Bottled Still and Sparkling Water

The average human is about 58% water. An apple is about 85%, or at least according to my daughter’s team experiment that won a prize at a recent science contest. Do you pay attention to the water you are drinking? Personally, I have poor water taste buds. I can only discern outrageously flat, highly chlorinated or dishwashing liquid residue in my water while others can sniff remnants of some hapless and unfortunate person who got sucked into the Balara water system (true story) and ended up in people’s baths. He may not have been present for his own wake but at least he touched a lot of people…

In our house, my wife is the water expert. God forbid there should be some lingering odor from the plastic bottle it was packaged in or some inordinately high content of sodium, magnesium, potassium or other offensive mineral. I believe her when she says she can taste different waters blindfolded and find her favorite Volvic. I can do a similar test and find my must-have Charmin toilet paper (I did this once at the end of a dinner party much to our guests’ amazement)… Since my wife spent quite a bit of time in France, living it up on Badoit, Vittel, Perrier, Volvic, etc., she has to be considered the resident expert.

For many years, dinner conversation sometimes drifted to our favorite waters and here is our two cents worth. In the still water category she believes Volvic wins hands down. It is clean, clear and does not have a whole lot of “mineral” taste. It tastes like water should taste, she says with conviction. Bottled at the source in Auvergne, France, the water is filtered through eons worth of volcanic rock and is tested to have a “perfect” balance with a pH of 7, or so their bottle boasts. She likes it better than the more well-known Evian because of the latter’s slight aftertaste. In the sparkling water category I prefer San Pellegrino and it pairs very well with the Italian food I like to cook. It has the right level of carbonation and for me, a nice mineral taste. Sourced in the Italian Alps, the water also boasts purity and balance. The company also has a still water offering called Panna from a spring in the hills of Tuscany. I like it because of the bottle, so there. The same applies to the nice blue Badoit bottles which are not available here. Since we can’t really afford the luxury of Volvic all of the time, at home we use Viva in five gallon plastic containers that are conveniently delivered every week.

And just in case you think we are semi-lunatic like, I recently bought a copy of Saveur where they rated all the best bottled and tap waters in the world and guess which one came out on top – Volvic, of course.