Vikram Achanta, CEO, Tullehho

Legend has it that Jack Daniel died from a blood infection. He had a chronic problem with remembering the combination of his safe, and once kicked it in frustration. Therein began an infection in one toe and one thing led to another. In bars across India (and around the world), you will find Jack Daniel promotions running; asking you to guess the combination of Jack’s safe and win prizes.

Most things about the eponymous founder of Jack Daniel (JD) remain shrouded in legend, including the date of his birth. When exactly he began JD is also not known.

The JD website mentions his year of birth as 1850 and the year of the distillery founding as 1866, which means he was a licensed distiller at the age of 16! Thank God he wasn’t born in Delhi, otherwise it would have taken him nine more years just to be able to reach the legal age to have a drink. Jack never married and took his nephew, Lem Motlow, under his wing so when Jack died of the aforementioned blood infection, Lem took over the business, and when the company was later incorporated, it was named, "Jack Daniel Distillery, Lem Motlow, Prop. Inc."

As a small entrepreneur myself, I am always in awe of entrepreneurs who have been able to build their business up from scratch, from generation to generation. The liquor industry, too, has spawned its fair share of entrepreneurs and given the nature of the business, there have been some fairly colourful characters. And they’ve occupied all segments of the business, from manufacturing to retailing.

If Jack Daniel’s is an example of someone who built a product (and a brand) from scratch, with the work furthered by subsequent generations, then Sidney Frank, who died only a couple of years ago is the perfect example of someone who created two modern day marketing miracles. Jagermeister was a small German herbal liqueur brand, which used to sell 500 cases a year when he began importing it into the US. Sidney turned that around through a series of brilliant marketing innovations—which made the drink into a must have fad—including creating a serving device that served it at 5 degrees F and introduced the Jagerettes, a bunch of sexy promoters who made the drink an essential in the college circuit.

The success of Jagermeister, however, paled beside the other brand, which Sidney

The most successful liquor entrepreneur in the world was a humble grocer in the town of Ayrshire

Frank was more known for building that gave him the sobriquet of the $2-billion-man. The brand was Grey Goose, which he reportedly sold to Bacardi Martini for $2.3 billion. Grey Goose was a little known French vodka, which Sidney brilliantly built up through pretty much single handedly creating a new category of super-premium vodka, which had existed till then, but in a more subdued manner. Sidney came and shook the market up, doing big bold advertising which touted that Grey Goose had been voted the best vodka in the world, based on a study by the then little known, Beverage Tasting Institute. He also made it a must have and seen brand in glamourous events in the US, even getting it into the limousines which transported the stars to Oscar night!

If Sidney Frank represents the new age of successful liquor entrepreneurship, then arguably the most successful liquor entrepreneur in the world was a humble grocer in the town of Ayrshire, who used to blend teas for his customers. From teas he moved to blending Scotch whiskies, and created what was first known as Walker’s Kilmarnock Whisky, as his name was John Walker. The creation of such iconic brands as Jack Daniel’s or Johnnie Walker shows that the work is barely done in the first generation. If it was John Walker who set the ball rolling, then it was his son Alexander and grandsons George and Alexander II who were responsible for popularising the brand. It was during the latter’s tenure that the brand was renamed as Johnnie Walker whisky.

The last entrepreneur on our list from the world of bars was an American gentleman called Victor Bergeron, who in 1936, opened his first restaurant, Hinky Dink’s, in Oakland, California, with a mix of Chinese and Tahitian dishes. In 1937, he went to the Caribbean. He changed his outlet’s name to Trader Vic’s with a menu featuring 35 different rums. Victor added to the mystique of the place with his peg-leg, people assumed that he had lost it during his daring trade dealings in the South Seas. The truth was that he lost one leg to polio when he was a child! One day, according to Vic in his autobiography, he sat down with his bartender to create a new cocktail and was about to taste it, when some of his old friends from Tahiti arrived. He asked them to taste the drink and one of them said, "‘It’s Mai Tai,’ ‘It’s Mai Tai roaae.’

"I asked what in the hell that meant and the friend said, ‘In Tahitian it means ‘out of this world,’ ‘the best.’ "That’s the name of this drink, then," Bergeron wrote. "It’s Mai Tai. It’s out of this world.