50 Cent focusing on his liquid assets
Rapper diving in with his own line of high-end champagne and cognac
He came wearing a Yankees cap when an Astros cap might have been a better marketing move, but Curtis Jackson said he had to be true to his deep New York City roots. And I can attest that he came in peace, bearing gorgeous champagne bottles and a lovely one full of cognac, too.
Almost everybody, of course, knows Jackson as 50 Cent. He got rich — tryin’ hard and not dyin’, to borrow from his own lyrics — because of his prodigious rapping skills. The Grammy Award winner from South Jamaica Queens has sold more than 30 million albums, affording him the means to acquire a glittering array of lifestyle accoutrements. Garages full of high-end automobiles. Vaults full of bling. Multiple fancy cribs. En route to the top, having climbed out of a bottom so low
that he was on the streets selling crack at the age of 12, he acquired a taste for premium bubbles. Cognac, too. But drinking the stuff is one thing, producing it — and doing it well — is quite another.
Jackson didn’t want just another cliché vanity brand when he launched his Le Chemin du Roi — “the King’s Path” — champagne line and his Branson Cognac VSOP, a partnership with the Tessendier brothers, respected fourth-generation producers.
When he arrived in Houston on a promotional visit, he’d only recently been tromping through the sacred Champagne vineyards southeast of Paris. He involved himself in the blending, hanging out with the team from Castelnau, a formidable Reims-based house known for over-delivering at its price points. He also played a lead role in designing the glitzy bottles, with the 14-karat rose gold plated king’s cross on each.
When I joked that one day he might become better known for his sparklers than his lyrics, or his emergent acting skills, he flashed a 24-karat smile and said he’d be ever so happy to open a few bottles to celebrate same.
“This is a very serious business for me,” he said, adding that you won’t catch him making champagne-cognac cocktails, a de rigueur ritual on the rap scene, with his wines.
Fellow rapper Jay Z pioneered this liquid profit line when he bought the middlingquality Armand de Brignac champagne house a few years back and rebranded it as the Ace of Spades. Jackson considers Jay Z (who, you may have heard, is married to Houston’s Beyoncé), to be an inspiration, not an adversary, in the champagne business. Of course, he thinks he’s making better bubbles. Is he? The market will answer that question eventually.
Jackson is already more than a few dollars up in the price war, though. The chardonnay-centric Le Chemin du Roi Brut and the Rosé, which gives pinot meunier a star turn, are on the shelf at Spec’s for $162.69 and $323.49, respectively. Hardly bargain pricing, but compare those numbers to the corresponding Ace of Spades bottles at $287.84 and $405.97, never mind $755.99 for the Blanc de Blancs. (A Chemin du Roi Blanc de Blancs is coming to the market soon as well, but that one is expected to be even more expensive than Jay Z’s.)
When we talked over lunch — at, fittingly, a’Bouzy, the city’s most bubbles-focused restaurant — Jackson and his team were working on scoring prime Astros-Rays tickets, and I strongly suspect they succeeded. For the record, he insisted he was 100 percent in on the Astros … unless they wound up meeting his beloved Yankees in the ALCS. Fair enough.