NO. NEXT QUESTION? Would you pay $95 for a bottle of water?
The water sommelier Cameron Smith is going through his list of stills and sparklings. We should start with the Berg, he says.
It is what is sometimes called a “fine water” and it is $95 a bottle. We will be sipping the melted remains of a 15,000-year-old iceberg, harvested off Greenland and once part of its ancient glaciers.
“It’s very aromatic, for an actual water,” he says. I should be getting snow, he says. “When you swirl this water, it’s very light-bodied. You have a very mysterious, very ancient, earthly kind of quality.”
Smith works at The Inn at Little Washington: a three Michelin-starred restaurant in the rolling countryside of northern Virginia that regularly hosts Washington’s power players, Supreme Court justices and the occasional European monarch.
“We had the vice-president here just last month,” Smith says.
Did he drink any good waters, I ask.
“I wasn’t actually able to go to that table,” he says, with an air of sadness.
He could have given JD Vance the full waterworks: his list of seven stills and seven sparklings, their story, their mouth-feel, their finish. Vance probably does not know about the Vellamo, which is the run-off of a Finnish glacier ($42), or the Three Bays — water that fell as rain 2,000 years ago on mountains in New Zealand, then seeped through an undersea aquifer and emerged thick as olive oil on a hillside near Melbourne ($45).
In his 1980 non-fiction anthology In Our Time, Tom Wolfe wrote, “In the fifties there was the martini. In the sixties there was vodka on ice. In the early seventies there was the glass of white wine. In the late seventies there was the bottle of Perrier, a French soda water. The fashionable American expense-account lunch drink became lighter and lighter, but not cheaper and cheaper. The soda water sold for $2.50 a glass in Manhattan restaurants.”
Even someone as brilliant at spotting societal tends and obsessions as Wolfe had no idea of the insane heights where this fad would end up in the 21st century.