Elegance in a drink
Cointreau on Ice. Cointreau… C’est Beau
The Legend:
In 1849, Adolphe and Edouard-Jean Cointreau, famous master confectioners, established a distillery in Angers, France to create spirits using local fruits. Following the family legacy, in 1885 Edouard Cointreau, son of Edouard-Jean, distilled a spirit from sweet and bitter orange peel.
The highly crystalline robe he used was a major novelty at the time. He also invented the square-sided amber-coloured container, the modern version of which still remains the signature of Cointreau liqueur bottle to this day.
As the legacy and the spirit successfully lived on throughout the generations, the oranges used in today’s production come from Brazil, Spain, Saint Raphael, Haiti, and are shipped to Angers. They are routinely tested to ensure that the flavor stays consistent, since faithful consumers have come to expect a particular flavor from their Cointreau.
The Work:
Basketfuls of sun-dried orange peels are categorized according to their intricate colours which define the different orange flavors and their fruity intensity; greenish-bronze for bitter and orangey-red for sweet. The peels are then fully dried, macerated and finally distilled in gloriously burnished red copper stills to extract every drop of the valuable essential oils. The other ingredients (alcohol, sugar and water) — which are also completely natural — give the liqueur its creamy roundness and aromatic vigour. Like an intimate romantic secret adding to its uniqueness, the recipe itself has been faithfully guarded for more than a century.
The Drink:
Renowned for its fine balance and exquisite fullness, Cointreau is at once intense and gentle, warming and refreshing, bitter and sweet. Every sip delivers a charming twist of joie de vivre that will arouse curiosity and heighten the imagination. It is displayed in a sweet mix of nature’s rich ripe fruitfulness and warm sparkling sunshine that inspires the mouth and leaves it curious.
On first appearance, the exotic sensuality of Cointreau is artful, flowing naked and crystalline from its amber bottle. This purity clouds on contact with ice and confers a delicate pearl-white aspect to its clear transparency.
Whether enjoyed as an aperitif or a digestif, this elegant drink is a heady fragrance that shows a perfect marriage between sweet and bitter as well as uniqueness and elegance.
Cointreau… C’est Beau
*Cointreau demonstrated its superior quality by once again winning a gold medal in the 2009 San Francisco World Spirit Competition.
Soon after leaving Egypt to Canada, I joined the School of Continuing Studies at the University of Toronto for a Creative Writing Certificate. This, apart from training (Train The Trainer) at work, was the first time to be back to the class setting since graduating in 1999-2000. I ended up taking two courses, Copywriting and Logic, and befriended both teachers, especially Leslie who taught the former.
As previously shared in From English as a Third Language to Author — How I Expanded My Vocabulary as well as in Choosing Art Over Corporate and Academia, those two classes were a major boost for my confidence and self-esteem. I had just come out of a seven-year hazy period of self-medication, so mingling again with people in such a setting was quite the invigorating experience. Eventually, I got an A in Copywriting and B in Logic, leaving me utterly grateful for the opportunity.
The above is a sample ad from the Copywriting course — originally published on One Lucky Soul on 4 October 2012.
ALSO VIEW:
From English as a Third Language to Author — How I Expanded My Vocabulary
Choosing Art Over Corporate and Academia
The Writing Process and the Creative Block
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