Meet Filip Wretman, who will be your sommelier tonight.
Would you like to look at the list, the 26-year-old Swede inquires, or might he suggest a coy little sipper with some mineral notes, a velvet texture and a long finish? Oh, and while you’re deciding, would you also like some wine?
Wretman’s eyes have the blue serenity of mountain lakes as he talks about being the first water sommelier at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City. “Water is the essence of life,” Wretman effervesces. “Bottled water has been neglected too long.”
He shakes his head and, with a bemused chuckle, recalls the days when he, too, drank tap water. Tap water, he shudders, can be recycled as many as seven times before it gushes out of your faucet. Drinking it is the kind of mistake we all make when we’re young.
The Ritz-Carlton isn’t the only place where water is the new wine. At Alain Ducasse, the French restaurant awarded four stars by The New York Times, once they’ve wafted the tray of black truffles under your nose, they bring around a silver basket with six bottles of the restaurant’s best waters.
Across the pond, in Paris, many stylish restaurants offer a carte des eaux: The chic department store, Colette, on the fashionable Rue St. Honore, has a water bar with some 90 selections. Mon cher, it’s no longer enough to be a wine snob; now you must also be an aqua expert.
Wasn’t water once that wet stuff that fell from the sky, rushed down the river and ran from the tap? And wasn’t it free, or just pennies a glass? That’s so ’90s, darling: In cities like New York and Paris, and Toronto, water is not just water any more. With more than 700 brands of bottled H2O produced worldwide now, eau de bouteille has reached a high-water mark.
The trend is just a fact of life in Europe, where 90 percent of the French and Italians drink bottled water, and have done so for years. But in North America, where 70 percent of us drink bottled water, more than 3.4 billion gallons are consumed every year. Sales have been growing at 10 percent annually for a decade, faster than any other beverage. The industry is worth nearly $7 billion in North America alone.
That figure makes it the largest market in the world, but there’s still room for enormous growth. In three years, market analysts expect bottled water to overtake coffee to become the second-most-consumed beverage after tap water (counting filtered and au naturel).
Business people who want to impress clients with the depth of their dedication now pull a reverse miracle, substituting water for wine at lunch and dinner meetings. Bottled water is also a calorie-free indulgence; a measly 5-ounce glass of wine, by contrast, has 100 calories.
The idea for a water sommelier first came to Nikheel Advani, the Ritz-Carlton’s food and beverage manager, about a year ago, before the hotel opened. While dining with several Goldman Sachs bankers at a downtown restaurant, Advani noticed that the Wall Street boys all ordered sparkling water. It occurred to him that although the sale of water in the hotel chain was growing by about 5 percent per year, it might be possible to increase that figure to as much as 20 percent in New York, especially in Battery Park, near the financial district.
Advani shared his plans to appoint a water sommelier with Wretman, who would be the first to fill the position. In February, the two men assembled and tasted 1,800 still and sparkling waters from around the world. They selected three still waters (Voss, Fiji, Evian) and three sparkling waters (San Pellegrino, Perrier, Aqua della Madonna) to become the hotel’s standard selections. But give them 48 hours, Advani said, and they can tap any of 50 waters. (That should please Michael Jackson, who orders 32 cases of Evian at a time: He bathes in it.)
In a hotel where rooms cost as much as $7,000 per night, it’s no more than a rounding error to pay $15 for a bottle of water. So you go with the flow and peruse the restaurant’s list. Each comes from an exceptionally good month, and Wretman can reel off their mineral, sodium and calcium levels as well as their elusive aromas, which don’t include hints of rusting pipes or swimming pools. (There are no offerings by the glass unless you want tap, referred to here as, ugh, Chateau Bloomberg.)
Make a good choice, and Wretman will share some water gossip with you. Among the purest waters in the world, he said, is the Norwegian artesian water Voss. It’s taken from a virgin aquifer (translation: an underground deposit of water) and bottled before it’s sullied by exposure to the air. Voss is the No. 1 non-alcoholic pick of Madonna (she won’t stay in hotels that don’t stock it), as well as U2’s Bono and lesser-known folks who also don’t mind getting soaked, according to Wretman. Even the bottle, designed by the former creative director at Calvin Klein, quietly suggests how much more evolved you are than the amateurs at the next table swigging from the tap: It’s a pastiche of a cologne bottle, time capsule and household cleaner. (Diners often tuck the empty into a briefcase or newspaper at dinner’s end.)
The Ritz’s waters are tame compared to the geyser of options on the market today. Cloud Juice guarantees 800 drops of Tasmanian rainwater per bottle and Lurisia is melted Italian snow water that seeps up through a volcanic rock grotto that Marie Curie discovered in 1918 when she was searching for uranium. Chatledon, one of the oldest and most exclusive eaux minerales, from a village in Auvergne, is coveted because it has no taste. Back in 1650, the court doctor at Versailles presented the water to the Sun King Louis XIV, promising that it would “cure His Majesty sometimes, often alleviate his distress, and comfort him always.”
As diners thirst for these brands, bottlers and restaurateurs salivate over the profits. A restaurant’s typical markup on wine is 100 percent to 150 percent, whereas on bottled water, it’s often 300 percent to 500 percent. But since water is much cheaper than wine, and many of the fancier brands aren’t available in stores, most diners don’t notice or seem to care. As a result, some restaurants are turning up the pressure to sell bottled water.
Far from Manhattan restaurant tabs, though, is a more global concern: Some wet blankets insist on pointing out the travesty of the western world paying billions for designer water, while more than a billion people in underdeveloped countries have no access to clean water at all.
A close-to-home complaint against the trend is environmental: Even though the bottles can be recycled, the new fad creates enormous packaging waste. According to the World Wildlife Fund, only a fraction of the 1.5 million tons of plastic water bottles produced are recycled–and we pay more for the bottles than for the water itself.
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Breaking the bottle-lingo code
According to the International Bottled Water Association, bottled water can be divided into the following categories:
Well water just means it came from a hole bored (or dug, in the old days) into the ground to tap the water of an aquifer, a water-bearing layer of rock or sand.
Artesian water comes from an artesian well, which also is drilled into an aquifer, but at a location where the natural pressure pushes the water to some height above the top of the aquifer.
Drinking water must contain no added sweeteners or chemical additives other than flavors, extracts or essences, and these must make up less than 1 percent of the product’s final weight, or the product is considered a soft drink. Drinking water must also be calorie free and sugar free; and it should be salt free or contain very low amounts of sodium.
Mineral water contains not less than 250 parts per million total dissolved solids–minerals and trace elements thought to be healthful additives. The proportions of these in the water must be constant from the water’s source to the place where it’s bottled. No minerals can be added.
Purified water has had harsh chemicals or trace elements removed by such means as distillation, de-ionization (reducing water to a non-mineral state by passing it over a bed of resins); or reverse osmosis (reducing water to a non-mineral state by passing it through a plastic membrane under pressure, which separates the water from other elements).
Sparkling water has naturally occurring bubbles of carbon dioxide in it. In handling, though, the water may lose some of its CO2, so the water company is allowed to replace the lost bubbles.
Spring water comes from an underground formation, through which the water flows naturally to the surface of the earth. Water is collected at the spring or through a hole bored into an underground spring.
— N.M.
