Steven Soderbergh's Singani 63 Rocks the Rules

Some 9 years ago I was working on the launch of a new-to-the-U.S. spirit brand, Singani 63. I was referred to Academy Award-winning film director Steven Soderbergh by my friend and partner Howard Bernstein to help respond to the question that filtered down to me as: "Hey, do I need a distributor or something?"

There's a lot more to that story and you can read?in this article ?by David Driscoll, then editor of K&L Spirit Journal.

Flip forward to when Steven was filming Magic Mike XXL in Atlanta and needed a liquor bottle on set, so of course he chose Singani 63. When he was inspecting the set before shooting he was confronted with a bottle filled with brown liquid. (I found out later that movies don't keep real alcohol in liquor bottles, but substitute with water colored appropriate to the brand.)

When questioned why brown, the prop guy explained, "Well it said brandy on the bottle and brandy is brown."

Steven came back and asked me a prophetic question: "Why do I have to call my product a brandy? It doesn't taste the same nor even look the same...it's nothing like brandy or Cognac." I responded that TTB regulations don’t recognize singani as a “type” and so it falls under the broader heading called class as a “Brandy.”?"How can we get that changed?" My first answer was "You can't." He pushed a little harder and I pushed back the same.

Then a light went on, and I thought well, maybe there?is?a way. It will be long road for sure, perhaps expensive, and most definitely requiring some creative thinking. But if it worked it would be HUGE!

So, I reached out to a couple of industry friends including Bill Earle who used to work at TTB and Steve Luttmann who dealt with a similar problem with cacha?a. Their counsel gave me the insight I needed to create a plan of action which would result in our making a petition to get the rules changed. We gathered resources and engaged the very same lab that TTB uses to do a detailed chemical analysis to prove our point. They used high tech tools such as gas chromatography, mass spectrometry etc. to quantitatively demonstrate there is a distinct chemical as well as organoleptic difference between brandy and singani.?Qualitatively the difference is also readily apparent…singani is clear, brandy is brown from aging in oak.

Then we pushed for and got a meeting with the management at TTB to hear our petition. And boy weren't we surprised when we arrived at the meeting room to find about 20 people there from departments including USTR, State, Commerce, Agriculture and even USPTO! I assume we got that sort of attendance due to Steven's celebrity but hey, if you've got the tools, use them.

Our strategy for the meeting was to anticipate every question, concern, regulation, policy and procedure we might get hit with.?And then preempt them all before they even got raised.?So, each time we made a statement that we knew might get challenged, we were able to lay before them a documented piece of evidence that not only validated our claim on the specific issue, but all related ones as well.?

As the documentation file rose in height it was pretty clear (pun very much intended) to all attending that we had our act together, had really thought this through and made a very compelling argument.

Then came the dramatic climax. Steven stood up to make his pitch, and I prepped the demonstration samples. FYI, Govt. employees aren't allowed to drink on the job. We knew that, so we teed up a bit of a show that let them see and smell the reality, even if they were unable to taste them.?

I had purchased special tasting glasses called "The Neat Glass" that are uniquely designed for tasting spirits. The wide brim of the glass tapered outward to help disperse the volatile alcohol, so that the taster can get a better sense of the actual smell...aroma if you like...of the liquid in a way that allows the scents to distinguished from the dominant alcohol.

My wife Sue came up with the added touch of putting a "watch glass" (a concve clear disc of glass) on top of each sample to give the presentation a more laboratory-like look.?(It worked)

Then Steven stood up and closed the petition with a simple statement. "This (the clear Singani) is not the same as this (the Cognac). It looks different, and if you'll remove the watch glass from your sample, you can even smell the difference."

Silence, sniffing, nodding heads...and elation on our part. What a show!

I'll skip past the interim years where Singani 63 dealt with some follow up questions and issues. Steven even went to Bolivia and met with then-President Evo Morales to promote the effort he was making for singani in the U.S.

Fast forward to Friday Jan. 13. 2023, the news came out TTB had granted recognition of singani as a “type” under the brandy “class.”

So, the lessons learned from the process were several. One, like Howard told me, don't take "no" for an answer, it's really a request for more information. Two, use some creativity when trying to get other people to make hard decisions. We weren't?challenging?the regulations; we were?informing?them so they could better reflect the new world of craft spirits being different from the world that existed at the end of Prohibition. Three, make the most of what you have. We were promoting Singani, but we could leverage the complementary issue of Bolivia’s recognition of Bourbon and Tennessee Whiskey as part of a (good kind of)?quid pro quo.

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