Boozehound - Jason Wilson [38]
You can thank Sidney Frank for that. Frank is the spirits industry legend best known for convincing Americans to spend thirty dollars on a superpremium vodka made in France. That vodka (Grey Goose—you may have heard of it) was eventually sold to Bacardi for two billion dollars in 2004, only a year or so before Frank’s death at eighty-six. One of his last projects was actually an energy drink called Crunk!!!, in partnership with the rapper Lil Jon. Frank’s first big success, however, was acquiring the rights to import Jägermeister in the 1970s, and then building the brand throughout the 1980s. It was Frank who invented the idea of sending attractive, scantily clad young women into bars late at night to convince horny young men to drink shots of product. In a way, guys like Rob Cooper and Eric Seed are following in the footsteps of Sidney Frank—the key difference is they’re putting their marketing faith in bartenders in high-end cocktail bars and not women in hot pants (although the possibilities for demo girls for Crème Yvette boggle the mind).
By now, the idea of the Jägermeister shot is so ingrained in least two generations of American drinkers that the liqueur has pretty much lost any tie to Germany. Jägermeister could really be from anywhere. In fact, we’ve exported our way of drinking Jägermeister back to Germany, where you’ll see young Germans sucking down Jäger shots. I certainly did at a popular spot in Wolfenbüttel called Laguna Beach Club—a sort of beer garden in the landlocked town, where they’d trucked in sand and set up a volleyball court.
Jägermeister sales chiefly rely on shot consumption by young drinkers, and this presents the company with a tricky marketing situation—one in which responsibility is the buzzword. We discussed this responsibility over shots of Jägermeister at lunch. “To promote shots is not to promote overconsumption,” insisted Alexandra von Tschirschky, Jägermeister’s head of public relations. “Maybe just have one or two shots.”
“Well,” said Franke, with a chuckle, “maybe three.”
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. An old liqueur from old Europe, made with a secret old formula and traditionally enjoyed by old men, somehow makes its way into the U.S. market and becomes wildly popular among the college and postcollege crowd, who knock back shot after shot of the stuff. In fact, this odd European liqueur inexplicably becomes the shot of a generation.
In the not-so-distant future, we may be telling that story about another strange spirit, called Tuaca. This one is not bitter herb and cinnamon, but a citrus-vanilla liqueur from Tuscany that is reputed to have been created during the Renaissance for Lorenzo de Medici. There are those who believe that Tuaca may soon become the new Jägermeister. It’s certainly already extremely popular in Western states such as Colorado. Which prompts the question, What is it with strange liqueurs and ski areas anyway?
Tuaca’s popularity means that the sweet liqueur is already mixed with Red Bull in a Tuaca Bomb and with tequila in a Tuaca-rita. There is also, as with Jägermeister, a Tuaca shot-chilling machine. I recently was sitting in the kind of place where the patrons—young, flannel-clad, and bearded—were drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, with their fixed-gear bikes parked out front, and I was surprised to see the chalkboard advertising three-dollar shots of Tuaca, right alongside the Jägermeister. “When did Tuaca get so popular?” I asked the bartender.
He stared at me blankly and said, “When it got to be three dollars a shot.”
It’s not just drunk college students who’ve noted Tuaca’s appeal. I, for one, enjoy it. And Nigella Lawson, on whom I have a deep and abiding crush, has written, “I can’t help reaching for the Tuaca … Think panettone in liqueur form.” I don’t really understand the panettone comparison, but Nigella—well, she can pretty much tell me anything she wants and I’ll go with it. It’s true that nearly everything tastes good with a