New York, 2003. I am standing at a midtown Manhattan bar with polished chrome, low lighting, lots of black and Moby on the stereo. I am waiting for somebody ridiculously moneyed to arrive, but they have forgotten the rules of Manhattan punctuality, so I order a vodka and Coke. A sniffy bartender in a waistcoat-and-dicky-bow ensemble says: “Excuse me?” So I repeat my order, and he launches into a list of the prestige vodkas I might like to choose from. This is my initiation into the rituals of “brand calling”. In America, it is no longer enough to ask for the drink itself – you must specify the brand or risk a withering social death.

London, 2007. I am standing at the bar in Shoreditch House, the capital’s razziest private members’ club. I ask for a vodka and Coke. This being Britain, there is none of the overt sneering that might accompany a simple bar order in the States, but there is a slight arch of the eyebrow. I recognise the intent behind the look. “Scrap that,” I say. “I’ll have a Zubrowka and apple juice.” There are smiles all round. Even a little nod of approval from someone next to me at the bar.

Brand calling is beginning its ascent into mainstream British bar culture. Jonathan Downey, owner of the the London members’ den Milk & Honey and the Match Bar group, says: “There has been a big rise in it in the past couple of years. It’s probably 10% of people ordering at bars here now, compared with 5% that did it before.” Not that this figure is anything like high enough for the drinks conglomerates, which are hoping the practice will become as common as the name-checking of handbags. If your tote says something about the rarefied social stratum in which you exist – or at least aspire to – then why shouldn’t your drink, too?

GET IN THE HABIT

“Prestige”, “luxury” and “super-premium” are the new buzz words in the spirits world (Ultimat, a vodka that sells for about £200 a bottle in bars, has trumped the competition with the tag “ultra-premium”). Compounding the handbag analogy, Belvedere vodka is owned by LVMH, the luxury-goods group that also owns Louis Vuitton and Dior.

The drinks companies are directing giddy levels of marketing at germinating the brand-calling habit. Stolichnaya vodka recently flew a Russian choir to London to entertain a party of upper-end social revellers, and its new venture at Harvey Nichols’s Fifth Floor Bar in London will mix a bottle of custom-flavoured vodka for your exclusive use. Last year, Sagatiba, a brand of the Brazilian spirit cachaca, used in the popular caipirinha cocktail, took 150 “tastemakers” on a private jet from London for a party at Pierre Cardin’s villa in the mountains above Cannes during the film festival. Even Beefeater gin, a label you might once have expected to find tucked away in granny’s drinks cabinet, has reportedly stumped up a six-figure sponsorship for Jade Jagger’s Jezebel group to try to tap into her exclusive Ibiza set. There is talk of a brand called Ibizeater, which deserves points for humour, if nothing else.

SOCIETY BACK-SCRATCHING

No brand is more hellbent on cornering the super-premium market than Grey Goose vodka, which has upped the stakes with a profile-raising initiative of dizzying ambition. In the autumn, the brand will auction five bars in aid of the Elton John Aids Foundation. They have been designed by the artists Sam Taylor-Wood and Dinos Chapman, Burberry’s creative director, Christopher Bailey, Elizabeth Hurley and David Furnish, Elton’s partner.

At a party presided over by Furnish at a stately home last month, each of the five sat down with a sketch artist and cocktail mixologist to turn their ideas into reality. The glamour of it all seeped out to the grounds as a gentle cocktail party and dinner rolled into the early hours. The society back-scratching played out at a poolside bar (where Taylor-Wood showed a brilliant way with a dirty martini) and in a spectacular dining room. When the guests retired to the drawing room for a round of karaoke, Taylor-Wood and Furnish proved particularly willing participants.

One of the guest designers intimated, off the record, that they wouldn’t be doing it were it not for the charity angle. But the event was a win-win situation all round. Grey Goose representatives were tirelessly on point with their marketing spiel, stopping just short of interrupting the merriment. Sophie Bowers, the brand’s marketing controller, points out that Grey Goose has a long-standing relationship with the Aids Foundation. It is the vodka served at the foundation’s vaunted White Tie & Tiara Ball, which cleared £6m this year.

When the bar auction takes place in October, acres of coverage will be guaranteed by Liz Hurley’s décolletage and the Elton stamp of drama and glitz, via his civil partner. The edgier angle will be provided by Chapman and Taylor-Wood, while Bailey’s presence will satiate the fashion crowd.

So is brand calling the new way of separating the consumer wheat from the chaff? The idea that vodka is the new handbag clearly appeals to Bowers. “What prestige spirit you drink can define who you are, as can an Hermès Kelly bag,” she says. “However, people tend to be loyal to their chosen drinks brand, unlike the more fickle fashion world, where consumers are encouraged to ditch last season’s handbag for the latest look or version.”

A FEATURE OF THE AGE

Downey is more circumspect. “This is about buying status,” he says, “which you can’t really divorce from Wag culture. Out bar culture is different from that in the States. The reason brand calling is so popular there is that the house spirits are deepest production-line rubbish. In Britain, even if you drink in one of the high-street bar chains, you’ll get a decent house vodka and tonic.”

Downey’s choice of house vodka is Wyborowa, an inexpensive “but excellent” brand from Poland. Even Wyborowa has entered the premium fray with its Single Estate brand, which comes in a bottle designed by (gulp) Frank Gehry. “I’m more impressed if someone downscales on their vodka than just goes for the most expensive, to be honest,” Downey says, “but if somebody wants to buy an expensive vodka to feel good about themselves, in the same way they would buy a perfume or a Marc Jacobs handbag, then so be it.” Ultimately, “buying status”, as Downey calls it, is a defining feature of the age.

As for the cost of all this to the drinks companies, status acquisition doesn’t come cheap. I ask Bowers how much the Aids Foundation bar auction will cost Grey Goose. “I’m not prepared to say. Sorry.”

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