Maybe it's the sticky weather, but my story about hunting icebergs this summer has done well as a cocktail anecdote. This tale has everything: a big boat, shotguns, a case of vodka, a gaggle of seamen, bikinis and a giant phallic symbol.
There are a number of ways to peddle booze. Sex is the main approach: Think of the finger-lickers shilling Baileys and, of course, the eternal brew babe. Some companies play up the "exclusivity" angle (green bottled premium Euro beers and single malt cults), others, the retro-chic effect (all the cool bars in Toronto are selling out of Labatt 50).
And then there is purity.
Thus it is that the Iceberg Vodka people have got me on a trawler off the coast of Newfoundland, to prove they really do go forth and hunt icebergs, haul them back and turn them into vodka. (To be honest, I spent part of the time sunbathing, taking advantage of a heat wave and freakishly calm seas.)
Icebergs, it turns out, are sexy. Like clouds, they take on different forms when viewed from different angles. Here the sphinx, there a woman's undulating curves, there the prow of a ship. My home at sea is the Mottak, captained by Ed Kean, a second-generation iceberg hunter who has a reputation for finding them by intuition.
First the berg is broken up: The hunters crack the icy behemoths by shooting at them. Then chunks of ice up to five tonnes each are hauled out of the water in nets (the guys snare them from a small, rickety motorboat). Iceberg Vodka also owns a couple of barges that sidle up to bigger icebergs and hack them apart with cranes. Back in port, the pieces are washed (the icebergs are pure, but since they've been bobbing about in the ocean, they need to be rinsed).
The high-cost ingredients (it costs $1 a litre to get a 20,000-litre tanker of iceberg water to the distillery in St. John's) combined with the processing (involving alcohol made from Ontario peaches-and-cream corn), make Iceberg a premium product, cost-wise. This is true when it comes to taste. In 1998, Iceberg was a Gold Medal winner at the World Spirits Championship. In 2001, it scored a No. 1 ranking from Wine Access Magazine. And last year, the New York chapter of the Taster's Guild International voted Iceberg No. 1 among premium brands.
The company strategy, though, has been to sell at an affordable price ($23 in Ontario, for a 750-ml bottle). It's working. In 1999 (four years after Iceberg hit store shelves), they shipped 15,000 cases; this year, they expect to ship 250,000. Owned by an Ontario consortium, Iceberg is the little product that shouldn't have worked.
"We are not going for the luxury segment, because it is only 6 per cent of the market," says senior vice-president David Hood, who is also onboard the Mottak. "Premiums are 30 per cent, and standard make up the balance. We competitively price Iceberg at the lower end of the premium segment. This allows us to compete both in the standard and in the premium marketplace."
President David Sacks, another member of our hunting team, hits every liquor store and restaurant he passes when on land, working the charm on employees, getting them onboard (one of his pitches: "The product is so pure you don't get a hangover"). "Most of the premium vodkas spend tens of millions on advertising to position themselves as an enviable lifestyle product," he says. "We are competing against those guys."
"We put everything into the inside of the bottle," Hood adds. Indeed, while the bottle itself has a distinct design -- shaped like a rectangle for easy freezer storage, it looks a piece of chiselled ice -- the graphics are decidedly retro, and not in a cool way.
But that doesn't worry Hood. "The glass is made in Germany, but we aren't logo whores. We are selling out of the 60-ouncer, the one in a plastic bottle, here and in Florida."
Sacks, a CPA and entrepreneur by day, clearly loves his sideline. During our excursion, he not only shoots at an iceberg with me, he also climbs onto a giant one and hacks away at it with an axe.
There is another way to break up an iceberg -- and it explains how I found myself caressing one shaped like a giant penis. When the vibrations from the pellets didn't work, Kean cruised by the tower of ice and asked me to stroke it. It could have been just to amuse him and his crew, but he told me they sense humans, and my vibrations would upset the structure. Lo and behold, as soon as we pulled away, the giant penis imploded. A triumph for womankind, if I do say so myself.
Which brings us to Iceberg's marketing Plan B, in case the purity and cute fishing stuff doesn't work. The company placed its first racy ad in this month's Penthouse, with a Russian doctor-vixen stroking a bottle. They got the page opposite the Forum letters. That ought to convert a few red-blooded American males to vodka made from icebergs.