Gordon's gin

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A bottle of Gordon's with the British strength of 37.5% (equipment before 2017)

Gordon's is a well known brand of gin , in the Scottish Cameronbridge is made -Brennerei and locations worldwide under license. The product history goes back to the 18th century. With 3.9 million 9-liter units sold worldwide in 2012, the brand was the only gin among the top 25 premium spirits brands in the western world. Taking all market segments into account, Gordon's Gin ranks second in the world in terms of volume after the Filipino brand Ginebra San Miguel . Gordon's Gin belongs to the multinational spirits group Diageo , which, unlike Tanqueray, does not count Gordon’s among its "strategic brands".

history

The Scot Alexander Gordon in 1769 founded his distillery , originally in the London district of Southwark area. The distillery moved to Clerkenwell on Goswell Road in 1786 , where it is still located today. From 1800 Gordon's supplied the Royal Navy , in 1898 the company merged with Charles Tanqueray & Co. to form Tanqueray Gordon & Co. The last descendant of the founder, Charles Gordon, died in 1899. In 1904 the typical square bottle made of green glass was introduced with a flat front and curved back. This bottle shape is only available on the British market today; Gordon's bottles are made of clear glass on export markets and licensed productions.

Gordon's developed an Orange Gin in 1929 and a Lemon Gin two years later ; production of both types was discontinued in 1988. Diageo has been marketing Gordon's Gin as a ready-mixed drink together with Schweppes - Tonic since 2011 .

The first appointment as purveyor to the court was made by King George V in 1925, and the company was then the owner of other royal warrants , such as the then Prince of Wales , the later Edward VIII from 1929 and King George VI. from 1941. Gordon's has been purveyor to Queen Elizabeth II since 1955 , her mother Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon appointed Gordon's purveyor to the court in 1988.

Manufacturing

Empty green Gordon's bottles in a British waste glass container

From the start, Gordon's was made from triple distilled neutral alcohol . The recipe is said to have remained the same to this day, it contains the typical gin ingredient juniper berries , coriander seeds , medicinal angelica , orange and lemon peel and other ingredients. Details are still secret today. The difference to the previously known types of gin was that Gordon left out the sugar that was originally added to the gin , which is where the name London Dry Gin for this type of distillation comes from.

Gordon's was originally produced until 1992 at an alcohol strength of 40 percent by volume . In that year, the owner of what is now Alexander Gordon & Co. and thus owner of the Gordon's brand, Diageo plc, reduced the alcohol content for Great Britain to 37.5%. Today Gordon's is available in different bottlings with 37.5%, 47.5% and 47.3%. Gordon's is also distilled under license in the USA , South Africa , New Zealand , Canada and other countries.

A sloe gin has also been available from Gordon's for some time , and there are also flavored variants with elderflower and cucumber .

marketing

Gordon's Gin provided the gin during the filming of African Queen in 1951 , which Humphrey Bogart consumed excessively in his role as Captain Charlie Allnutt and which Katharine Hepburn dumped overboard in a central scene of the film. In the wake of the film, Gordon's increased its sales by 26 percent. An advertising campaign “The African Scene” was developed with outtakes from the film and a Bogart impersonator was hired to discuss a tape for a free customer telephone. The campaign is one of the first documented cases of product placement in a Hollywood film.

About 70% of the gin consumed in English pubs and clubs in the late 1990s was Gordon's.

Artistic reception

Gordon's Gin was the market leader in international branded gin for most of the 20th century. Before super-premium brands emerged in the 1990s, Gordon's was almost synonymous with gin for martini or gin and tonic in English-speaking countries . Accordingly, the product appears frequently in literature and film without necessarily conveying a specific meaning or even being the focus. Nevertheless, the social consumption of branded products always has social connotations. With Gordon's Gin, this connotation was middle class in the USA and England from the middle of the 20th century.

Ernest Hemingway published two short stories in Holiday magazine in 1951 . One of them is titled The Good Lion and is about a winged lion from Venice who goes to Africa . There he refuses to eat meat, especially human flesh. The lion likes pasta , the other lions refuse him and accordingly he flies back to Venice. Back in the heart of civilization - in Harry's Bar - he orders a very dry martini with Gordon's gin. And a human meat sandwich.

Gordon's Gin is the namesake of the early work Gordon's Makes Us Drunk (1972) by Gilbert & George . The twelve-minute film shows an absurd sequence in which Gilbert & George sit at a round table, consume gin and tonic to the point of drunkenness and thus raise ironic questions about identity, nationality and “good behavior”. The dialogue mainly consists of the sentence “Gordon's Makes Us Drunk”, in German “Gordon's makes us drunk”.

Web links

Commons : Gordon's Gin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Top 25 premium spirits brands worldwide 2013. In: Lebensmittelzeitung.net. Retrieved February 17, 2015 .
  2. ^ The Gin Market - A Global Picture. In: ginvodka.org. Retrieved February 18, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Brand Explorer. (Accessed May 24, 2019.)
  4. ↑ Strategic Brands of Diageo (Retrieved May 24, 2019.)
  5. ↑ Andrew Starke: Diageo, Schweppes in Pre-Mix Partnership ( Memento of the original from February 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.theshout.com.au archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . In The Shout: Hotel, Bar, Liquor Industry News dated April 13, 2011.
  6. ↑ Gordon’s homepage , accessed on January 19, 2012
  7. ^ Perry Luntz: Whiskey, Whiskey & Company for Dummies. 1st edition, Wiley Verlag, Weinheim 2009, p. 160.
  8. ↑ Why has gin got so much weaker? , accessed January 19, 2012
  9. ^ Richard J. Varey: Marketing communication: principles and practice . Routledge, London 2002, p. 167; Bob Stone, John Wyman: Successful Telemarketing . 2nd ed., NTC Business Books, Lincolnwood 1992, pp. 82f.
  10. ^ Paul Smith et al: Strategic Marketing Communications , Reprint 2002, Kogan Page Ltd., London 2002, p. 141.
  11. ^ George Monteiro: Hemingway Para Crianças (O Bom Leão eo Touro Leal) by Ernest Hemingway; Hélio Pólvora . In: The Modern Language Journal . Vol. 61, No. 8 (December 1977), p. 433. (Review)
  12. ^ Ernest Hemingway: The complete short stories of Ernest Hemingway . Simon and Schuster, New York 1998, ISBN 0684843323 , 482-484 .
  13. ↑ Description in the Tate Collection , accessed January 19, 2012.