Absolut Vodka got its missing letter from an American trademark rule
Sweden's state liquor company wanted to call its export vodka Absolute Pure Vodka. But in the United States a common English adjective could not be registered as a trademark, so the Swedish spelling stayed, one letter short. The bottle broke convention too, with lettering printed straight onto the glass.
The name reaches back to the 1860s, when Lars Olsson Smith ran a distillery on Reimersholme, then just outside Stockholm, and sold spirits billed first as tenfold purified and then as absolutely pure. After a city company won a monopoly on serving spirits in 1876, Smith undercut it on price and ferried customers to his island for free, a feud remembered as the first spirits war. His face later ended up in a medallion on the bottle.
The modern brand began in 1977, when the state-owned Vin and Sprit, under Lars Lindmark, set out to create a vodka for export. The advertising pair Gunnar Broman and Hans Brindfors borrowed the old absolutely pure name and proposed a clear bottle modelled on an old apothecary bottle found in an antique shop. Market research was lukewarm, with worries it would vanish on shop shelves. The liquid broke with habit too: Swedish spirits were made from potatoes, but Absolut won an exemption to use grain, and is still distilled from winter wheat, only at Ahus.
It launched at a New Orleans trade convention in spring 1979, and the first American order, 700 cases, came from Boston that April. Sales got an unexpected lift after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, when some American bars boycotted Soviet vodka. Then, from 1981, the agency TBWA ran ads built around the bottle and two-word headlines such as Absolut Perfection. By 1985 it was America's best-selling imported vodka, and that year Andy Warhol painted the bottle, the first of many artist collaborations.
Sweden sold Vin and Sprit to Pernod Ricard in 2008 for about 5.63 billion euros. Absolut is now the world's second-largest vodka brand, shifting 12.3 million nine-litre cases a year.
Source: Absolut Vodka
