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A Paris conglomerate opened this Mexicantown outpost in 2014. (Facebook photos from the microdistillery)
"Our" really meant "Their."
Now the Detroit beachhead established on Bagley Avenue by a giant French distillery is washed away after trying to ride the Detroit-is-hip wave for four years.
Showing a brand at Eastern Market doesn't make it local.
"Cocktail bar and vodka distillery Our/Detroit has permanently shut down operations in Mexicantown," Brenna Houck confirms at Eater Detroit.
Although Our/Detroit carried the Motor City label it was heralded early on as a 'fake' local brand, contrived by a major spirits producer to capitalize on the Detroit name.
The micro-distillery was the second-ever location of Our/Vodka, a company owned by French booze conglomerate Pernod Ricard. . . . The distinctive 350-milliliter bottles of vodka were 'partly distilled, blended and hand bottled in micro-distilleries in each city,' as Our/Vodka’s founder Åsa Caap put it.
Eater's local editor links to a March 2014 rip right here, when we mercilessly mocked the Paris poseur as "a self-parody of an earnest Detroit start-up."
Saying it in all caps doesn't make it so.Coca-Cola has local bottling plants that use at least one local ingredient (water), but you don't see them flapping about saving Detroit one bottle at a time. . . .
You are cynically using our own local identity to sell us vodka to enrich a multinational corporation that doesn't want you to know it is a multinational corporation.
Fast-forward to 2019, when Pernod Ricard holds its pose. David Mizrahi, the New York-based chief executive of Our/Vodka, tells Eater:
"We were passionate about lifting the Detroit story to the world. . . . We’ve learned so much and gotten to love the city and its people. We are proud that Detroit will always be part of our story."
Whatever. We'll stick with Valentine Vodka from Ferndale and Gilded Age Vodka from Detroit City Distillery in Eastern Market. We'll also skip Houck's suggestion to "pour one out for the sort of local distillery."
So long, Our/Vodka. We hardly knew 'ye and never drank 'ya.
