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STRAIGHT, NO CHASER (p. 2 of 3)

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Highwood Distillers, on the other hand, won’t figure in a rosy magazine spread anytime soon. It’s an austere cement-block factory in a blustery, largely vacant High River industrial park. That it is home to Pearl Vodka, a soldier launched in 1997 to fight the vodka wars on a battlefield of excellence and purity, seems a small irony. But a far greater one is that the vodka that extols its Canadian heritage is owned by a San Francisco consortium.

Patrick Silvagnia, Pearl’s CEO, is a former Silicon Valleyite who saw opportunity in the premium vodka market. "We wanted to make the finest vodka in the world, and we were prepared to go wherever it took to get that done," he says. His search led to Ron Stothers, a Calgary-born entrepreneur mentored in spirit production at Seagram’s. Stothers also had connections to Highwood, a working man’s distillery whose own assertively non-premium line includes Root Beer Schnapps and White Lightning Vodka. What Highwood offered, though, was ultrapure well water burbling just three metres below the factory floor.

Guided by his palate, Stothers began the quest for vodka immortality. "I experimented a lot," he recalls, "searching for just the right wheat, always using natural materials with no additives." (While vodka can be made from almost anything, including potatoes, most is made from grain.) His process, though secret and proprietary, starts, as in most distilling, by fermenting a kind of beer. The soft winter wheat that Stothers uses yields beer of 12-percent ethanol, which is then concentrated by a series of five distillations to reach about 97-percent purity. This product contains the character-defining solids that, once diluted to the final 80-proof product, are what some professional tasters describe as the "bread" of the vodka.

Which brings us to the realm of flavour, where subtlety and subjectivity reign. Even connoisseurs can’t get much beyond a narrow vocabulary when blind tasting vodka. Gourmet magazine praised Pearl for having "a very clean nose" and being "chocolatey-smooth in the mouth." Pearl vindicated Stothers’ efforts by placing first in its category at the 2000 World Spirits Championships.

Credits like that, plus clever packaging, go a long way. Pearl’s bottle is imported French glass, resembling an elongated Absolut bottle with a pearl-shaped stopper and featuring Stothers’ signature. It looks undeniably fabulous behind a bar. The company is also borrowing Absolut’s high-profile attachment to art and fashion events. For example, Pearl recently sponsored the fundraising season of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and was served at a Sex and the City wrap party.

Not that Canada will soon see a lot of Pearl-powered society shindigs, despite it being distributed in several provinces. "For now," says Patrick Silvagnia, "our promotional efforts are concentrated in our top three markets: New York, Miami and Los Angeles." Cities, in short, where a gargantuan plastic tub of Wolfschmidt sells for US$9.99, but a smart, clean bottle from some romantic, pristine, obscure place far away fetches a princely US$24.95.

Don’t bother looking for the distilling headquarters of Canadian Iceberg Vodka. Its location is a secret, though presumably it’s somewhere near Toronto, where Iceberg was launched in 1995. Founder and president Gary Pollack will only say that Iceberg starts with spirit from triple-distilled sweet Ontario corn of the peaches-and-cream variety.

Instead, Iceberg’s mystique comes from the purest possible source where it draws its water. In the late 1980s, Pollack noticed that each summer, Newfoundland fishermen would sail out in their dories and use nets to gather up the "bergy bits" that split off from icebergs for later use as superquality ice cubes in their highballs. "At first, I saw it as an opportunity to sell premium water," says Pollack, noting the environmental benefits of capturing water that would otherwise melt into the sea. The decision to focus instead on the greater value-added product of vodka has proven to be a brilliant one. Iceberg has experienced steady growth and expects to sell about 200,000 cases next year.

Iceberg’s clean flavour has earned it numerous gold medals in world vodka competitions. It was a silver medal, however, that has done more to promote the brand, thanks to a competitor called Grey Goose Vodka. When the just-launched French product claimed first place among 40 brands at the 1998 World Spirits Championships, its American importer went on an advertising binge in U.S. publications, repeatedly showing the Goose topping a long list of vodkas. Yet the eye of a smart shopper would immediately scan to number two, Canadian Iceberg, at roughly half the price. "Yeah," admits Pollack, "Grey Goose has been pretty good for us."

Outside a few radio spots, though, Iceberg has not itself been a major advertiser. That may change as Pollack is currently seeking a $25-million infusion to finance brand extensions and global marketing, notably in the U.S. – equivalent to what was spent in Canada alone back when Absolut stormed the market.

While some spirit writers have suggested that Iceberg would command twice as much if only it were sold in some sort of fancy-schmancy packaging, Pollack defends his bottle. When it emerges all frosty from the freezer (as it should), it looks exactly like a chunk of glacial ice.

Vodka is, after all, a proletarian beverage, and Canada, it seems, is a proletarian country. "We’re committed to selling Iceberg at a commodity price point," says Pollack – good news for those who will go on enjoying ultrapremium quality at an average price in the low $20s.

"Hell," adds the Iceberg president tellingly. "I wouldn’t pay $40 for a bottle of vodka." [ ]

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