Boozehound - Jason Wilson [58]
I’d heard the same thing the day before at Arcus. There seemed to be a great deal of concern that people only drank aquavit at Christmas—and then mostly the older men of the family. Close to 90 percent of Norway’s aquavit consumption actually happens during that season. There was talk of finding a wider audience and diversifying the aquavit market. Arcus has recently rolled out a label called Sommer Aquavit, which, like Nansen’s, has lighter, brighter citrus notes. Sommer Aquavit was targeted at, of course, young drinkers: the Cosmo crowd—young women who liked vodka cocktails.
It’s still unclear how successful this effort has been, though I can say that I saw an awful lot of bottles of Sommer Aquavit on deep discount at the duty-free shop in the Oslo Airport. Generally, I find that changing an ingrained tradition—such as “Aquavit Only at Christmas Dinner”—is nearly impossible. Creating a market for summertime aquavit seems as elusive as recapturing the mythic summers of one’s youth.
After we tasted Nansen’s second aquavit, a more traditional caraway-flavored offering, Sven (who had now fully sweated through his dress shirt) unwrapped and presented his new aquavit brand: Edvard Munch Premium Aquavit, its label in English. He also handed me a press release: “Edvard Munch was a forerunner of the expressionist art movement. His best-known composition, The Scream, is part of a series, The Frieze of Life, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy. Therefore we are proud to present this exceptional, luxury aquavit as a taste of his art.” Fear and melancholy—not to mention Munch’s darkly erotic love-and-death axis—being ideas that one may or may not want to ponder when drinking shots of an 80-proof spirit.
Edvard Munch Premium Aquavit is a lovely spirit. It spends twelve months in sherry casks, yet retains intense, fresh herbal aromatics and flavor. But I worried aloud about who was going to buy it, especially with its English label, and especially with the local aquavit market clearly declining among the younger generation. “Our plan is to find some partners outside of Norway,” Sven said. But most people outside of Scandinavia and Germany have no idea what aquavit even is. In fact, in my experience, most people fear it, just as they fear grappa.
Perhaps in answer to my skepticism, Sven expressed even more excitement about his second spirits project: Scream Vodka, named after the famed Munch masterpiece. “It’s French grain vodka, from Cognac,” Sven said. “Like Grey Goose.” Scream Vodka would directly target tourists at duty-free shops and and also, he hoped, at the Munch Museum itself.
Sven admitted that he really didn’t have much experience in the spirits business, but he did have a long background in the music and entertainment industry. He said one of the first big acts he’d managed was Norway’s winning entry in the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest, Bobbysocks. In a strange way, this career path made sense to me. I think spirits share an emotional space with pop songs. And I’m guessing the generation who listened to Bobbysocks as young people is probably the same one that’s moved away from aquavit appreciation. Maybe they were drinking other things on those summer nights when they got drunk and fell in love. On my flight to Oslo, my Norwegian seatmate, a woman about my age, nearly jumped out of her seat to point out a member of a-ha, the 1980s Norwegian one-hit wonder, who’d wandered down the aisle. Later, when she asked what I was doing in Oslo and I told her about my aquavit research, she said, “Ah, I only drink aquavit at Christmastime