The Tasting Panel magazine

August 2010

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14611

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 81 of 104

Bar Games R ed Hot Rover, created by Aidan Demarest and Marcos Tello of Tello/Demarest Liquid Assets, hit the beach with an “all-star review of hot girls with cool skills” at Santa Monica’s Hotel Shangri-La on July 12. “Red Rover is a series of events created to sample and get a take on another city’s drinks, as well as to get the LA community together,” says Demarest, “and then we send our L.A. bartenders to these other cities for exchange events.” Red Rover, Red Rover sent the following female bartenders over (from left to right): Naomi Schmick from Los Angeles, Jennifer Contraveos from Chicago, Christy Pope from New York and Jessica Tanaka from San Francisco, with Aidan Demarest (in back) and Alex Strauss from the Hotel Shangri-La (in front). —Allison Levine Medea is the Message I MEDEA VODkA IS THE COMPLETE PACkAGE n a world where style frequently outweighs substance, it’s a rare occasion when the two meet face-to-face and the scales balance out evenly. Such is the case with Medea Vodka, a brand whose bark is as big as its bite, and that has the accolades to prove it. When co-founder Matt Sandy looked to enter this new brand into the 2010 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, he was surprised to get a call from the competition’s Assistant Director, Chandler Moore. “They initially only entered in the vodka category,” explains Moore, “but when I saw the packaging, I thought it was a very innovative idea to put a program- mable LED on the bottle. I thought they did it in a tasteful way, so I encouraged them to enter the packaging segment of the competition as well.” Moore saw good things for this brand’s innovative packaging, and she was right; the bottle that can be programmed to store up to six personalized messages with up to 255 characters each was a hit with the judges and took home the Double Gold Medal for packaging—a unanimous vote of Gold from all judges. But this brand’s bling hasn’t overshadowed the product in the bottle, a super- clean, ultra-smooth vodka that has been perfected over seven generations at a famed Dutch distillery, where the finest whole grain wheat is single-batch distilled slowly using natural artesian water. “The taste is what really makes it or breaks it with accounts,” explains Sandy, “because if the vodka wasn’t good, it wouldn’t work.” Beauty and brawn? That’s a one-two punch we can get behind. —Rachel Burkons Medea took the Double Gold for packaging—a unanimous vote of Gold from all judges—at this year’s San Francisco World Spirits Competition. august 2010 / the tasting panel / 81 PHOTO: ALLISON LEVINE CREDIT: PHOTO: DAVID GADD

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of The Tasting Panel magazine - August 2010