we're proud to be a part of it.

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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. And 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, and, uh, you know, in personal meetings with them. And I'd love to hear more one day offline with, uh, with some of this tequila that you have, some rare tequila. So 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, uh, how can they do so? Oh, they can go to the website, which is, uh, I would do us.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 through knl uh 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 and uh 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 uh

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. I mean, this is like 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. Curious about investing in crypto? Start with Grayscale. They have over a decade of experience managing crypto investment products, many of which are available right in your investment account. Search for a Grayscale product ticker today. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. For more information and important disclosures, visit grayscale.com.

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