How's THIS for luxury?

When you take a Celebrity cruise, you too will be handed a 12-ounce martini with six olives to help warm it up and make it taste like the salty ocean over which you're boating. Decadent!

Sometimes too much of a good thing is not such a good thing.

This is yet another ad in the cocktails = vacation theme I've been tracking here on Alcademics. They just keep coming!

Even cocktails fall victim to Photoshop

We expect to see photoshopped celebrities in magazines, but must our cocktails be digitally manipulated also? Sure, mint is hard to style, but can't booze brands with big budgets invest a little more time in making the drinks look real?

Fake mint makes me sad.

Liquid travel

Peru is advertising its cultural assets in travel magazines: ancient ruins, vibrant and colorful ethnic traditions, and pisco. Mmm, Peru.

Turning up the heat in the cachaca war

Perhaps by now you've noticed these subtle Cabana cachaca ads that suggest the product is a depilation aid. But seriously, I've seen them around a lot lately, which implies Cabana is increasing its ad spending in an effort to become the leading cachaca. I know Cabana was released on the east coast first but out west Leblon had a big head start on Cabana and Sagatiba. It will be fun to see who comes out on top, or if there is room for all three.

Cocktails = vacation relaxation

Here's another ad equating cocktails with relaxation and vacation. It's not the first time we've seen an airline promote cocktails, and the cruise lines are into it also. And blue seems to be a popular cocktail color in ads these days.

I suppose the cocktail has undergone a symbolic status change. In the 2000 Sex in the City cosmopolitan era, cocktails symbolized going out and having fun. Nowadays, they seem promoted more like a luxury relaxation symbol, akin to the "woman in a spa with a hair wrap" or "dude on a lush golf course" image in ads.

Blue drinks to match your blue pants

More fashion cocktail mania! In these Louis Vuitton ads, the models hold a neon curacao blue drink and a swamp-green one. Be careful not to spill your ugly drinks on your nice white jackets!

Tom Ford sets a poor example

I recall reading a quote from Tom Ford saying he only drinks vodka sodas because they're less caloric than other cocktails. Apparently he's now trying to push his lifestyle choice on us all. Don't fall prey to fashion's ugly subliminal messages!
On closer inspection, there's no ice in that drink. I guess we see what we want to see.

Whine Snob

Alder at Vinography has a fun list of wine marketing techniques that need to stop. It includes Green Wines and Critter Wines, and:

Wine Brands for the Millennials
Ditto on the insult, folks. You're not going to convert new wine drinkers by pandering to them and repackaging wine as some hip new beverage. The much coveted Millennial generation spends more money on eating out than any other generation before, and we're not talking about fast food. This generation may have some of the most refined palates of any American consumer, and what they're going to care about is how your wine tastes. Not how it's packaged. So just go make great wine, and then think about how to get the story of your wine out in ways that Millennials can easily find it. Your winery does have a Facebook page, right?

Ha!

You know it would be fun if booze brands all had Facebook pages, and Lillet could be friends with gin and vodka, but hit the "ignore" button for other vermouths.

Cocktails Sell Everything

I found this new ad for the Holland America Line cruise ships in a magazine. It's funny how now the cocktail has come to represent not drinking or bars or even a night out on the town, but comfort and ease. Stick a cocktail in your ad and you show that life is good with your service- you can relax and let them take care of you.

The ad reminded me of a this one from Delta airlines.

The value of overcharging

Here's a fun article on why Balvenie can charge $30,000 for a bottle of 50-year-old scotch. The best part:

Few consumer product purveyors dare to trumpet the exorbitance of their prices as an actual virtue. But this is the spirits world, where flavour nuances are as subtle as they are subjective, and where bragging rights can be more of a draw than the fleeting liquid in the bottle.

The past few years have seen a parade of "rare," bottles proudly promoted at stratospheric prices. In 2005, a bottle of The Macallan 1926 single malt was ceremoniously sold for $75,000 (U.S.) at a liquor store in Seoul, while a bottle of The Dalmore 62 Years recently changed hands for $51,000. And various spirit companies routinely stage similar publicity events with precious bottles from supposedly long-lost casks that are miraculously uncovered in a corner of the distillery by accident.

Curiously, most Scotches, if left in cask for 50 years, wouldn't be worth blending into a Rusty Nail. By that age, the wood tends to impart too much of a lumber flavour, turning the spirit into a syrupy goop with an aroma of stale church pew.

If you licked the magazine, you'll love the show!

CBS is hoping to give TV viewers a flavor for its new fall show, "Cane," with ads consumers can actually taste.

The network is rolling out an unusual magazine ad that tastes like a lime mojito to promote its prime-time series about a powerful Cuban-American running a rum and sugar business in South Florida.

The campaign, which will appear in Rolling Stone magazine this week, is a twist on a conventional liquor ad by touting Duque rum - the fictional rum brand from the series - rather than just the show. The first-of-its-kind ad features a nonalcoholic flavor strip in a "tamper-proof pouch."

More about the show here. Thank goodness they've got that tamper-proof pouch. That way you know that you're the first person to lick the magazine ad about a television show in the dentist's waiting room.

Fly to Brazil

Stirrings came out with a Caipirinha mixer. When I made a joke about what a great scam Caipirinha mixers would be a month ago, I had no idea so many brands were rushing to fill this niche. But I guess it shows that a lot of people are banking on the Caipirinha to be the next Mojito and building drink accessories around it.

Yesterday I was flipping through New York magazine to see a two-page spread for Delta that promotes nothing but their cocktail program. The in-flight cocktails are all made with Stirrings mixers, so maybe next year we'll able to get Caipirinhas in the air.

And for the new father...

Another small thing by me in today's Chronicle:

Father's little helper

Fatherhood is a lot of work. First you have to help make the baby, then you have to sit around and wait for nine months until it's ready to play with. After all that effort, new dads deserve a refreshing cocktail, and since there are extra hands around the house, it's about time baby started pitching in. "Baby Mix Me a Drink" ($9; McSweeney's), a 12-page board book from San Francisco resident Lisa Brown, will help Baby start to identify shapes and colors such as olives and red vermouth. Good baby!

-- C.E.

For the Father With (Almost) Everything

Small piece I have in today's Chronicle:

For the dad who has almost everything

It's a touch pricey for a Hallmark holiday gift, but consider this: Father's Day is on Sunday and National Martini Day is on Tuesday. That's two birds you can kill with one stone, and by stone we mean a $440 silver-plated cocktail shaker set packaged in baby blue Tiffany's-esque boxes. The Ercuis brand two-piece shakers and Hawthorne strainers were imported from Vienna by former Enrico's bartender David Nepove, a.k.a. Mr. Mojito, who now sells them online at MisterMojito.com. Unfortunately the shakers do not come with the magic power to transform every drink made in them to the finest cocktail in the world, so we recommend you also send Dad's butler a gift certificate for bartending school.

-- Camper English

Clean planes and dirty martinis

Delta is advertising seat-side cocktail preparation including mojitos, martinis and virgin cocktails. They put the menu online so you can make first-class cocktails at home. They have a bourbon/apple drink, a passion fruit mojito, and a vodka Fresca drink. Most are made with Stirrings drink mixers, which makes a lot of sense. Can you imagine your flight attendant trying to muddle in the middle of the aisle?

An actually good liquor website

In today's SF Chronicle, I have this short write-up:

Bay Area bartenders invade the Interweb

Most spirits Web sites are a mess of Flash animation and overly loud house music that you can't turn off, but the relaunched Roth Vodka Web site is actually kind of cool. It stars many of the Bay Area bartenders we know and love, including Greg Lindgren from Rye (pictured at right), Jonny Raglin (Absinthe), Martin Cate (Forbidden Island), and Nicole Burke (Garibaldi's), in hundreds of short videos wherein they demonstrate recipes and drink preparation techniques. Because there is a lot of overlap in topics, it's great fun to watch bartenders with contrasting opinions, such as the nine bartenders who justify their muddler of choice or Zack Morlock (Frisson) dismissing "Ice is ice" while Dominic Venegas (Range) says, "It's the backbone to a drink." Stalk your favorite bartender at www.rothvodka.com.

Check out the site- you can spend hours on there. It's great that they don't hit you over the head with product placement. And for those of us struggling to make proper drinks at home, hearing bartenders disagree with each other on techniques and recipes makes you feel a lot less stupid.

Here's a new one...

I was flipping through the current issue of GQ magazine and came across this ad for PAMA pomegranate liqueur. I almost missed that it has a scented perfume strip so you can smell what it tastes like. I haven't seen that trick before.

I have a bottle at home and can tell you that the stuff in the bottle smells different- pomegranate is syrupy and that doesn't come through on paper. The magazine smells more like pomegranate perfume.

Maybe I'll rub it on my neck before I go out tonight. Though I'm used to reeking of booze, it would be nice if that was actually a good smell.

Fun with Vodka

A poster on the DrinkBoy forum pointed out these hilarious 42 Below Vodka University ads on YouTube. They're totally not PC (and slightly not safe for work) with gay jokes, rimming jokes, strippers, and Mexican wrestlers. It's about time vodka got a sense of humor!