As the planet thirsts, the rise of ‘luxury water’ for the privileged

Monsoon rains have finally passed and floods blocking the lone dirt road have retreated enough for a small truck to climb these Himalayan foothills to a gurgling spring. It spews water so fresh that people here call it nectar.

Workers inside a small plant ferry sleek glass bottles along a conveyer belt. The bottles, filled with a whoosh of this natural mineral water, are labeled, packed into cases, and placed inside a truck for a long ride.

Ganesh Iyer, who heads the operation, watches like a nervous dad, later pulling out his phone, as any proud parent might, to show the underground cavern the waters have formed in this pristine kingdom, the world’s last Shangri-La.

This is no ordinary water. It will travel hundreds of miles to some of India’s luxury hotels, restaurants, and richest families, who pay about $6 per bottle, roughly a day’s wage for an Indian laborer. Millions of people worldwide don’t have clean water to drink, even though the United Nations deemed water a basic human right more than a decade ago.

Yet, even as extreme heat dries up more aquifers and wells and leaves more people thirsty, luxury water has become fashionable among the world’s privileged, who uncap and taste it like fine wine.

This “fine water” is drawn from volcanic rock in Hawaii, from icebergs that have fallen from melting glaciers in Norway, or from droplets of morning mist in Tasmania.

Connoisseurs, some who study to become water sommeliers, insist this trend isn’t about snobbishness. They appreciate the purest of the pure.

“Water is not just water,” says Michael Mascha, a founder of the Fine Water Society, a consortium of small bottlers and distributors worldwide. He likens consumers of high-end water to foodies who’d drive miles to find heirloom tomatoes or a rare salt. Some drink fine water instead of alcohol.

“Having the right stemware, drinking at the right temperature, pairing it with food, celebrating with water – all those kinds of things are important.”

As a truck rolls out of the Bhutanese bottling plant, operated by Veen Waters India, the 40-some line workers take a tea break along a short row of employee housing. They check their mobile phones and chat, while birds chirp in the background. Laundry hung out to dry flaps in a subtle breeze. It’s a steamy day, even at this higher elevation.

Up a hillside behind them is a mineral spring, once a source of fresh water for nearby villagers, who used bamboo rods as pipes to help funnel some of the steadily flowing clear current into buckets they carried home. Now that source, which Veen purchased from the previous owner more than a decade ago, is kept behind a locked gate for safekeeping.

Veen’s business slowed to a trickle during the pandemic, says Mr. Iyer, Veen’s managing partner. But now the company is exporting about 20,000 cases – or 240,000 bottles – of the water into India each month, minus the occasional few that break on their bumpy multiple-day trek. He figures they’ve tapped only about 10% of the potential market so far.

After crossing into India, the trucks carrying the bottled water run through lush green Darjeeling tea plantations, past road signs marking elephant crossings, and the occasional cluster of teenage boys cooling off in a rain catchment next to rural villages dotted with banana trees.

Eventually, the cases are delivered to luxury hotels and restaurants many hundreds of miles away in cities like New Delhi, Pune, and Mumbai, where Veen is headquartered.

A few wealthy families get weekly shipments. Mr. Iyer jokes that the richest of the rich buy so much that they “probably bathe in it.”

Market reports predict even greater demand for premium water worldwide in years to come. In India – now the most populous country in the world, with a rising standard of living and growing concerns about water quality – Veen is poised to help satisfy that demand.

For many Indians, however, the story of water is very different, including in Mumbai’s Dharavi neighborhood, one of Asia’s largest slums, jammed with working families.

There, water arrives in municipal pipelines just once a day, from about 6 to 9 a.m., setting off a flurry of activity as the day’s crushing heat arrives in spring and summer.

Veen is far from the most expensive in the fine water category. The rarest of all, often bottled in collectable glass, sell for hundreds of dollars apiece.

A few restaurants in countries such as Spain and the United States now have menus that pair food with particular types of fine water. A bolder mineral water, for instance, might be suggested as a companion for a charbroiled steak. More subtle rainwater might be paired with fish.

Without its opulent packaging, the average consumer might fail to taste the difference in these waters. Even sommeliers say it can take months of practice to determine the subtleties.

Water sold in clear plastic bottles that are ubiquitous the world over is often simply filtered municipal water that’s distilled and bottled from any number of sources. In many instances, Mr. Mascha says, a water filter on your tap would produce the same result, with far less impact on the environment.

This story was reported by The Associated Press. Rajanish Kakade in Mumbai, India; and Sheikh Saaliq in New Delhi contributed to this report.