By Jennifer Litz
Editor
June 3, 2007

This story doesn’t need an author so much as a referee.

It concerns the usually favorable explosion of consumer choice. There’s a rapidly growing market for a particularly portable product right now, whose worldwide brand offerings exceed 3,000. The product’s appeal traverses demographics, and spin-offs—ultra-premium offerings, thematic bars—are beginning to infiltrate hip, trend-setting scenes.

And yet, in a world where people will pay upwards of $3 for coffee that’s 79 cents at most convenience stores around here, many still scoff at America’s burgeoning bottled water market.

Maybe they’re fine with paying the soda-comparative price of Coca-Cola’s Dasani or PepsiCo’s Aquafina, but they may have a problem with the genre’s growing quirks: water marketed as “structured—Penta, whose creator claims it hydrates “16.7 times faster than other bottled waters”; “oxygen-infused”—OGO, a Madonna “fav” with “35 times” more oxygen than other waters; or purposefully pretentious—ultra-premium, $20+ “Bling Water,” created by a Hollywood writer-producer.

It seems that by the time the 21st century rolled around, water was deemed not sexy enough to exist in its current form. An explosion of water choices has helped turned that tide. So, also, has a school of “water connoisseurs,” who have appended the tasting rituals usually reserved for fine wines to tasting the world’s bottled waters. “Food anthropologist” Dr. Michael Mascha, author of the book Fine Waters, was a wine connoisseur with 500 bottles in his cellar before his doctor gave him a choice between living and continuing to drink the stuff. He subsequently transferred all his knowledge from that area to the world of water.

Which begs the question: Is “designer” water and its surrounding practices the natural trajectory of American water consumption, or the domain of terminally ill winos—and Californians?

The Backdrop of Bottled Water Consumption in America

 You’d think it would be enough that water is the basic building block of cells, the wellspring of life. But now the natural resource is subjugated to the variables of free market capitalism.

In fact, bottled water is the United State’s fastest-growing “refreshment beverage.” According to Beverage Marketing Corporation, 2006 saw a 9.5 percent increase in bottled water consumption from the previous year. The same company predicts that by 2011, bottled water’s share of the liquid refreshment beverage market will be at 29 percent—while its biggest competitor, soda—which currently comprises about 42 percent of the market—will continue down a dwindling market share to 34 percent by 2011.

Bottled water’s growing appeal is the portability of soda, with the healthiness such beverages lack. “People are buying water for refreshment, purity and health reasons,” says Gary Hemphill, managing director of Beverage Marketing Corporation.

The bottled water buyer—whose wide consumer base skews just a bit younger and more female, and whose stronghold is in the West Coast—does have a hierarchy with which to filter grocery store bottled water choices. First, according to Hemphill, is price. Next is packaging—size, sports cap or no sports cap, etc. Then comes brand loyalty, playing a smaller part than it does with soda consumption.

And then, almost as an afterthought, Hemphill mentions taste.

Water Tastings

Truthfully, not all waters are created equal. A water’s source will greatly affect things like its mineral content, carbonation and pH level. For example, bottled water harvested from rainwater or glacier sources tend to have a much purer taste, as their mineral content tends to be very low. But water sourced from underground springs and wells can have much higher level of minerality, giving them what Austin water sommelier Janet Abbott, owner of Spa Waters of Texas, calls “a raw flavor, like sucking on a stone.” Water bottlers also source from artesian wells, icebergs, the deep sea, and municipal sources (like Aquafina and Dasani, which are really just purified tap water).

Admittedly, once you get into the worldwide realm of bottled water, sourced from German artesian wells (like Gerolsteiner, est. 1888, whose minerality is so high it leaves your mouth’s roof chalky), to the springs of Iceland (with its slightly sweet “Icelandic Glacial,” est. 2003), you’re entering a world in which big-name commodities like Aquafina and even Evian occupy only the periphery. Many of the world’s fine waters are not available in wide distribution, but a lead from a tasting and a visit to a Web site can have them delivered to your door.

It is these globetrotting waters that capture the hearts of water sommeliers who pour over limited resources on fine waters to find the next big splash.

“It’s really just kind of digging away,” says Abbott. “There are companies, like www.bottledwaterweb.com [that help you find new waters]. You just have to start digging into [it].”

Abbott has conducted about four tastings, which usually include waters from around the world, as well as regional municipal (tap) waters, so that tasters can compare. “In one I featured waters that have been bottled for over 100 years. I’ve used the Famous Water Company up near Mineral Wells, Texas—they make one called ‘Crazy Water’ and one called ‘Deep Well Mineral Water’ (whose high mineral content has given it a reputation of having medicinal qualities; Mascha’s Fine Waters book describes the water as ‘a meal in itself’). I feature waters from Eastern Europe or Mexico, and I let [attendees] know the source, how long it’s been bottled; there was one water from the [Eurasian] Republic of Georgia that has won different awards—Borjami. It’s carbonated, and the people drink it before meals, like an aperitif.”

Herein lies the proof that water consumption lies at the crossroads of marketing and anthropology. Because while American bottled water companies spent about $58 million advertising bottled water in 2005, Mascha’s research indicates that Americans only drank 18 gallons of bottled water that year—compared with the Italians’ 50 gallons. And Italians, the world’s primary bottled water consumers, only drink six percent of that water away from the table. Conversely, 35 percent of American bottled water consumption takes place on the go, meaning that while bottled water tastings and savorings may be de rigueur in Europe, they are not on the sonar of American jet-setters.

Tasting Water

For those American Europhiles who want to know the protocol for sampling the 90 different waters in Paris’ Collete water bar, Mascha offers a simple formula: “Flavor = Taste + Smell + Mouthfeel.”

Some of it is simple. For one, you don’t need to stick your nose in your bottle, thankfully—the “smell” component should be absent. Mouthfeel, the largest component of water’s flavor, is also pretty simple: “gas or no gas,” as the French say. The world’s premiere naturally sparkling waters, like Gerolsteiner, Apollinaris (both German), Ferrarelle (Italy), and Perrier (French—whose waters and carbonation are extracted from the Vergeze-area spring separately, then recombined during bottling), are usually carbonated from carbon dioxide emitted from volcanic activity close to the water source. Carbonation ranges from light to bold (the latter usually bolstered by added Co2).

Taste gets a bit more complicated. A water’s TDS, “total dissolved solids,” is a measure of the amount of minerals—calcium, magnesium, potassium, bicarbonate, silica, sulfates, et al.—dissolved in the water. The higher the water’s TDS, the more you taste the minerals it represents. Depending on your tastes, this could be a good or bad thing.

Water’s pH factor also affects its taste. Suffice to say that to enjoy water from this standpoint, a physics degree is helpful. Mascha “simplifies” this by marking an acidic (sour), alkaline (bitter), or low alkaline (slightly sweet) orientation for the world waters he inventories in the back of his book, as well as some pairing suggestions: game is best consumed with waters that are more alkaline; fried chicken with those that are more acidic. Mascha says that a water’s pH can be used to complement or contrast with a dish. But then to assuage the fears of the more science-wary, he reveals his own devil-may-care interludes for some of his favorite pairings: “I love Perrier (pH 5.46) with crisp fried oysters (pH 5.7), and Borsec (pH 6.45) with cheese (pH 7.5).”

Water Essential

You don’t have to fork over a fortune to try a few different bottled waters from a few different sources, and with a few different characteristics. Specialty food stores like Central Market or Whole Foods have a larger water selection than regular grocers, and almost any water can be ordered off the Web.

And lest you think such consumption is pretentious and unnecessary, remember this: At Rome’s peak, eleven aqueducts, all distinguished by their source and quality, served the city—“a feat of ambitious engineering not surpassed until the Twentieth Century,” according to Mascha.

From time immemorial, water has played an essential role in the survival of our species. Now, it seems, people are celebrating it.

I can drink to that… with a bottle of Gerolsteiner.