Paul Sticht's new shtick is all wet.

• Position: The bottled water business

After more than a decade of peddling cigarettes, J. Paul Sticht has found something much healthier to hawk: water.

To hear him tell it, it's a natural progression. "Water quality has been critical to my career," the former RJR Nabisco chairman says. As CEO from 1978 to 1983, Sticht, 73, presided over the cigarette maker's expansion into the food and beverage industry. "At RJR," he says, "we were always concerned with getting high-quality water for our products like Hawaiian Punch and Canada Dry." (The company sold its Canada Dry business in 1986 and Hawaiian Punch in 1990.)

Now, Sticht is going into the bottled-water business. The Winston-Salem company he heads, AWH Corp., has acquired a spring high in the Ossippee Mountains of New Hampshire and plans to start selling water under the Castle Springs label early next year.

AWH was founded 100 years ago by the Hopeman family of Rochester, N.Y. It was known for building ship interiors and jail cells, but the family brought in Sticht two years ago to change that.

"Albert Hopeman has always liked the stability of consumer goods because his business was so cyclical," says Sticht, who has homes in Winston-Salem and North...