Water Way To Learn

February 23, 2008

With the price tag of top-shelf wine, designer water has become the latest luxury fad, reports JOHNNY DAVIS

Standing in the shadow of Stansted Airport in England, Elsenham is a small village whose amenities run to a convenience shop, a public house and a fish and chip shop that was previously a butcher but is now an Indian takeaway. Leave the railway

station, cross the M11, negotiate a landfill site and eventually you come to Elsenham Estate, home to an industrial sealant manufacturer, factories owned by Molton Brown, the skincare people, and -- in a shiny building built a little over two years ago -- a goldmine.

This is Elsenham Water, one of the world's most expensive waters, "bottled at source'' from a "pure confined aquifer''. It's an unlikely proposition, perhaps; and one reflected in the water's price. A 750ml bottle can set you back as much as $68; and that's assuming you know where to shop for it. You won't find it in supermarkets.

Elsenham is sold at Collette, the fanciest fashion boutique in Paris, served at El Bulli, the multi-Michelin-starred restaurant in Catalonia, Spain, regarded as the world's finest, and swigged by the clientele of Private C, a charter yacht company catering for the more discerning millionaire.

"When we started in 2005 everybody said, `You're the most expensive water in the world','' says Elsenham founder and chairman Michael Johnstone. "But price is [our] secret weapon. We don't want to be in the budget hotels.''

Indeed, the towering glass vessel that houses Elsenham was made by a company that designs perfume bottles for French fashion labels. Its distinctive cap is trademarked. Before every bottle leaves the building it is polished by hand.

"We looked at the market and realised: this is really like fine wine or champagne,'' Johnstone says. "There's a premium category at the top, where if people are having a meal they can order a luxury water. We helped create that market. A market where water is the new wine.''

Johnstone used to be in jam. One day his accountant told him his water bills were shooting up. So they went looking for a leak and instead discovered a borehole.

Johnstone called the Environmental Agency, hired some cranes and derricks and started digging, "exactly like drilling for oil''.

On day five, "up came water''. He was told he'd hit a confined aquifer, a 400m-thick "huge piece of chalk that sits right under this building and half the car park''.

"A confined aquifer is the best water you can get,'' he says. The deeper you dig, the cleaner and purer water becomes. Pricier, too. Johnstone got out of jam.

Bottled water is the food phenomenon of our times -- an anomaly to previous generations who somehow managed to get their hydration requirements from the tap.

Global sales increased a thousandfold between 1984 and 2005.

Today the market is worth $57billion, making bottled water the fastest-growing beverage in the world. Last year, we collect-

ively swigged our way through 180 billion litres of the stuff.

In Australia, a one litre bottle of water sold at a supermarket costs about $1.80, more expensive than petrol. Across the globe we spend more on water than we do on iPods, cinema tickets or sneakers.

Australians last year parted with more than $385 million for 252 million litres of bottled water, while Americans get through more bottled water than coffee, milk or beer. According to the US Beverage Marketing Corporation, 40 per cent of the US bottled water market is controlled by Nestle, Pepsi and Coca-Cola. But not all of it is extracted from the remote mountain wilderness consumers might assume it to be. Some brands are simply tap water, put through a purifying process, and sold for a vast profit.

The thirst-quenchingly icy mountain range on the Aquafina logo has drawn the ire of US consumer groups, forcing Pepsi last July to agree to spell out on bottles that the water "... originates from a public water source'', a clarification that's so far failed to cause any evaporation in sales.

"The consumer just doesn't seem to care about the source,'' says Beverage Marketing Corporation senior vice-president Gary Hemphill. Bottled water might be moving inexorably towards becoming the world's favourite drink, but its popularity has meant this: pouring Perrier at dinner parties no longer makes the statement it may have done a few years ago. For that, you have to turn to the luxury bottled water market -- of which Elsenham is the tip of the iceberg.

High-end bottled waters represent a completely different category: products from a glacier or volcano that possess characteristics derived from their source -- the more unusual the better.

Take King Island Cloud Juice. That's rainwater from Tasmania's King Island, touted as from "the cleanest weather the earth has to offer''.

A decade ago, entrepreneur Duncan McFie hit on the idea of bottling heaven's bounty. He only produces about 100,000 bottles of Cloud Juice each year, but like Elsenham it's an in-demand drop at Spain's El Bulli restaurant and Collette in Paris. It sells for up to $21 for a 750ml bottle in London; in Australia a 375ml bottle can be ordered online for $3.50.

Further up the price scale is 10 Thousand BC, "the most ancient source of water in the world'', retrieved from melted ice in British Columbia's Coastal Glacial Range and bottled to the sound of classical music (selling at $34 a bottle in London), and 420 Volcanic, sourced from Tai Tapu, a spring in the foothills of Banks Peninsula, an extinct volcano in New Zealand ($48 a bottle).

Then there's Bling H2O, "the Cristal of bottled waters'', says Kevin G.Boyd, a Hollywood producer who launched it in 2006.

With its frosted glass bottle decorated with hand-applied Swarovski crystal, and a $91 price tag, Boyd would seem to know his market. Fans are said to include Mariah Carey, Jamie Foxx and Ben Stiller.

"It's for the uber-luxury consumer, the same guy who has the $300 bottle of champagne in a night club,'' says Boyd. "Order Bling H2O and the perceived value is the same.''

To make such a statement you need to hang out in the places where you can be seen drinking the stuff. A handful of five-star Los Angeles hotels now employ water sommeliers to advise on the best water to accompany spiced braised pork belly or fillet of brill with parmentier of truffled leek.

In New York, the bar Via Genova has been doing a roaring trade, despite serving nothing stronger than 65 varieties of bottled water, while the luxury Claridge's hotel in London's Mayfair introduced its first water menu two months ago: a 30-bottle selection sourced from Italy, Japan, New Zealand and Hawaii, among others.

A few Australian establishments have embraced the water menu concept. Melbourne's Bottega restaurant has seven different labels represented on its water list (with some, such as Voss from Norway at $11 a bottle and Hildon from England at $13 a pop, offered in both still and sparkling), while Astral at Sydney's Star City

casino has five different waters ($7 per person unlimited pour), including King Island Cloud Juice and Antipodes from New Zealand.

It's all a sign of the times.

The micro-obsession with where our food comes from, flatlining fizzy drink sales and the constant reminders to "drink more water'' have all conspired to swell the bottled-water market.

And just as fashion's bespoke and limited-edition sectors really took off once designer handbags went from something available to the few to something within the reach of many, the truly wealthy will always look to differentiate themselves in whatever ways they can ... even if it's with the water they drink.

"There's too much money out there and everything is now available to everyone,'' says Reinier Evers, of the consumer marketing site trendwatching.com.

"Soon it won't really matter what mundane goods or service you're charging $680 for as long as you provide a good accompanying story and thus provide the buyer with a story they can tell others.''

Others say we're simply beginning to think about water in a new way. Dr Michael Mascha, author of Fine Waters: A Connoisseur's Guide To The World's Most Distinctive Bottled Waters, says it was once something you'd drink when you were thirsty.

"Now water is in a transition from being considered a commodity to being considered a product,'' he says. "Ten years ago, no one had more than one oil in their kitchen. Oil was oil. Now you have all sorts of olive oils, one from Italy, one from Morocco ... chocolate is another classic example.''

Mascha is a wine refugee. Six years ago his doctor presented him with a sobering choice: continue drinking wine or live.

Now he spends his time producing water menus for hotels and hosting tastings where he enlightens the public on water terroir -- how an origin of spring, glacier or well can dramatically alter taste.

"I have a conversion rate of 99 per cent,'' he says. "Even when they are very sceptical.''

Most people might prove to be "very sceptical'' of the news we're supposed to be treating our water like wine. It is, after all, the most plentiful substance on Earth after air. Time and again taste tests have declared people unable to differentiate between the most famous bottled brands, let alone appreciate whether their drink originated from an artesian spring or a Tasmanian cloud.

One newspaper panel once had a taster praising a particular water's "fresh, sweet, lemony aroma'' only to find out it came from a tap in a Birmingham public toilet.

PT Barnum is attributed with the phrase "there's a sucker born every minute'' and the idea of people paying 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 times the cost of tap water is a prime example of this, says documentary maker Alan Snitow, whose award-winning 2004 film Thirst examines how corporations co-opt public water supplies.

"Despite people saying they're in difficult financial constraints, clearly they're not poor enough if they will waste vast quantities of money on something they can get virtually for free,'' he says.

"It's a triumph of marketing of the first order.''

Actually, yes and no. The marketing spend on bottled waters is, even for the biggest companies, a fraction of that for fizzy drinks. Mostly they don't need to bother.

"A lot of people tell me, `You guys have done some great marketing to get customers to pay for water','' says Nestle Waters CEO Kim Jeffery. "But we aren't that smart. We had to have a hell of a lot of help from the consumer.''

Jeffery calls our thirst for bottled waters "a force of nature''. We want to believe they're better for us; that they're sophisticated and healthy and that by choosing them, we've made an empowering decision. Buying bottled water makes us feel good. It's not money down the drain. But not that long ago, it was only the poor who drank water. Chlorine, probably the most important public health breakthrough of the 20th century, meant we were able to quench our thirsts without risk of typhoid or cholera. Today there may be the same amount of water on the planet as there was 1000 years ago, yet we still haven't managed to sort out distribution.

A $48 bottle of Just Born Spring Drops (from "the cloud-kissing peak of India's Nilgiris Mountains; a great gift from Mother Nature'') might seem harder to swallow when a billion people worldwide have no water at all and 3000 children die each day from diseases caught through drinking tainted supplies.

Unsurprisingly, a backlash against bottled water is building. In New York -- where municipal water comes from the Catskill Mountains and is some of the healthiest in America -- the mayor last year led an advertising campaign against bottled waters, citing environmental waste.

Similarly in Australia, the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change played the environment card when proposing to scrap providing bottled and "cooler'' water to staff, arguing the country's bottled water consumption was responsible for about 60,000 tonnes of greenhouse emissions in a year. In response, the Australasian Bottled Water Institute labelled the move "misguided and shortsighted'' and a case of "cost-cutting disguised as environmental action''.

With Australia in the grip of drought and water restrictions in force across the country, some argue bottled water is a better choice than tap. But, say both the Australian Conservation Foundation and Clean Up Australia, it's a spurious suggestion.

"Bottled water is the greatest con,'' says Clean Up chairman Ian Kiernan. "Tap water is delivered to your house for between $1 and $1.20 a tonne. Why would you choose to buy water that costs thousands of times more, comes in a petro-chemical container that only has a 35 per cent chance of being recycled and is transported maybe six or seven times in vehicles burning fossil fuels? You aren't doing the environment any favours. What we have to do is get away from bottled water.''

Others are more concerned with increased privatisation and commodification of water supplies, imagining a future where drink corporations race each other to the world's remaining reserves.

"Water is more valuable than oil,'' Snitow says. "If we get a combination of climate change and commandeering of water for profit by corporations, you're going to have extraordinary political dislocation and rage on a mass level.''

Expensive bottled water may be completely unnecessary. But then, so are lots of things. And besides, if consumers get enjoyment from spending money on a bottle of fancy water rather than wine or cigars or champagne or anything else, then why not?

"People should have choices,'' says Mascha. "Please allow those of us who care where our food is coming from to spend money on a really nice bottle of water.''

Mascha is already on to the next thing: ice. And not the stuff you get from an ice machine.

"At home, I have regular ice and I have high-end ice cubes,''

he says. "So when I do vodka martinis for my guests, they can say, `This is Grey Goose with 15,000-year-old melted iceberg water'.'' At which point, you could probably use a stiff drink.

 

 

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