Tealye Long and Ramon Escobar joined forces in 2014 on a mission to change how we drink. Ramon, with Bolivian pride and an illustrious 14-years in the foreign service, and Tealye, as a global citizen and entrepreneur with deep roots in the hospitality industry in the United States. In their travels, Tealye and Ramon discovered the incredible wine-making regions of Bolivia and saw an opportunity to help build a brighter future for the country and its people.

The business idea was simple and rooted in an oft overused metaphor: “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” The eureka moment: what if the man has no marketplace to sell his fish? So the team set out to build a marketplace for small-scale wine and spirits, knowing that with just a little scale and exposure, significant economic impact was possible.

Just five years later, Chufly products from Bolivia have been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, and on NPR. The continued effort is made possible through strong and direct relationships with the viniculture communities local to Bolivia.