Maybe it’s the robust stock market. Maybe it’s television’s Niles and Frasier Crane nattering snootily about the glories of this or that fabulous French claret. Maybe it’s the wave of narcissism that seems to precede the fall of empires.
Whatever the cause, we Americans are getting pickier by the day about what we drink. And we’re putting our money where our mouths are. In a two-decade trend, we’re drinking less but drinking better.
Chief evidence: the rise of `single-source’ drinks. More and more, we’re paying premiums for single-vineyard wines, single-malt Scotches, single-distillery Cognacs, single-barrel whiskeys and–in the very epitome of an apparent trend–single-agave-field tequila.
Call them singular sensations.
“It’s the same phenomenon as Starbucks: Why spend four bucks for coffee when you can buy it for 75 cents at Dunkin’ Donuts?” says ad man Steven Grasse of Gyro Worldwide in Philadelphia, who handles national drinks accounts.
The question is this: Up to what point are these drinks truly distinctive, worth the extra money, and when do they become just a lot of hot-air marketing?
At first, it sounds like a contradiction: Americans today are drinking 16 percent less alcohol than they did in 1979, according to Impact, a beverage-industry magazine. Yet the most expensive drinks sell best.
At least part of the reason is that a bigger percentage of the Baby Boom generation is now in the affluent, 45- to 54-year-old group that spends the most money on wine and liquor.
“This is the guy who’s doing well in the stock market, who wants to flash his cash,” Grasse says. “But it’s not as bad as during the ’80s. It’s not quite as conspicuous as spending $500,000 on a second home.”
“No question about it; people are drinking less but better,” says Roger Brashears Jr., a spokesman for Jack Daniels, which two years ago introduced the concept of “single-barrel” Kentucky whiskey at $35 to $40 a bottle, more than twice the price of its regular whiskey.
Still, Grasse warns, marketing such pricey potions creates the danger of a backlash.
“With all this stuff, they turn up the volume a notch each time, and it gets to the point where it’s ridiculous.
“If they can get $1,000 a bottle for it, I applaud them. But you have to come through. If people can taste the difference, they feel like they got their money’s worth. If they can’t, if they think they’ve been scammed, they feel ripped off.”
In the land of the grape, the concept is single-vineyard wines, made of grapes from a single plot rather than the large and multiple fields of lesser wines. The idea is that certain fate-blessed plots of land, often no larger than suburban lawns, produce wines that are many times better–or more expensive, anyway–than apparently identical plots only a few yards away.
The French call it terroir, a term defined as a combination of soil, climate and local tradition. In California, replacing Gallic mysticism with the American aura of science, the term is “microclimate.” But the idea is the same. Usually such hallowed ground has shallow, poor soil, often on hillsides, where the rain has washed away most of the nutrients, in the counter-intuitive but widely accepted maxim that the best wines come from vines stressed right to the edge of their existence.
Still, many plots have poor soil; only a few rate single-vineyard status. The world’s most fabulous single-vineyard wine is the Romanee Conti, from the wine firm Domaine de la Romanee Conti in France’s Burgundy region. The wine, a red pinot noir, is, according to British wine author Oz Clarke, “the most famous and expensive of all Burgundies, intoxicating in its spice and heady scent, thrilling in its depth of dark fruit.”
And this year it became the first wine in history to fetch $1,000 a bottle–upon first release, not at an inflated charity auction.
What holy dirt grew this? It’s a 4 1/2-acre plot above the modest village of Vosne Romanee, halfway up a sloping limestone ridge paralleling National Route 74, a main road from Beaune to Dijon. All shallow soil, red clay and pebbles, it has been producing grapes at least since 1041, when the dukes of Burgundy gave it to a group of wine-loving monks.
“It is a sacred place,” Aubert de Villaine, a principal of the firm, has said. “Gods visited the earth and wanted to leave some trace of their passage.”
In California, winemakers are beginning to buy the sacred-soil concept, especially now that they’ve been in business long enough to figure out the best places to plant grape varieties. After all, the California wine industry is only about 100 years old, while France was making wine in Roman times.
Maybe California’s most distinctive single-vineyard wine is Heitz Wine Cellars’ “Martha’s Vineyard” cabernet sauvignon, a tarry, opulent wine with concentrated blackberry flavors that is instantly identifiable even in blind tastings for its underlying tang of mint. It’s so sought-after that the current vintage, 1992, is almost sold out at $77 a bottle.
Martha’s Vineyard itself, named for part-owner Martha May, is a 34-acre plot of loam and decomposed rock on the Napa Valley floor, just where the land begins to slope upward into the Mayacamas Mountains, 50 miles north of San Francisco. Fans have long believed that the minty flavor comes from a nearby windbreak of eucalyptus trees.
Winemaker David Heitz isn’t so sure: “It’s hard to know what it is. There are some eucalyptus trees, but not that many. We think it has more to do with the clone.”
But he doesn’t know the name of the clone–the hybrid of cabernet sauvignon grape planted in the vineyard. And Heitz concedes that the same clone, planted in other vineyards, does not produce that telltale minty flavor. So, as may be appropriate in such matters, the secret may never be known.
Now, even Ireland is getting into the “single” act. For centuries, most Irish whiskeys have been blends of many malts. But whiskey aficionado and Texas ex-oilman Mark Andrews has begun importing single-malt Irish whiskeys from various Irish distilleries and selling them unblended. (Other packagers have been doing the same thing with Scotch for years: Whyte & Whyte is one.) His brand is Knappogue (nuh-POGUE) Castle, named for a famous outpost on Ireland’s west coast in County Clare.
Andrews is even putting vintage dates on his whiskeys, like fine wine. The 1991 vintage has intense orange aromas with potent, sweet flavors of licorice and fruit, at $30 a bottle. The 1951 vintage, aged 36 years in oak casks that once held sherry, is opulent, mellow, with sweet flavors of apricots, nuts, even ripe bananas. It’s the rarest of Irish whiskeys, at $600 a bottle.
Yet another innovation in the singular sensation market is single-distillery Cognac, introduced last year by Hennessy. Cognac is simply brandy made in the Cognac district in western France. They make wine the usual way, distill it up to 70 percent alcohol, age it in barrels, cut it with spring water to the traditional 40 percent alcohol and sell it as Cognac.
Traditionally, this, too, has been a mixture of brandies from many distilleries, blended for smoothness and year-to-year consistency. But now, catering to the well-heeled customer’s acceptance of pricey individuality, Hennessy has released individual Cognacs from three distilleries: delicate, floral, nutty Le Peu at $49 a bottle; oaky, fruity Izambard at $47 a bottle; and opulent, even yeasty Camp Romain at $48 a bottle.
Tennessee whiskey is made when a malt of corn, rye and barley is mixed with iron-free limestone water, cooked and fermented into “sour mash” and distilled up to 70 percent alcohol. Then, in a step that differentiates it from Kentucky Bourbon, it spends 12 days dripping down through 10 feet of homemade, sugar-maple charcoal to filter away harsh oils before being aged in charred, white American oak barrels and cut to 47 percent alcohol.
In the aging room, Jack Daniels master distiller Jimmy Bedford conducts careful tastings to select the most distinctive barrels, whose contents exhibit a particularly fine nuance of vanilla, caramel, fruit or toasted oak, and sets them aside. Each barrel yields about 240 bottles of single-barrel whiskey, which sell at $35 to $40.
For Jack Daniels regular whiskeys the distillers mix 100 to 500 barrels, aiming at consistency.
Not to be outdone by Tennessee, Kentucky distillers make “small-batch” Bourbons, bottling a few barrels at a time instead of a single one. Brands including Booker’s, Baker’s, Knob Creek and Basil Hayden’s are promoted on a high-tech Web site, www.smallbatch.com. Bourbon is made a lot like Tennessee whiskey except that, by law, it must contain at least 51 percent corn in its mash, and it is traditionally made in Kentucky’s Bourbon County.
Outdoing all other singular sensations, in sheer audacity if nothing else, is Mexico’s new single-agave-field tequila. Called 1800 Colleccion Anejo Tequila Jose Cuervo Limited Edition, it retails for $1,000.
Is it all too much? There’s probably no such thing in today’s freewheeling economy.
We’ll know it’s gone too far when we see the first TV ads for Miller’s new sensation–single-barley-farm beer.
Just kidding. (Probably.)
