Night & Day
(Colour supplement of the
Mail on Sunday)
3 February 2002
|
Night & Day |
|
| Black vodka is the latest in a new breed of premium drinks for the style-conscious explains Nick Foulkes |  |
Not so long ago, one took a certain pride in stocking one's drinks cabinet with alcohol that, though perfectly drinkable, cost a mere fraction of well-known labels. Down the pub, you asked simply for a vodka and tonic or a Scotch and soda, no matter what name the bottle's label carried.
Not any more. These days you have to 'brand call'. Brand calling is something that has become de rigueur in America. It is something that Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous has been doing for years - bawling for Bolly and Stolly.
But now it's not even enough to name-drop: brand managers want us not only to pick their named brand of booze, but to choose - and pay more for - their top-of-the-range spirits.
Why? According to Customs and Excise, since the early Nineties, demand for spirits has decreased, which is not good news if you happen to be a distiller. So, how do you persuade more people to drink spirits? You play on the current mania for status and style. You convince the people who care about that sort of thing that they shouldn't be caught dead drinking anything but the premium brands.
We have moved on from the prelapsarian innocence of a nip of Teacher's or a slug of Popov. Today's beverage of choice has to be specially filtered (Rémy Space is a cognac that undergoes the same filtration as recycled water on a spacecraft, yum yum. It's not for sale yet, but they are taking orders); prefixed with the adjectival compound single-barrel' (Blanton's Gold is £75 a bottle); ingredient-specific (Grey Goose is an ultra-premium' vodka made with barley, corn, wheat and rye; £24.50 a bottle); colour-coded (as with Blavod, the black vodka); or just cripplingly expensive (Cuervo has a special tequila of which only two barrels are released per annum. It can sell for £100 a shot). All these drinks are available for mail order from Robertsons, call 020 7371 2121.
Nowhere is the marketing blitz more concentrated than in the crowded vodka sector. This is the only spirit to have bucked the downturn, with consumption rising by ten per cent during the Nineties - blame the martini boom, all those clever Absolut ads, and the fact that it is pretty nearly tasteless.
Unsurprisingly, everyone wants a sip of the action and in my drinking career I have seen the front-line tactics employed in the battle for market share. One evening, I was drinking in Las Vegas with the actor George Hamilton, when two women turned up trying to interest him in stocking their trendy vodka. They had driven from Los Angeles in the hope of getting him to sell their liquor in the bars that he owns.
On another occasion, I happened to be in the bar Monte's on Sloane Street, London, when a bottle of the then new Smirnoff Black Label (£16.50) was being presented. I was invited to marvel at the smoothness of the martini it produced. To be honest, it tasted more or less like any other well-assembled martini, although it was rendered more enjoyable for being complimentary.
What these two examples demonstrate is the care with which premium distillers try to seed their products.
'Any good cocktail barman has a very condensed selection of high-quality products on the shelf behind him. Which, of course, makes him the ultimate marketing tool if you have a premium brand,' says London restaurateur Oliver Peyton.
It has to be said that the non-premium brands are fighting back with some imagination. It had long been perceived that a single malt whisky is superior to the blended junk at the cheaper end of the market. Then Bell's got Jools Holland to front the 'It's all the blend' campaign. He plays some single notes on the piano and says something like 'they don't sound much on their own, but blend them together', before his big band does its swing thing.
Has it come full circle with cheap, blended Scotch as the new premium booze? After all, Bell's fairly bristles with ironic, boozer-lad, geezer-chic, nahwaddameanguv?
