‘Water flows uphill towards money’.  ~Anonymous, saying in the American West, quoted by Ivan Doig in Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert, 1986

In most Turkish eateries when you sit down at the table there is a nice full jug of water and at least two glasses waiting for you. İn village homes two glasses are often used for everyone to drink from, not exactly hygienic but certainly environmentally friendly as there is that much less detergent and hot water needed for washing up. Both locations have something in common – the water will be tap water. However there’s tap water and then there’s tap water. Certainly in Istanbul I would be wary of the faucet stuff but here in Dalyan I feel safer. İn Çandır village the water is actually unfiltered spring water, when it comes out of the tap it is opaque with some sort of sediment which then does a magician’s disappearing trick and evaporates away into transparency. I love it but it brings Sez (who was born and brought up on the stuff) out in a rash!

On our recent trip to Istanbul we were amused by my cousin’s tales of derring-do as to how he had managed to abscond with one of Claridge’s water menus stuffed under his jacket. His friend, he explained, collects menus and as there are only four Claridge’s water menus in the world this would be a real boon to his collection. I marvelled even further when I opened up this holy grail of the world’s water at the amazing inventiveness of the Claridge’s people in coming up with the notion of a water menu and then at the hyperbole and imagination used to describe the varieties of H2O available. 

In small print at the top of the menu they claim to have ‘thoroughly researched the water market’ and to offer ‘a confident choice of over thirty of the best bottled waters in the world’. What hokum! It’s not hard to infer that someone on their Mayfair PR team cottoned on to the fact that there’s a huge amount of money to be made from our ‘gourmand’ palates and aspirational desires. The hotel claims that the menu is a ‘service for our guests’, how much service is involved in charging a punter £15 for 50cl of Berg water?

Berg has the distinction of being the most expensive water on their list, why? Well apparently it’s ‘unique’, it began it’s life 15,000 years ago in ‘ancient glaciers’, it’s in a location ‘totally inaccessible to man’ and one can only ‘harvest’ it when a large piece of ice breaks into the sea. According to Claridges it has a clean, light, pure taste. At £30 p/litre it better have, in fact I would expect it to taste like nymphs stroking your taste buds with golden feathers. Don’t the Claridges people have any sense of irony? The earth passed has passed through at least four major ice ages, the most severe of which was about 850 million years ago. İt produced a snowball earth and all the water was frozen. Perhaps they could add to the Berg description ‘originally frozen in the Cryogenian period’. The amount of water atoms in the world is the same as it was a million years ago so all water can ultimately claim a pedigree ancestry.

The fallacy behind the menu, that bottled water tastes ‘better’ than tap water was revealed last month when Decanter magazine invited Anthony Rose, the wine correspondent for the Independent, sommeliers from top London restaurants Zuma and Chez Bruce and three writers from their own magazine to a blind taste test. Twenty three commercially-produced mineral waters were pitched against Thames Water's tap water. Guess where Thames Water came? Third best on the list. Guess where 420 Volcanic (from Claridges £25.60 a litre) came? Eighteenth. So much for the ‘pleasant smooth sensation on the palate’ that the menu boasts. How much does Thames Water cost? A tenth of a penny per litre making it thousands of times cheaper than the most expensive bottled brands. Thames Water are quietly proud, their Water Services director said; ‘İt’s nice to see that these experts recognise what a fantastic product we serve’. A fool and his money are easily parted never seemed truer.

Coca Cola were roundly abused in 2004 when they bottled tap water from their Sidcup factory, relabelled it Dasani and stuck it on the supermarket shelves. We know now that although the claims that it was ‘pure’ may have been exaggerated but at least they did enough research into ‘the water market’ to realise what tasted best and what would make them the most money. It almost goes without saying that tap water is given only one line in the Claridges menu, in small print it says; ‘There is one further choice, not listed, which is a glass or jug of London Tap Water. This water is free of charge’.