KISS ROCK DRINKS – The hottest drinks in the world

It was recently brought to my attention that the almighty KISS, marketers extraordinaire, have their own wine and also a beer. I did a quick google search and found this site KISS ROCK DRINKS.com – The hottest drinks in the world.

The wine is a Zinfandel, which seems to be quite popular in the Swedish market, and is described as:

KISS Zin Fire is a bold and fruity California Zinfandel — the result of a cool, long growing season that promoted fantastic flavor and a rich, jammy aroma. A brazen blend of blackberry and pepper gives the wine a hard-rocking kick and spicy smooth finish.

There is also a beer available in both bottle and can and seems to be a traditional German Pilsner style of lager. Check out this video at about 1:30

 

Members of KISS had the following to say.

“This isn’t just something we put a label on. We wanted wine and beer unique to KISS and we got it, said Paul Stanley of KISS. “This stuff will set your taste buds on fire.”

“If you love beer and wine, this one is for you!” said Gene Simmons of KISS.

Please leave a comment if you have actually tried either of these products. I’m very interested to see what your impressions are. Also, if you hear of any rock branded beers, wines or spirits let me know as we often don’t see these here in Australia and I love seeing what others are doing.

Until next time, keep it loud!

Distorted Beverages is now official!!

Well, I haven’t lived up to my promise in my last post to write more often, but it has been a very hectic Christmas & New Year season. Hope you all had a great time spent with family and friends, good music and good booze!

When I started writing this blog my vision for what I would be doing was quite strong and well-formed but as you do, I had small doubts as to whether it would all come together or not. 12 months ago following a phone call from Rick Sales, manager extraordinaire, my brain started racing with ideas and concepts as to what we could create and the potential to really be innovative and creative, whilst just doing something cool. It has taken that full 12 months and little bit more to get to the stage where an actual company and physical presence is being realised. Distorted Beverages is now trademarked, domain names locked in and a registered business name. The company structure has been decided and within the next month we will be an official Australian company. It’s amazing to see what I have dreamed of finally actually happening, amazing and scary at the same time.

There has been many discussions with Rick and Barry over at Global and with the help of some new and fantastic friends here I have been able to make my vision a reality. What this means in actuality is that in the coming Autumn we will be releasing Motorhead Shiraz onto the Australian drinking public closely followed by Motorhead Vodka. We are in negotiations with the largest independent group of liquor stores in the country and so far the response has been good. It is now up to yours truly to get out there and rally stores behind our concept, a hard rock section in every store. In reality that is what I want to achieve, having a selection of beer, wines and spirits with their own shelf area in each of the stores and what better way to start than with the mighty Motorhead!

My vision though doesn’t stop there. I have a lot of big ideas and dreams/visions/goals/whatever for where this company can go and I am very adamant that it will be a great success. That doesn’t mean there aren’t nights where I lay in bed not able to sleep thinking “Can I really do this?”. That happens more than I would like, but the only way I will fail is to give in to those doubts. I have already achieved things I wasn’t sure were possible, met some amazing people and we are only just getting started.

I really do promise to write again very soon. The other angle of this story is my brewing collaboration with Dan Donegan from Disturbed which is really starting to move in the right direction; very, very cool.

Until then, may all your music be loud!

Luke

Chief Distortion Officer

Damaged Case

A while back I wrote a piece about the Motorhead wine that was being sold throughout Scandinavia for the past year or so. Some of you may also be aware that the wine is also now available in Germany and the UK and I’m proud to announce that yours truly will be launching the wine here in Australia in early 2012! i can’t truly express how awesome it is to be involved in a project with a rock icon, one of the original heavy metal bands and a group that has been so influential on hard rock and metal for the past 30 some odd years! To make sure I’m truly in the mood whilst writing this post I am of course listening to the deluxe edition of Ace of Spades, such a great album.

This is really just the beginning for Distorted Beverages, which by the way is now an official registered business, which is nice. I had a great conversation with Barry Drinkwater from Global Merchandise this past weekend. Barry is top bloke, very experienced in the merchandising field for the entertainment industry and it’s a privilege to work with someone like him. We have plenty of ideas flowing about promotional concepts and future artists and products that we can launch and I’m really excited to get my teeth stuck into it.

The last piece of the puzzle is the retailers here in Australia. In order to make the biggest impact and reach as many people and fans as possible I have been in discussions with one of the big liquor retail chains here. Whilst they haven’t come onboard 100% yet, they haven’t said no either so we are negotiating on things like price and quantity, all the fun stuff. not my favourite part of the job but a very important one and a very good learning experience anyway.

In the meantime dear readers please check out the Motorhead Wine website, follow it on all your favourite social media sites and lets enjoy this together with the music turned up LOUD!

I’m going to see Foo Fighters in about a week or so, think I may have scored some passes as well, so next time I’ll be reporting about that. Until then….

 

Chief Distortion Officer

Luke

 

AC/DC wine?

It’s been a little while since my last post and somewhere along the way I realised that I hadn’t written about the range of wines that were released for AC/DC here in Australia. There has been huge media coverage of the release in both music media and a lot in the mainstream, even breakfast television. The wines were produced under licence by a winery called Warburn Estate, not a winery I’m very familiar with other than to know that they are based in the Riverina area of NSW, not really considered a premium wine growing region. The range of wines consists of:

• 2010 Back in Black Shiraz
• 2008 Highway to Hell Cabernet Sauvignon
• 2011 You Shook Me All night Long Moscato
• 2010 Hells Bells Sauvignon Blanc

Warburn Estate is a large wine producer who sell a lot of their products through the Woolworths/Dan Murphys chains here. Woolworths are on of the two major supermarket chains in Australia, the other being Coles. In this case the wines were made available exclusively from Woolworths stores. Generally the Warburn Estate wines retail for around the $10 mark. All four of the AC/DC range retail at $15.99 which I think is a clever strategy that I’m guessing the aim is for consumers to not be swayed by price to purchase one wine over the others. in fact due to the price and style of wines they made I think the average accadacca fan will at least buy one bottle of each but most likely several.

The closest Dan Murphys store to me is about 25 minutes drive away and I went in there a couple of days ago to grab a bottle of each of the reds. SOLD OUT!! Wow, I was impressed. They had a few bottles left of the Moscato (sweeter slightly fizzy white) but that didn’t interest me. When I asked the store attendant if they got much of it in stock to begin with, he told me they had about a pallet, which equates to roughly 50-60 dozen depending on how they were packed. these wines by the way were packed in 6 bottle boxes, again I give some kudos here to the producers as I think many would buy a 6 bottle box given the chance but probably wouldn’t buy a dozen box. The impressive thing about all of this is that it means the wine sold out in approximately 3 weeks! Now I’m not sure if there are plans to do a follow-up release but I hope that they do as it really does help pave the way for myself and our ambitions.

Luckily I went past another store later in the day and I did manage to get a bottle of both the Cabernet and the Shiraz. I tried the Shiraz that night and while I don’t like tasting notes, here are my thoughts on it.

Purple and vibrant, this has all the hall marks of what young Shiraz should look like. There is a good, yet simple ripe berry aroma and it seems as if somebody may have walked past the tank with an oak stave at some point, but lets just say there isn’t a lot of complexity going on here. The palate is medium bodied and quite smooth, overall it is a pleasant drinking wine.

Basically, the wine was pretty much how I expected it to be. Good wine for the price and considering it is pretty young being a 2010, there were some good qualities about it. I’m yet to open the Cabernet but i will in the next week or so and give a little update then of my thoughts.

Until then it seems only fitting to say, “For those about to rock, we salute you!”

The Ace of Spades….

Motorhead is such an iconic rock band, their sound is unmistakable and what you see is definitely what you get. I last saw Motorhead when they toured Australia with Motley Crue, back in maybe 2005/2006. They were then and are to this day the loudest band I have ever heard. Straight up rock n roll, Lemmy is GOD!

Late last year Motorhead Shiraz was launched across Sweden and the rest of Scandanavia and has been very succesful to date. As of this past Friday, there has been a major development for that wine, that I’m very excited to say I have a part in. I can’t give to much away right now, but watch this space for future announcements.

http://boozinfoodie.com/2011/05/26/motorhead-wine/