What's the biggest compliment you can give to water? That it tastes like water. Or, if you're one of the increasing number of water gullible fools connoisseurs, then you'd use words like rounded, flinty, crispy and spritzy to describe two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen.
All of those adjectives are actually used in a taste test of waters served at Claridge's in London, which has a mind-numbing 33 choices ranging from the plain and cheap Fiji to $40 water pumped straight from glaciers, rainwater, springs and God knows where else.
Claridge's and several restaurants in Los Angeles employ water sommeliers to advise customers on what goes best with "spiced braised belly pork or fillet of brill with parmentier of truffled leek."
There is even a French term for what people are supposedly buying in these expensive waters.
As BLDG explains, terrior
is the idea that an object grown in one geographic area will taste different from
the same object grown in another. Terrior is most often
applied to wine but can be applied to
virtually any food. A book called Fine Waters claims to be a "guide to the world's most distinctive bottle
waters" and, at $24.99, it costs significantly less than many of the
waters it covers.
The problem nobody mentions is that water will take on the properties of anything
it touches. The taste of pure water (no fluoride here) will depend as
much on the bottle it's stored in as the place where it comes from. And often, it seems
the bottle is what people are actually paying for. Take $30 Elsenham Water,
the towering glass vessel that houses Elsenham water was made by aWe'll see whether expensive water takes off. Forty years ago, who thought we'd be paying for water in the first place? Twenty years ago, if you said millions ofcompany that designs perfume bottles for French fashion labels. Its
distinctive cap is trademarked. Before every bottle leaves the building
it is polished by hand.
people would gladly fork over $5 for a cup of coffee, nobody would
believe you. Crazier things have happened than $25 bottles of water.
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