by Kent Jennings Brockwell
Staff Writer
Jacksonville bar-hoppers may soon find something different in their vodka martinis — a dill pickle.
For the past year, Peter Helow, president of Empire Communications Group, has been helping Itera Group, a Russian company with a Jacksonville office, bring their new grain vodka and the traditional way to drink Russian vodka to the U.S., and he started with Jacksonville.
The vodka is called Ivanabitch, but the name isn’t what makes the vodka overtly strange to American drinkers. Helow said unlike American vodka drinkers, who often mix their vodka with fruit juice or a mixer, Russians traditionally drink their vodka neat and they eat dill pickles or pickled vegetables as they drink.
“What they do is they take the pickle in their hand, they drink the vodka and they have a bite of the pickle,” Helow said, “and if they don’t drink all of the vodka they hold on to the
pickle and have some more of the vodka.”
While the idea of drinking liquor and chomping on a pickle at the same time might seem odd, Helow said the Ivanabitch brand is becoming increasingly popular thanks to the pickle and the controversy it has created. He said every billboard company in North Florida has denied the company any advertisement space — not because of the brand’s edgy name, but because the pickle is too phallic of an image.
“Since when did the pickle become offensive?” Helow asked.
But, in actuality, Helow said he really likes the controversy because that is what he intended to create with the Ivanabitch name and the brand’s image.
“We have never been rejected by a bar,” he said. “The only trouble we are running into is some people have a problem with the pickle on the rim of the glass, but we kind of like that. It’s creating the controversy we are after.”
While many people think the name has something to do with Ivana Trump, ex-wife of New York developer Donald Trump, Helow said he came up with the Ivanabitch name one night during a dream. From there, he said the idea just took off.
Ivanabitch is billed as a “Russian born vodka distilled in Holland” because the vodka was distilled in Belarus until Vladimir Putin took office, Helow said. The company became worried that the state might take over control of the Russian distillery and cut off the supply, so they moved the operation to the Netherlands.
Ivanabitch has been around Florida for one year but the brand will soon be headed to two other states by the end of 2005, Helow said. Currently, Ivanabitch is being distributed in Texas and in March the brand will be distributed throughout Pennsylvania. Helow said it should be in New York state by next New Year’s.
As a long term goal, Helow said he is planning for the brand to be distributed in all of the major alcohol consuming states by 2006.