One of the upsides of talking about Mongolia all of the time is that your true friends will get the hint and start bringing you Mongolian stuff. So NJ Kpopper recently had the pleasure of sampling Golia vodka, a very smooth, premium drink, tasting as good as its marketing description telling of sextuple filtration and water from pristine mountain lakes. [Note this is not a PP - product placement!]
A bit of Googling goes a loooong way for the curious, so it was soon revealed that the presence of this vodka in the US was the product of a plutocratic romance. According to an interview with the owner/distributor...
"It starts like this — my good friend was working in Hong Kong as a
trader, and he decided to take a junket to Mongolia. He went up on a
tour and fell in love with his tour guide, who happened to be the
Mongolian government administrator’s daughter. They got married, and
like 12 years and two kids later, he ends up owning half the country."
So, is this a cute story, or by consuming this vodka am I contributing to the wealth of a second Gulnara Karimova (Googoosha)? The tale is a bit ominous, I am afraid. So perhaps commenters will enlighten us and inform us if this tasty drink should be set aside for ethical reasons. If falling in love leads to business success, is that an automatic indictment for insincerity? Can't always be so, can it?
No comments:
Post a Comment