Scorpions, Astronauts, and a Booze Launch Gone Wrong

On the importance of credit and attribution.

Over the weekend, I attended the Explorers’ Club annual dinner. You’ve perhaps heard of this notorious event: It’s the black-tie gala where, during the cocktail hour, guests enjoy all sorts of canapes with proteins considered “adventurous” to standard American palates: scorpions, cockroaches, mopani and bamboo worms, palm weevils, dried silkworm pupae, etc. (I’m not ashamed to say I went back for thirds on the ants and the silkworms.) Apparently, a few years back, they were encasing cocktail onions and olives in eyeballs as martini garnishes; that practice seems to have been dropped in the meantime, to my disappointment.

Oh, and it’s also where you might get a chance to chat with an astronaut.

The Explorer’s Club, you see, is an organization that was founded in 1904 and whose members are responsible for just about every exploration “first” achieved since then: First to the North Pole, first to the South Pole, first to the summit of Mount Everest, first to the deepest point in the ocean, and first to the surface of the moon. The club’s flag was flown on the Kon-Tiki and carried to the moon on Apollo 11.

Anyhow, it seems like a good time to tell a story relevant to that evening, a story of an oopsie by a booze brand that maybe we can all learn from.

A few years back, a member of the The Explorer’s Club was walking through an airport and saw a large display from Johnnie Walker advertising its new line of (duty-free exclusive) whiskies it was calling “The Explorers’ Club Collection.”

The kiosk looked remarkably like the Upper East Side home of The Explorer’s Club, with leather sofas, dark wood, and vintage-looking pieces of décor. “Join the Explorer’s Club!” the kiosk beckoned.

When he got back home, the member called his club and was like “Hey, congratulations on the collaboration/brand deal. That must be bringing in a bunch of money for the club!”

The club’s response: WUT.

The Diageo folks, as it turned out, hadn’t contacted The Explorer’s Club for permission to use its (trademarked) name and identity for the brand’s new line of whiskies.

And when the club reached out to Diageo, Johnnie Walker’s parent brand, to say “Hey, we exist (as you surely know), and this sounds like a great opportunity to collaborate somehow,” Diageo said, in effect, “I don’t even know you, man!” and kept carrying on exactly as it was before in its promotion of the new collection.

Funny thing: The member who stumbled upon the airport display happened to be a lawyer. And he happened to be a lawyer at a major firm with a strong and very well-respected intellectual property-focused department.

Long story short, The Explorers’ Club (the club) sued Diageo over the Explorers’ Club (the whisky) and won, resulting in an injunction forbidding Diageo from continuing to sell the whisky line. A couple of months later, however, the two entities came to a settlement in which Diageo became a “corporate sponsor” of the club (take that as you will), “working together to promote exploration and discovery.” It kept selling the line of blended scotches for the next few years, even holding a couple of tastings at the club.

The lesson here, of course, is about credit and attribution, always concerns among the bar industry. I often hear mutterings from industry folks about everything from stolen/unattributed cocktails to stolen business ideas.

As a writer, I feel their pain: I’m irritated every time a publication or online personality runs a recipe I took the time to get straight from its creator without saying where they learned of it, and furious each time they include quotes that I took the effort to get, and were said directly to me, without attributing where they lifted them from. I’ve talked with plenty of my fellow drinks-media colleagues who tell me they feel the same.

The fact that recipes can’t be copyrighted seems well known by now. (Drink names can be trademarked, however—witness the well-known examples of the Painkiller™ and the Dark N’ Stormy™. That’s a different issue, to be discussed another time.)

And yet, in my experience, bartenders are unfailingly generous in giving out their specs. Sother Teague has a policy of sharing specs when asked, and has instructed the team at Amor y Amargo to do the same. I’ve seen guests ask for specs in other bars, and I haven’t yet seen anyone say no. When I’ve asked in a professional capacity, I don’t think anyone’s declined yet.

The expectation in return, of course, is attribution. You can’t “own” a recipe, but what you can do is make sure that your name becomes associated with the drink. I’d rightfully face severe professional repercussions if I published a cocktail recipe and didn’t credit its origin. Sother asks that if another bar puts an Amor drink on its menu, they credit where it came from. It’s a policy that, if not overtly spoken, is kind of widely assumed.

The aphorism “Good artists borrow; great artists steal” springs to mind; plenty of unscrupulous people cite it in their defense. But there’s an awful lot of drama in the art world over stealing, you’ll note; take a look at all of the lawsuits over music sampling in the past few years. And the hospitality industry is founded on a certain generosity of spirit. This generosity shouldn’t be punished: Give credit where it’s due.

It’s simple: If someone’s doing something cool that you want in on, maybe just talk with them about it. Get permission. Attribute your source.

Because we can learn from the Johnnie Walker fiasco that it’s better to play well together and collaborate from the start than be ordered to do it by the courts—or the court of public opinion.  

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The Sidecar:

While it’s not easy to get into The Explorer’s Club (unless you’re an astronaut), there is a club for (boozy) adventurers where you’re sure to enjoy the membership-qualification process. Sunken Harbor Club launched its passport program last autumn, and those aspiring to membership must complete a dozen challenges, ranging from drinking specific cocktails to tasks such as “Wear the Horns of the Ibex while in the Sunken Harbor Club for at least 30 minutes. Answer no questions about the horns honestly.” What does membership get you? You’ll have to achieve it to find out.