Making 'Game of Thrones' Booze Is a Game of 'Cat-and-Mouse'
The penultimate season of Game of Thrones opened with a vicious mass murder. Walder Frey gathers his sons and soldiers to celebrate the evil that was the Red Wedding, distributing brimming glasses of wine to the men-“No more of the Dornish horse piss, this is the finest Arbor gold!” They raise their glasses in the air and guzzle as one, and then, also as one, they begin to choke and sputter and collapse until Walder is the last man left standing. Only it’s Arya Stark wearing his skinned face, which she took from him after slitting the old bastard's throat. Vengeance for House Stark, at last.
And while we smugly watched the Frey family get theirs via goblets of tainted red, Bob Cabral, a renowned winemaker who partnered with HBO to create the official Game of Thrones varietals, thought, “Shit. That’s gonna kill wine sales.”
It didn’t.
Cabral, working with Vintage Wine Estates on the West Coast, is one of a few alcohol experts HBO tapped to make exclusive beverages for Game of Thrones, alongside Brewery Ommegang in upstate New York and international spirits giant Diageo, whose portfolio includes a string of whisky distilleries across Scotland. These partnerships have produced four wines, 14 beers, and eight single malt scotches (nine scotches if you count Diageo’s special “White Walker” bottle of Johnnie Walker). They’ve quenched a ravenous thirst for Game of Thrones merch that’s also inspired GoT Adidas Ultra Boosts, GoT Oreos, GoT Mountain Dew, and countless others. But where sneakers, cookies, and the Dew don’t exactly tie into Westerosi life-although, if the Night King copped a pair of Ultras and crushed a can of green soda before taking the Throne, we wouldn’t complain-alcoholic beverages are a constant presence on the show. Even in cases of cold-blooded killing.
It took skill from the beverage makers to make these collaborations work. But more than anything, their success came from tapping the power of highly passionate nerds who love to consume good alcohol.
An obnoxiously popular television show-nay, cultural phenomenon-like Game of Thrones could take the easy way out when licensing its name to consumer products: Slap a branded label on the package in that iconic GoT font, create a quirky marketing ploy, ship it to eager fans, and move on. That’s what HBO did with Oreos, and many more of the over 200 licensees it worked with for Game of Thrones. Or, it could develop a spiritual connection between show and product, and then geek out on it, hardcore.
HBO found its brewing spiritual match in Brewery Ommegang, which prioritizes quality, Belgian-style craft brewing with an old-school European aesthetic. Ommegang chose to represent Game of Thrones’ many, many characters-and a certain, all-important seating apparatus-with its beer. In 2013, Ommegang and HBO released their first collaboration: Iron Throne, a blonde ale. From then on, they fell into a pattern of launching one beer to anticipate the upcoming season and a second when the holidays rolled around, with names like "Take the Black Stout" and "Fire and Blood Red Ale." Now Ommegang is on its fourteenth brew, called For the Throne, a golden ale co-fermented with pinot grigio and viognier grape juices then bottle conditioned with champagne yeast.
“For the Throne was brewed specifically to be the beer that would sit alongside you, whoever you might be, in the Iron Throne when all the dust settles,” says Doug Campbell, president of Brewery Ommegang, who joined the team in 2016. “We really wanted this to be the beer for the victor”-or for the fans to drink to celebrate the victor finally clawing his or her (hopefully her) way to the finale. Ommegang started developing its co-fermenting process with wine juices in the six years since it started working with HBO, and although co-fermenting is primarily reserved for non-GoT products, the wine element makes it keenly fit for Westeros.
It’s not just a fermentation method that has evolved. When Ommegang started on Iron Throne, Robb Stark hadn’t been crossbowed, Stannis Baratheon hadn’t been chopped, and Joffrey Lannister hadn’t been poisoned. Cersei had long hair. There were plenty of books yet to guide the creation process, and the brewery team could more or less predict which characters would be important enough in the upcoming season to dedicate a beer to them.
But the literature ran dry in 2016 heading into Season 6. There was no knowing which characters HBO, sans George R.R. Martin’s guidance, might kill off, making any beer named for them a gigantic waste. In recent years, Campbell says his team has been in a “game of cat-and-mouse” with HBO: The brewers will devour the show and read the blogs to get an idea of who or what might be relevant. They could be dead wrong. “And [HBO] will gently, with a smirk, steer us in certain directions instead of others,” Campbell says. “Then our heads are reeling for a week, trying to figure out why they tried to steer us away.”
“Cat-and-mouse is probably a good way to put it," says HBO's VP of licensing and retail Jeff Peters. "They’ll ask us questions-what about this, what about that-and then we have to decide: How do we answer, and if we do, is it going to tip anyone off?” No matter what, HBO won't break its one rule: Share no secrets with any of its licensing partners, ever.
Unlike brewing a normal, non-GoT beer, where you might start with a sour culture or regional ingredient and work up to a proper brew from there, Ommegang’s creation process starts with a bunch of brewers sitting around a room, trying to connect beer to a fictitious character whose upcoming season is a mysterious tangle of unknowns. For example, this is how Ommegang would brainstorm a beer for Jaime Lannister, Campbell’s favorite character who hasn’t yet been honored with his own brew: “He's playing for the team that nobody really likes, and he's done some dastardly stuff. So think of a beer that, on the surface, is something you look at and you're not sure you're gonna like, but then underneath it, there's a certain goodness that you can't ignore,” says Campbell. “And sometimes I'll get brewers looking at me funny, like, ‘That is way too heavy a description for a beer.’” (The Jaime brew is hypothetical, of course. God knows what horrors are in store for Season 8 that might cut that goodness right out of him.)
In the end, the beer will be spoiler-free homage to a character or otherwise significant GoT reference, like Daenerys’s beer, called Mother of Dragons, which was a smoked porter blended with a reddish Belgian kriek-red like fire.
Scotch is about land as much as the power struggles Game of Thrones depicts are, and that’s where Diageo found its sweet spot.
In the Seven Kingdoms, the Starks and the Night’s Watch keep peace to the North, the Tyrells sit overlooking the region in Highgarden, the Lannisters’ family home is along the coastline on Casterly Rock, and so on. “If you look at Scotland, it's a little bit like the Seven Kingdoms in the show,” says Ewan Morgan, Diageo’s National Master of Whisky, who worked closely on the HBO project. “It has such a diverse landscape, and every region has its own identity and looks like that region as well. You have the Speyside region, which is lowland and floral and has a lot of lighter whiskies. The Highland region, which is quite mountainous, those whiskies are a little dense, a little heavier on the palate. You have what we call Maritime whiskies, and those are distilleries that sit on the coastline.”
It was Diageo’s task to pair eight of its 29 whisky distilleries with seven Westerosi Houses, plus the Night’s Watch on the Wall. But more than mixing and matching random scotches with house sigils, Morgan and his team were given leeway to create what he calls a wish list of complex single malts never before bottled by the distilleries-with ambitious details about ages, barrel types, and cask finishes-to be sent to the Diageo blending team in Scotland, who made it happen (or told Morgan no, keep dreaming).
“I'm not saying that I was solipsistic in my choices, just because I wanted these whiskies for my own personal collection, but there are distilleries out there that I have a real soft spot for, because they are so unique and many people have never heard of them,” says Morgan. “Royal Lochnagar is an example. Clynelish is another distillery that many people haven't heard of. It's in the far north of Scotland, and it produces a very, very unique, waxy, citrusy, soft style of whisky.”
Along the way, a Diageo historian and her archive team well-versed in the history of scotch cross-referenced Thrones with the distilleries to find connections within their respective backgrounds. Cardhu was founded in the 1820s by a firebrand Scot named Helen Cumming, who passed it along to her daughter after her, and so the obvious choice was to pair it with House Targaryen. Oban is backed by a cliff face that curves around the town; no distillery could have better suited the Night’s Watch hunkered down in Castle Black. A Lagavulin 9 Year Old was paired with House Lannister, a Royal Lochnagar 12 Year Old with House Baratheon, a Clynelish Reserve with House Tyrell. It turned out the land stretching from sun to snow in Westeros yielded surprisingly deep connections to Diageo’s scotch.
HBO looked for a vintner to mine those same connections and found him in Cabral, who first considered where in Westeros the kings and queens might drink his wines.
“As you go North, I think of heartier, meatier wines that don’t have as much fruit but still represent those varietals that I use to blend into them,” he explains. “As you get back down towards the middle kingdoms, it gets much warmer. I thought of fruitier, softer wines, more approachable wines.”
From the portfolio, the Chardonnay and the newer Pinot Noir represent southern Westeros, while the Cabernet Sauvignon is a more “serious” Napa varietal at a higher price point, and the Red Blend is dry and robust, meant for serving at feasts. All four are accessible, be you a Cersei-level wine snob or a poor sod guzzling vino in a brothel.
“The whole idea behind the wine project was to make sure that people that were watching the show could have something that could be shared. They could be enjoyed,” says Cabral. “I wanted to make wines that were very approachable, wines that maybe the average wine person wouldn't necessarily go out and buy, but might give this a try.”
He did not want to make wine that fudged on quality. (And, for what it’s worth, he did not want to make wine that aided in a homicidal poisoning spree.) Really, he just wanted to make wine for fans to sip on the couch as treachery and betrayal played out on the television screen. “I think that’s what will keep you successful in any craft, whether it’s music or film, television, wine, food: Over-deliver to a consumer, and they’ll keep coming back,” Cabral says.
HBO approached Ommegang, Diageo, and Cabral in service of the fans as well, to link the fictitious world of Game of Thrones with real life through good beer, wine, and spirit.
“The show is a grown-up show. It has grown-up themes and a grown-up storyline, and so an adult product made sense to us," Peters of HBO says. "We’re trying to make things that feel like they’re of a piece with the show itself."
Before the first episodes of the final season were rattling around in our brains, Cabral had released his fourth wine, the Pinot Noir, Diageo had released all eight single malts (and White Walker), and Ommegang had put out its fourteenth ale. All the business were stocked with Game of Thrones nerds, and they made their Game of Thrones products to show off their best work-co-fermentation, unique single malts, robust reds-to an international fanbase HBO delivered to their doorsteps.
And fans shelled out the money, "vastly surpassing" HBO's expectations in terms of sales, Peters says.
Campbell says on launch days, the brewery itself is mobbed with that ardent crossbreed of “beer geekiness” and rampant Game of Thrones geekiness. Rarely does Ommegang piss any of its fans off by misinterpreting a character or botching a beer style. More often, Campbell says, they get a wink at the smoky kriek in Dany’s beer or a nod at the fancy wine juices used in For the Throne.
Morgan was up against experienced Scotch drinkers who were also GoT fanatics, a formidable bunch, especially online. “When you have such passion, you also sometimes have conversations, sometimes heated conversations, because people are so in love with both things,” he says. “For the most part, the feedback that we've seen and gotten from folks live has been incredible. But, obviously, if you're gonna go into the depths of the internet, the Reddit, and subreddit, then you're gonna get some fairly heated discourse. People thought that they could have picked better houses, or people thought that they could have picked better whiskies.”
Apart from the quibbling, these collaborations give fans a reasonably priced bottle to anxiously clutch through five more Sunday nights to come, as the death toll rises and universal favorites are mercilessly dispatched. None of the producers will dish out hard figures, but Vintage Wine Estates points out that the Pinot Noir and Cab are sold out on the official website (you can find them elsewhere), and Ommegang says about 10-15 percent of its yearly volume is Game of Thrones-related, with last year's Royal Reserve Collection pulling in the biggest numbers. Morgan says the single malts sold "extremely quickly" (and Diageo disclosed that Johnnie Walker saw a 9 percent uptick in 2018 net sales, largely driven by White Walker). That’s not to mention the prequels, spin-offs, and sequels in the works. It's a business that stands to keep on giving.
“That’s what keeps us going in this industry, the support from the folks who actually drink it and love the product and love the show,” says Morgan.
By all counts, HBO was a good partner, but a frustratingly tight-lipped one, dispensing no spoilers, not even for a bottle of booze. Don’t even ask. “I’ve got people that have been trying to bribe me with money. HBO hasn't said a thing,” Cabral says. Morgan tried to squeeze a few secrets from HBO-“Wouldn’t you? No, it did not work, not one iota,” he admits-and Campbell didn’t even bother pestering for hints so as to preserve the sanctity of the watching experience.
We’ll know how it all ends soon enough, for better but probably for worse. In the meantime, Morgan says Diageo still has a little liquid to bottle up and ship to the States. He’s coy about whether more scotch will come out of this Game of Thrones partnership: “I’m gonna be as tight-lipped as our friends at HBO were with me when I tried to get some juice. All I would say is, keep your eyes and ears open, because you never know.” Brewery Ommegang, too, is mum on whether more beers will join the line before the year is up, but Campbell says they’d love to keep going for as long as they can. Cabral says that as long as sales continue and HBO stays interested, he and Vintage Wine Estates will keep producing newer vintages of each GoT wine, “I think until somebody says, ‘Uncle. Quit.’”
As for this cultural phenomenon's finale, Campbell wonders if George R.R. Martin would’ve written the ending so “the zombies win and everybody dies.” Ommegang already made a "Winter is Here" ale with the Night King emblazoned on the label, but an “in memoriam” brew for beloved (and beheaded) Ned Stark might be nice. Morgan has no idea how it will end, but predicts there will be “quite a lot of bloodshed.” Cabral’s simply preparing to be shocked. But he hopes Dany survives. She’s his favorite character for her cunning and her ruthlessness, and he wants her to survive to sit on the Iron Throne.
"I'm hoping she gets another show," he says, "and I can make some more wine for her new kingdom."
HBO just says, "No comment."
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