Wine, liquor combine in spirited new blends
BY MICHELLE LOCKE Associated Press
Sunday, October 28, 2012
10/28/12 at 5:57 AM
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tulsaworld.com/absoluttuneOriginal Print Headline: Wine gets in the spirit with new liquor blends
Cognac blended with moscato? Pink wine mixed with port? And how about a mashup of sparkling white wine and vodka?
Hard liquor is showing a softer side as producers shake things up with new blends that put wine and spirits in the same bottle.
"Companies are going out of the box," observes Ted Carmon, spirits buyer for the BevMo! liquor chain.
There's no official category name so far - Spirited wines? Laid-back liquors? - but Carmon traces liquor's "anything goes" movement to Pinnacle Whipped, the wildly popular whipped-cream flavored vodka that came out a couple of years ago. "That really rewrote the rules on what kind of flavors could be used."
Bill Newlands, president of Beam Inc., which bought Pinnacle Vodka earlier this year, sees the intensely flavored Whipped as playing into a trend of consumers "whether it's an alcohol beverage or anything else, looking for more flavor reward." They're looking for two things, he says, "flavor and flavor intensity."
That quest influenced Beam's latest product, Courvoisier Gold, which blends French cognac with moscato wine from the South of France. Research indicated customers, particularly women, wanted a cognac with less alcohol but more flavor, and Gold answers on both counts coming in at 36 proof, or 18 percent alcohol by volume, well below the 40 percent (80 proof) of traditional cognac. Suggested retail for a 750-milliliter bottle is $24.99.
Gold follows last year's introduction of Courvoisier Rose, which blends cognac with French red wine grapes.
Gold and Rose are grape-on-grape affairs because cognac, a type of brandy made in the Cognac wine region in France, is a distilled grape spirit.
But TUNE, a new product from ABSOLUT, goes in a different direction, blending grain-based vodka with a sparkling white wine, New Zealand sauvignon blanc to be precise. It comes in a champagne-style bottle decorated with gold stars, swirls and other patterns. TUNE, so named for the dual notes of vodka and wine, is 14 percent alcohol by volume and has a suggested retail of $31.99.
Another beverage taking a lighter touch is Croft Pink, which is a port (not a liquor but wine that's been fortified by addition of a spirit). Croft traces its roots to 1588, making classic ruby and tawny ports. Croft Pink is made from traditional port grapes but with light contact between the wine and the grape skins, resulting in a light ruby color. Alcohol content is 19.5 percent by volume, similar to traditional port. Suggested retail is $19.99 for a 750-milliliter bottle.
Associated Images:
Courvoisier Rose liqueur blends cognac with French red wine grapes. Beam, Inc./ Associated Press
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