The Business of Spirits: How Savvy Marketers, Innovative Distillers, and Entrepreneurs Changed How We Drink - Hardcover

Rothbaum, Noah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1427754756 ISBN 13: 9781427754752

Publisher: Kaplan Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

Walk into a liquor store today and you’ll be faced with an unprecedented variety of vodka, gin, whisky, cognac, rum and even tequila. In the past decade, the amount of spirits sold in bars, stores and restaurants has climbed nearly sixty percent. Celebrating the acumen of the businessmen and craftsmen responsible for this phenomenal sales growth, The Business of Spirits: How Savvy Marketers, Innovative Distillers, and Entrepreneurs Changed How We Drink, is a cocktail of history and insight into a rapidly growing industry. Journalist Noah Rothbaum takes readers from the cellars of Cognac, France, to the Scottish Highlands to the agave fields of Mexico to find out what’s now driving this age old industry. The book explores new production techniques, cutting-edge marketing campaigns and introduces a new crop of crafty entrepreneurs.

About this title

About the Author:

For over five years, Noah Rothbaum wrote for SmartMoney The Wall Street Journal Magazine. He has also written about spirits for Money, Forbes.com, the academic food journal Gastronomica and the trade publications Beverage Media and Beverage Dynamics. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine, Food Arts, O, The Oprah Magazine, Esquire, Details, Fortune Small Business and Life.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this slim book, journalist Rothbaum explains how the liquor business has engineered a new golden age. As with so many industries, conglomerates have soaked up the small distilleries, improving global distribution, while increasing connoisseurship spurred partly by pop culture vehicles like Sex and the City has turned on consumers to super-premium vodkas and rum distilled from hand-harvested sugarcane. Among those he profiles is impresario Sidney Frank, who transformed Jagermeister from an obscure herbal elixir to frat-boy staple, and opened his Grey Goose vodka distillery not in Russia, Poland or Scandinavia but in France's Cognac region, gaining easy access to excellent water, local distilling expertise and a unique and luxurious-sounding provenance. He eventually sold the brand to Bacardi for more than $2 billion, but not before me-too brands popped up to lure imbibers, with ever more complex backstories and filtration processes, not to mention flashier bottles for the tasteless spirit. Rothbaum devotes a chapter to applauding the revival of the pre-prohibition craft of quality cocktails, a trend distillers celebrate as well. The text is sprinkled with informative sidebars—perhaps too many, given its slender size—like a guide to artisan cocktail bars in New York, London and Prague, and a thumbnail history of rye whiskey. An industry cheerleader, Rothbaum tells his story well, but it could have benefited from more social context regarding the roots of today's hard alcohol renaissance. (Sept. 4)
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About this edition

• Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1427754756
• ISBN 13: 9781427754752
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 189