How it all started in Cabo
In the first BAJARRIBA blog, I mentioned that I would expand upon how the Tres Cabo Amigos all met in Cabo. Mike moved to Cabo in 1989 and started playing music and writing songs. He and his wife Josefina opened a restaurant bar in 2004 where Mike would perform for their dine-in customers. He then started his El Arco brand tequila and was quickly becoming a local celebrity within the Cabo community.
In 2004, Jay arrived in Cabo and purchased the Cabo Lounge. Jay and Mike know some of the same people and run in the same crowd, so it was only a short time before they were introduced. In 2004 Rico had met both Mike and Jay through a mutual friend, Mariana Estrada, who knew nearly everyone as she was one of the best bartenders in Cabo. She had moved to Cabo from the mainland of Mexico and with her fluency in both Spanish and the English language, she had gained many friends and acquaintances.
Now enter Johnny and Maddie Corona, a couple who took a life-changing motorcycle trek from their home in Salem, OR to the tip of the California Baja – Cabo San Lucas. They started the Caboholics Support Group with a blog and Facebook page in 2013. Mariana, Mike, and Rico were all among the first 100 members to join this group which now has over 16,000 members from the world, with most being from the 50 US states, all provinces of Canada, and a few locals living in the San Jose and Cabo area.
Rico finished writing the award-winning, best-selling novel “My Bad Tequila” in 2010. On his second book signing tour in early 2011, Cabo San Lucas, Mexico was one of the stops. Rico had reached out to Mariana who arranged and set up two book signings, one at Cabo Lounge which was formerly owned by Jay, and the other at Mike’s restaurant – Miguel Loco’s. Fate would have it that Jay was visiting Cabo during that time and came to the book signing at the Cabo Lounge.
In October 2020, Rico called both Mike and Jay and invited them to meet him at Streets of New York Pizza in Fountain Hills, AZ. Here they discussed putting together a partnership for a new tequila brand. A few days later the three friends formed Tres Cabo Amigos, LLC which owns the BAJARRIBA brand. And the rest is modern history.
The three of them took their first trip together to Guadalajara. They teamed up with Tequila El Viejito distillery in Atotonilco el Alto, Jalisco. This is in the Highlands region, 60 miles east of Guadalajara. On that trip, we also secured a steel mold manufacturer for our one-of-a-kind bottle. The talented painter/artist hand-paints the beautiful Baja peninsula-shaped bottle, which is made of only recycled glass. We also found the cork manufacturer while we were in town. The cork has a medallion inscribed, wooden top, and is synthetic. The reason we chose a synthetic cork is that the wooden corks over time can become soggy and break, sometimes falling into the 100% Blue Agave tequila thus contaminating the entire bottle. We then found a great box manufacturer, the last piece needed to create our tequila.
Once we had all of the pieces chosen, the components were shipped to the bottling plant where our brilliant, tasty agave juice is poured, corked, bottled, and shipped to the border of Tijuana and San Diego, CA. We stayed at Mike’s good friend – Carlos Chacon’s beautiful home in Guadalajara. Carlos has turned out to be one of our closest Amigos and has picked us up and dropped us off at the Guadalajara airport numerous times.
On this first trip in April 2020, the Tres Cabo Amigos flew to Cabo San Lucas for some fun and relaxation after a grueling 5 days of meeting and closing deals with all the aforementioned vendors.