Day Seven: Cointreau

5/19/2010
Today’s big adventure was a class trip to Angers, France (1 hour via bus) to the one and only Cointreau (quen-tro) distillery and bottling factory. Cointreau is a type of triple sec distilled from orange peels that is used in cocktails. In fact, the cocktails in Sex and the City use Cointreau. I had never heard of it before, but it has been around for over 150 years. They sell 50 million bottles a year around the globe and there have been many marketing campaigns that have been important in the history of marketing. We learned about several of these including one in which an ad ran for two weeks of a woman having her shudders closed because she was sick; two weeks later the ad revealed an opened window with a high class woman drinking a glass of Cointreau and saying that Cointreau made her better. I like their marketing tagline which is ‘Be Cointreauversial’! It was also very interesting to learn that in France in 2007 a law was passed that forbids advertisements for alcohol from displaying any portion of a human body in the ad. After seeing the distillery room where the orange oils are removed via vapors (this room smelled delicious and looked like something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) we saw the mixing rooms and the bottling lines. Cointreau uses a secret recipe which is a proportion of the orange oils mixed with alcohol, water and sugar to make the drink. Also the square bottle was revolutionary for its time as nearly all bottles of alcohol were sold in clear glass bottles formed into objects. There was a lot of copying of this product and the bottle that was patented.
Of course the trip ended with a tasting of a cocktail in their company bar for the fifty of us and it did taste pretty good!
Oh and dinner was great tonight once again! I never thought I would eat these but we had lentils with ham. Lentils are amazing and I’m surprised I never had them before. I think the name was just a turn off for me. We did have a ton of bread though. Too much. Another entrée was a soft, warm bread with olives baked in and it went really well with salad.

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