What Bottled Water User's Need to Know
The summer before last, during a brutal Colorado heat wave, I drove from Boulder up a dusty road to Eldorado Springs, the source of the water that had been named the best-tasting in the country at the Berkeley Springs International Water Tasting of 2016. Next to a stream flowing under a bridge decorated with flower boxes, I parked by a squat stone pumphouse, put a quarter in a water dispensing machine, filled a bottle, and chugged. In that beautiful setting the clear, cold purity of the water, consumed so close to its source, was the best drinking experience of my life.
Back at my Long Island summer home, it was the opposite. The tap water, which comes from local aquifers (not the reservoirs that supply New York City with its world class water), tasted like chlorine. The talk at parties was about a toxic plume from a landfill, dioxane, and contaminants in the soil from a nearby nuclear laboratory. Before I could stop myself, I became a bottled water user, stocking our house with San Pellegrino, Evian, O, and Perrier.
Never mind the environmental issue of all those bottles, a Times article debunking the need to drink eight glasses a day, or the healthier “raw water” trend; I savored each sip of the old European classics. But when I looked at the bottles on my table, I realized I knew nothing about them. That simply would not do in a source-crazy society in which connoisseurship is all.
What if I were to take a trip to see where my bottled waters came from-sourcing the sources, as it were? After all, obsessive oenophiles travel to learn about the terroir and blending of the wines they consume, so why not take a water tour? Plus, with the poisoned water disaster in Flint, the latest concerns about drought in California and Cape Town, and the EPA’s recent suspension of President Obama’s clean water regulations, what could be more relevant?
DAY 1: PERRIER
On a hot October morning I wake up in the tiny village of Verge?ze, in the south of France, to drive through miles of sun-drenched farmland, hungover and thirsty from a lonely night of drinking more than the Perrier placed on my table. I am not far from Ni?mes, and the land is flat, arid, and not at all what I expected when I imagined the place where Perrier is bottled.
After passing a factory as big as an airport, I end up in a cavernous underground space at one of the earliest cachements (water-sheds) used by Dr. Louis-Eugene Perrier when he started his bottling business in 1898. When Perrier first perfected gas and water “capture,” the technique was novel. But harvesting water from its gurgling source, Les Bouillens in Verge?ze, dates back to the Romans. The water I’m looking at now, bubbling under walkways and giant copper cones that capture the natural gas (to be re-added later in the factory), tells only part of the story.
“Perrier is an expression of the terroir,” the company’s communications director Fabio Brusa tells me. It begins with rainwater entering the distant Massif Central mountains through fissures in the limestone rock, mingling with gas that has volcanic origins, and traveling hundreds of miles through silt, stone, and sand to be pumped from four highly secured company wells. “Our water has the same mineral content it has had for hundreds of years.”
To preserve its environment, Perrier subsidizes local olive, grape, and saffron growers in using the best organic techniques-in other words, going to great lengths to protect the water supply in ways that the EPA may not.
I walk through a garden to take a tour of a museum in a stately old stone mansion, where newspaper clippings tell the story of how Perrier (its source having been authorized by Napoleon III in 1863) started exporting to England and the U.S. and grew to the present nearly 1 billion bottles a year shipped to 140 countries. In a tasting room I try the Perrier Blue, which is not available in the U.S. and has delightful, smaller bubbles (to compete with Badoit), and a bracing Perrier Menthe, which isn’t available in the states either.
“I had too much red wine last night, so I’m dehydrated,” I tell Brusa. He reminds me that Perrier has always allied itself with bars and drinking more than with health and food. “Between every two alcoholic drinks you need to pause with a water,” he says. I tell him I’ll drink to that and grab several bottles for the road.
Although bottled water existed even before Louis XIV declared his love for Chateldon (with its discreet, naturally occurring little bubbles), its popularity in the U.S. came later. Some link it to the health craze of the late 1970s, others to New York Fashion Week in the early 1990s, when Evian, looking to move beyond its presence in the sports world, became a sponsor.
The trickle-down from paparazzi photos of models with bottles was immediate. Hydrating became a thing. Bottlers started misleading us into thinking that drinking lots of water was key for good health. Soon, and especially when Nestle?’s Poland Spring in Maine became a market force, environmentalists began to decry the privatization of a natural resource. Politics followed, along with questions about all those bottles and whether they were being efficiently recycled.
And, yet, despite whistleblowing books like Bottlemania and Bottled and Sold, the thirst has continued. These days everybody has a preferred water, whether bottled, boxed, or canned. “It’s about choice: taste, bubbles, bottle shape, and the narrative romance of where the water comes from,” says Dana Cowin, former editor in chief of Food & Wine. She remembers when Alain Ducasse opened his first New York restaurant, in 2000, with a selection of waters that drew mockery. “And there will always be waters that are trendier than others.”
Right now the trendy ones seem to include the upmarket Lurisia, from northern Italy; the extremely popular La Croix, from Wisconsin; and Essentia, for health obsessives. When I call Michael Mascha, the founder of Finewaters.com, for tips about visiting the sources of the old-school waters I drink, he pushes lesser-known brands in “the superpremium category.” These include one from a glacier in Antarctica and another with high mineral content from Slovenia.
Many get this indoctrination at the Ray’s & Stark water bar in Los Angeles. I had mine at the water bar at Colette, the Paris department store, before it closed last year. “Water is a way of life for us,” Guillaume Salmon, the store’s spokesman, told me. For an impromptu tasting he moved me from the mildest of waters to the strongest. But the Elsenham, from a pure “confined aquifer” in England, while rich in calcium, was distinct only for its square glass bottle.
The Hydroxydase, from the Auvergne, was without taste to my unknowing senses but so rich in minerals that it is sold in pharmacies. Mineral water, to be clear, is sold more for health than taste-since we all need minerals and not all waters have them. Calcium is good for bones, magnesium for cardiac health, sulfates for cholesterol, and bicarbonate for digestion.
“We’ve taken the waters at thermal baths here for centuries, so we know locations,” Salmon said. “Americans really don’t get to see where their water comes from the way we do.”
I like being the exception. But before going on with my water log, so to speak, some definitions: Purified or filtered water (Dasani, Aquafina) is tap water that has been distilled, deionized, or put through reverse osmosis. Water snobs eschew it. And those “ionized” waters with an added electrical charge that supposedly increases antioxidants? Not much there, and it turns out that the tap water in many cities has enough antioxidants anyway.
Alkaline waters, also dubious, increase pH to supposedly spare the body having to produce extra bicarbonate, giving the organs a holiday-but for no real reason. Hydrogen water is purified, then infused with hydrogen, which is reputedly good for inflammation and pain but without clinical proof. And those waters with added electrolytes? It turns out the tap water in many cities has more.
Spring water is bottled water that can be a mixture from various sources-including the economical Poland Spring from Maine and the much older Mountain Valley Spring from Arkansas. The trendiest new raw “live” waters-untreated, unfiltered, and unsterilized (and somewhat controversial because they can have bacteria and other contaminants)-come from springs or sometimes from systems installed on rooftops to collect rainwater. Mineral waters, my trip’s focus, come from single underground sources and contain at least 250 parts per million of total dissolved solids. They are very strictly regulated. And, like all the most interesting people, extremely complex.
DAY 2: AIX-LES-BAINS
On the second day of my European water tour, I pull into a small factory at Aix-les-Bains (like Perrier, the bottled water is named after the town), a beautiful, historic village with a massive hillside thermal spa. I’m north of the Perrier factory and south of Geneva.
Phillippe Germaneau, the affable manager, gives me the tour, showing bottles blown like glass but from plastic cubes. He takes me to a lab where water chemists test samples. He drives me uphill past woods and fields to an “impluvium” and points out the limestone rock ledges where rainwater seeps underground until, after some years, it reaches a locked well in town, where a pipe brings it to storage tanks.
Like the water from nearby Evian, Aix-les-Bains water (also sold as a facial spray) is said to flush out the kidneys. Patients at the town spa come to treat rheumatism and phlebitis. Over dinner Germaneau looks proud as a waiter presents a striking triangular plastic bottle. We take sips, but there’s no taste, just a softness.
“Tasting water is like tasting wine,” he says. “The one that is good is the one you like.”
DAY 3: EVIAN-LES-BAINS
I think about this as I drive to Geneva to pick up my brother, a wine connoisseur. On our first night in Evian-les-Bains, east of Geneva, he charts the mineral content of various waters. Evian, at 345, has a small amount. Perrier, at 475, has more, and San Pellegrino, at 940, is so mineralized that it is not recommended for babies. We sample and try to critique. Although I’ve heard that magnesium tastes chalky, and I have friends who believe one water is sweet, another acidic, we can’t tell much difference beyond bubble size and the impact of carbonation. “Does TDS stand for Total Dissolved Solids or Too Damn Specific?” my brother asks.
In the middle of the 19th century the wealthy traveled by train(as they did to spa towns all over the continent) to Evian-les-Bains, a pretty little city with Alps rising around Lake Geneva. They stayed in the magnificent Ho?tel Royal (host to Marcel Proust, Greta Garbo, and Maurice Chevalier, it was recently honored with a Palace award) and, on doctors’ orders, drank from a town spigot to flush urinary tracts, rid kidneys of stones, and treat other ailments.
“That clock tower was for patients timing their drinking,” Patrick Lachassagne tells us about the defunct Belle Epoque spa next to the original Evian factory, which has been replaced by a vast one outside town. Lachassagne is Evian’s hydrologist, and he has started our tour at Source Cachat, where the same Evian we drink at home comes out of a bronze faucet for public use. I wait for locals to fill their giant bottles before filling mine. This is the same easily absorbed pH-neutral water discovered by the Count of Lazier, a man of science, in 1789.
“There are other sources, but Evian tastes the best,” says Lachassagne, whose brand won a tasting contest judged by his hydrologist peers. I can’t say I would be able to agree or disagree, but one fact is indisputable: Evian is recognized by the World Health Organization for having pH and mineral content that come close to the natural levels in our bodies.
Lachassagne, a rugged and lean man, is excited to take us up into the green hills, past cows and woodlands, to step onto a plateau that looks out over the mountains and lake. It’s not exactly the Alpine meadow I’d envisioned from the bottle, but it’s lush and green. “This is the real factory,” he says. Stewardship of this land keeps Evian’s water pure. A stainless steel pipe brings it down to town and factory.
The company (owned by Danone) has no conflict with environmentalists. Like all French bottlers, it pays a tax for harvesting the water, which flows in such abundance that most ends up in the lake. Some also ends up in the pool at Evian’s modern, state-of-the-art spa in town, where my brother and I take a swim that feels more salubrious than decadent.
DAY 4: SAN PELLEGRINO
If a pool filled with Evian is nice, it’s nothing compared with QC Termal Spa in San Pellegrino Terme, an Art Nouveau palazzo above town in the Bergamo area northeast of Milan. While the original San Pellegrino Spa (the word spa is sometimes said to come from the Latin salus per aquam, “health from water”) was a birthplace of modern wellness practices that drew celebrities and royals, QC’s business model was inspired by the ancient Romans, who socialized heavily in their public baths.
In hooded white bathrobes, we climb a marble staircase and pass into bathing areas that feature everything from shoulder-pounding waterfalls to therapeutic underwater music. We bathe in the waters for hours while young Italians around us smoke and drink espresso.
After a waterlogged sleep in a small hotel by the roaring Brembo River, I arrive at the San Pellegrino factory, my last stop. Immense steel tanks full of the highly mineralized water, which collects nearby, at around 3,500 feet in the Alps, overshadow the parking lot.
The San Pellegrino company, started in 1899, can make 40,000 bottles an hour in a factory from the 1960s that is soon to be replaced by one designed by a world class architect. “We always look to improve,” says Antonella Stefanelli, the communications officer who is giving me a tour. A citrus smell fills the building because today they’re making Aranciata, San Pellegrino’s first soda, invented in 1932.
In a gallery overlooking the factory, Stefanelli points out newspaper pages from a century ago that chronicle the elite who visited the town spa, hotel, and casino. After a day of healthy pursuits they would spend nights drinking, smoking, and gambling. Many old ads are set in restaurants. The brand still promotes pairing its products with food, and it holds a chefs competition.“Water,” Stefanelli says, “is never just about water.”
I learn more as the tour winds down. For one thing, Italy, the world’s largest consumer of bottled water, is rich in thermal areas. And yet a brand famous for bubbles is not naturally sparkling. Over a century ago, when carbon dioxide was first added to preserve San Pellegrino for shipping abroad, the result was so pleasing that the product stayed that way. The other thing I learn is that pellegrino means pilgrim-the perfect factoid for the end of a water tour.
On the flight home I wake up parched to find a flight attendant offering a lowbrow bottled water that any connoisseur would eschew. But I’m so thirsty I don’t think about its low minerality or whether it is filtered or distilled. I just chug it down and feel quenched. Sometimes water is only about water, isn’t it?
This article appears in the May 2018 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Now
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