The other component was marketing. David Embury concedes:

My hat is off to the American vodka manufacturers and their advertising departments, particularly Heublein, manufacturers of the Smirnoff brand, for what I regard as the most outstanding job of advertising and sales promotion that this country has ever witnessed. I am not so keen about the claim that vodka “does not have an unpleasant liquor taste.” If you don’t like the taste of liquor, why drink it? But the blurb that it “leaves you breathless,” with its double-entendre, is one of the cleverest advertising slogans I have seen.

Smirnoff also garnered celebrity endorsements from the likes of Woody Allen, Eva Gabor, and Groucho Marx.

But perhaps the greatest marketing coup for Heublein was a product placement in the first James Bond movie, Dr. No (1962). Dr. No serves Agent 007 a vodka martini, famously “shaken, not stirred,” and the vodka of preference is Smirnoff.

This is like the prequel to Seth Stevenson’s 2005 story for New York Magazine, The Cocktail Creationist.

(via Give Me Something To Read, Daring Fireball)

Posted at 4:34pm.