Sheeple

Liquor Makers Offering Luxury by the Glassful: 'Mentoring' Part of Push to New Generation By Michael S. Rosenwald

Matt Stutts is...sitting with a couple of buddies, about to sample 18-year-old Scotch that costs about $80 a bottle. But this liquor is free, part of Johnnie Walker's efforts to "mentor," as company executives put it, a new generation of Scotch drinkers. Here come more women in black, holding bottles of Scotch against their chests, offering tidbits of history (Johnnie Walker's grandson came up with the recipe for JW Gold) and forecasting the pleasures of the palate (hints of raisin, vanilla).

"Being co-opted is so great," Stutts says. "I love this."

Freedom is a great thing, but this guy's desire to be manipulated sounds pathetic to me.

Scenes like that...are elaborately staged by the world's biggest liquor producers, who have discovered in the past several years a winning recipe for increasing their sales while flattening those of their competitors, the beer companies.

Using carefully scripted on-premise marketing as the linchpin of hundred-million-dollar ad campaigns, the $15 billion-a-year liquor industry is pushing the concept of affordable luxury into the hands of people in their twenties and thirties as they lean over bars to order drinks. The idea is to get them to order not just a martini, but a Grey Goose vodka martini. To not just do shots of tequila, but to sip Jose Cuervo Reserva. To not order Scotch on the rocks, but Johnnie Walker Gold.

And women can be just as foolish as men.

Luisa Calderon, 28, a radio marketing executive, stood at the bar with her friend, Rossanna Hernandez, 30, a consultant with Ernst & Young. "Our lives may not be as glamorous as the girls on 'Sex in the City,' " Calderon said. "But that doesn't mean we can't try."

Hernandez agreed: "We can live vicariously through them by drinking nice liquor."..

"That's the key here. These companies set up a stage that lends itself to sophistication," said Michael C. Bellas, chief executive of Beverage Marketing Corp. a research firm. "These young people carry on dialogues with their friends. These people are attractive. They'll go out and talk to people about what Johnnie Walker is and how it tastes. That's marketing."...

Liquor companies are aiming at consumers one by one, courting people like Stutts. During the first part of the evening at the Topaz, as Stutts and two friends sampled crab cakes and Cajun shrimp wrapped in bacon, they reflected on how their tastes have changed since being drawn into the Johnnie Walker orbit at a previous event.

Stutts, for example, said he drank whiskey before, but it was often whatever he got his hands on, and never something he ordered by name.

Now Johnnie Walker is his drink of choice. "It's all about finding something that you like," Stutts said.

"If we want a Scotch we know it by name," said his friend, Mark Cutler.

Please, please lead me! Tell me what I like!

Their glasses empty, a woman approached their table. She offered the bottle suggestively. In the midst of being branded, they were enjoying every minute of it.

"Would you like to touch it?" she asked.

Extra points to Rosenwald for the sarcasm.