Liquor stores heated up over Fireball move
Afriend who peddles booze for a living dropped me a note describing upset among his client liquor stores because customers think Fireball Cinnamon Whisky is being sold in supermarkets in small bottles priced at 99 cents.
It isn’t. But it’s an easy mistake to make, and one intended by the manufacturer.
My friend the liquor rep shared a photo posted on a local alcohol-focused Facebook group that asked, “How can Shoprite sell (this)???,” and he added a note: “Liquor stores are PISSED.”
The little bottles sure look like Fireball Cinnamon Whisky, a brand established in Canada in the mid-1980s that in the past decade has become the fifthbest-selling spirit in the United States, behind Smirnoff and Tito’s but ahead of Jim Beam, Jack Daniel’s and others; Fireball sells more than two and a half times more cases in the U.S. annually than Jameson Irish.
Based on Canadian whisky,
Fireball has a potent cinnamon kick that tastes like the similarly named Atomic Fireball candy that’s been around since the 1950s. Never mind that it’s yucky. Let’s set aside aesthetic and palate considerations to ask an objective question: How the hell is this stuff now in supermarkets and gas stations?
Because it’s not actual Fireball Cinnamon Whisky. It’s a malt-beverage version called simply Fireball Cinnamon. Introduced last summer, it’s now available in 170,000 stores that cannot sell spirits, according to the company. Which means it’s in front of innumerably more
young people, a demographic generally associated with being attracted to candy. Talk about grooming the next generation of drinkers.
Anyway. Trying to make sense of the complexities of which stores can sell what becomes an exercise in foundering in the State Liquor Authority website, which I recommend only for frustration masochists. The short version is that distinctions are largely based on ingredients and how a beverage is made, and to a minor degree about the percentage of alcohol by volume.
So: Supermarkets/drugstores/convenience stores can sell beer, malt liquor, hard cider and mead. Also, you may see something in such stores that looks like a standard wine bottle, with a deceptive brand name and a grape varietal like “chardonnay” on the front, but in smaller print will be the words “wine product,” which means it has lower alcohol content and stuff added, though manufacturers don’t make that easy to determine. One popular brand of wine product, called Vineyard Creek, appears to say nowhere on its website that what it’s selling is not actually wine, but Walmart.com helpfully says this of Vineyard Creek’s merlot: “Ingredients: California
Table Wine, Water, Sugar, Concentrated Juice, Natural Fruit Flavors, Citric Acid and Carbon Dioxide.”
If a product is a liquor, liqueur, spirit or is distilled, it may be sold only in a liquor store in New York state, but liquor stores can’t sell malt-liquor products or beer. Which means wine/liquor stores can sell cider, mead and wine products, as can supermarkets. However, wine/ liquor are off-limits in grocery/drug/convenience stores, and beer and malt liquor are verboten in wine/liquor retailers. Got that?
Which brings us back to Fireball Cinnamon. It is malt-based and clocks in at 33 proof, or 16.5 percent alcohol. Fireball Cinnamon
Whisky is whiskybased and runs at 66 proof. The labels look almost identical. That is intentional.
A representative for the SLA tells me that no laws were changed. It’s just that Fireball, owned the New Orleans-based conglomerate Sazerac Co., which has scores of brands, found a way to further its name (and I assume basic flavor profile) by pushing the malt-based Fireball into vastly more stores. Sazerac is doing something similar with a malt-based version of another of its brands, Southern Comfort, according to Marty Schanz, who owns Schanz Beverage Center in Watervliet and helped me sort all this out. (His brother, Tom, owns the liquor store next door.)