Word: tequila
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...Pissed in Andrew’s Tequila Bottle...
Next Big Things come and go--remember dry beer, "malternative" beverages and low-cal cream liqueurs?--but the industry has very high hopes for one ongoing craze: from chocolate vodka to tequila-and-lime-spiked rum to sour-raspberry schnapps, flavored spirits are multiplying like empty shot glasses on a 21st birthday. Flavored rums rose from 18% of total rum sales in 1998 to 39% last year. Flavored vodkas are similarly flush. Even Martin Friedland of Jenkintown, Pa., an importer of fine spirits for more than 50 years, won't call flavored liquors a fad; the worst he'll call...
...past decade, through good times and bad, Americans have drunk less but better, boosting superpremium liquors like Grey Goose vodka and Patron tequila, which cost $3 to $4 more a drink in bars than house brands. Profit margins on such brands are higher all the way from distillery to bar, but they barely balance out the industry-wide drop in volume...
...show, as is beer. But in the race to tempt the palates of a generation brought up on mocha frappes--and maybe even, in some cases, grab the sweet-toothed fake-ID crowd--what chance does, say, a fine vodka like the venerable Russian Magadanskaya have against Ciclon, the tequila-and-lime-spiked rum, or Coco coconut-flavored rum, both getting big play at the Bacardi booth? ("There's not another 70-proof coconut rum out there," says Steven Messer, a Bacardi assistant marketing manager.) Or against Atomic X's cloying, vaguely tropical, nonalcoholic energy drink being touted...
...makes Robert Plotkin of BarMedia, a well-known consultant, say, "Oh, my goodness." But it tastes like ... vodka. Its importer, Sylvia Scherer, of West Import & Export in Kenai, Alaska, is marooned near the back of the hall, far from big corporate booths pushing Stoli Cranberi vodka and Tarantula Azul tequila. Scherer struggles to nail down distribution beyond Alaska, California and Georgia. "One of these days everybody's going to discover us," she says. For now, she swims against a purple, berry-flavored tide. --With reporting by Julie Rawe/New York