Bottlemania - Elizabeth Royte [12]
Harmsworth had zero marketing experience but an uncanny sense of possibility. He could see that spas were falling out of fashion, but he also noted that the Brits were currently entranced with artificially carbonated soft drinks. He designed a green bottle shaped like an Indian exercise club, the kind he’d used to strengthen his arms after the automobile accident; the shape would become as unique to bottled water as Coke’s shape is to soft drinks. He invented a slogan—“the champagne of table waters”—and, ignoring the French market for the time being, sent his little bottles to the British army in India. The military endorsed the product, and Perrier went on to conquer thirst in the other British colonies, and then at Buckingham Palace. By 1908, Perrier was selling five million bottles a year.
Harmsworth died in 1933, with production at nineteen million bottles a year, and a group of British shareholders took over the company. After the war they sold Perrier to Gustave Levin, a Paris broker, who modernized the bottling plant and, in the late 1970s, reached across the Atlantic with six-million-dollars’ worth of marketing schemes aimed at urban professionals—people like him. Investment bankers. Yuppies. Linking his product to health, he sponsored the New York City marathon (the tradition lives on: Poland Spring sponsors the race today). As Orson Welles purred on television ads, “There is a spring and its name is Perrier,” sales went up and up, from twenty million dollars in 1978 to sixty million dollars the following year.
I haven’t brought any Perrier today: it seems a little pedestrian, and I also have the feeling that Mascha doesn’t much like it. His book says it contains “a very high level of nitrate” (which might come from fertilizer, animal waste products, decaying plant matter, septic tanks, or sewage treatment systems), and he gives it only three, of five, diamonds for virginality, a word used to mean distance from pollution. I didn’t bring any Poland Spring either, knowing how Mascha feels about thin plastic bottles. Still, I think American water should be represented so I settle on Mountain Valley Spring, which is bottled near Arkansas’s Hot Springs National Park. Mascha seems to have a soft spot for Mountain Valley: he likes its green glass bottles, its deep history, mineral content, and five-star virginality.
North Americans, well before the nineteenth-century spa craze introduced by European immigrants, weren’t unfamiliar with mineral waters or healing springs. Records from the fourteenth century indicate the Iroquois, in upstate New York, were fans of Saratoga’s springs, and in 1541 warring Tula Indians laid down their weapons, according to Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto, to sip the stuff that’s now bottled under the Mountain Valley trademark. In California’s Solano County, Tolenas Indians drank from mineral springs, one of whose waters would later be marketed as an early Viagra: “To those suffering from a loss of virile power, this beverage is an absolute blessing,” read a pamphlet of the mid-nineteenth century. (It worked on malaria and hangovers too.) The Wappo Indians of the northern Napa Valley visited its geyser springs, which were eventually developed into the Calistoga Mineral Water Company, now owned by Nestlé.
In the postcolonial period, healing water reached its popular zenith following the Civil War as developers built Europeanstyle resorts and spas, appealing to class consciousness. With some bottlers claiming their water cured “kidney diseases, scrofula, salt rheum, erysipelas, dyspepsia, general debility, chronic consumption, catarrh, bronchitis, constipation, tumors, piles and cancerous affections,” it was no wonder. Maine’s own Poland Spring was said to cure dyspepsia (aka indigestion) and liver complaint, though contemporary Nestlé literature says only that “drinking plenty of water” flushes toxins and impurities from the body, reduces daytime fatigue, nourishes skin, and relieves constipation.