Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [10]
At precisely one o’clock my water expert arrives at Bryant Park. With a couple of sandwiches and a box of fancy cookies, I wait at a table near the mowed lawn. We shake hands and then I nervously lay out my wares: I have Voss, from Norway; Jana, from Croatia; Gerolsteiner, from Germany; Iceberg, from off the coast of Newfoundland; Ty Nant, from Wales; Sanfaustino, from Italy; Mountain Valley Spring, from Arkansas; and a plastic bottle of mystery water around which I’ve wrapped a sheet of white paper. I feel a little conspicuous, with my cloth napkins, wineglasses, and eight bottles of water. Almost everyone around us has just one, either Poland Spring or Fiji, which is sold at park kiosks. (I don’t see a single reusable bottle among the hundreds in hand, nor do I see a recycling bin.) I ask Mascha if my display makes him self-conscious. He shrugs. “I’m used to it.”
At tastings, it is normal to have ten to fifteen bottles. “You start with something that has a neutral pH and low minerality, then you move to a high-mineral-content water.” Mascha will go on like this for the next two hours, talking about minerality, pH, TDS (for total dissolved solids), and the size of bubbles. “Sanfaustino,” he announces, pouring from the green bottle that he’s selected to start us off. “It has midlevel mineral content with small, fine bubbles. It’s naturally carbonated, which is rare.” I take a sip. “You feel a little structure in the water?”
“Yes,” I say, I can feel the bubbles. Mascha had written something about effervescent water having evenly spaced bubbles. I have to ask, “How do you measure the distance between bubbles? Does someone actually do this?”
My water expert cuts me a rueful glance. “It’s not scientific,” he says, then changes the subject. “This water has lots of calcium—it’s hard water. It’s good for you.”
“So I see,” I say. The bottle’s three labels mention calcium no fewer than ten times. I like the taste of the Sanfaustino, though I can’t say why. It has more flavor than my tap water, to be sure, but Mascha is reluctant to help me out with any subjective descriptions. He likes to stick to the facts. Even in his book, he studiously avoids the windy language of wine tastings to describe what is in his mouth.
Instead, he lets the look of the water—its label and bottle—and the water’s “story”—its history and aspirations—shape his impressions. Is the water a natural product, that is, bottled straight from the earth, or is it a commodity, by which he means processed water, such as Aquafina or Dasani? Those waters he considers a scourge on the fine-waters landscape. “Most people in America don’t know or don’t care that they’re tap. Here, the scientific aspect of food is cherished; Americans are infatuated with technology. In Europe, they value food. High-end waters, with nice bottles and brands, tie into this concept.”
For years, Mascha has been leaning on American bottlers to upgrade their image, but he doesn’t get much traction. “I’m frustrated,” he says now. “I say to these people, ‘Get a designer, develop your brand.’ ” He isn’t a big fan of Poland Spring’s thin plastic bottles, which, because they are inexpensive, let Nestlé compete with purified waters that come from municipal supplies—waters that happen to be bottled, as he puts it, but aren’t fine bottled waters.
I find this ironic, since Poland Spring actually has a pretty good story, every bit as authentic as the European brands. It involves an old-timey Maine farmer and his kidney stones, cured in the early 1840s by drinking from the family spring in the tiny town of Poland. Soon,