THE SYNAESTATE:
CAMPARI ACADEMY AT TALES OF THE COCKTAIL
Great cocktails ignite all the senses. And we achieve them through flavour. Flavour is so much more than what hits the tongue: our memories, our history, our environment, and even the conversation we’re having affect flavour. Flavour is everything, everywhere, all at once. So how do we share it?
For the famed Campari Academy’s experiential presence at Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans, we took over the Virgin Hotel and developed the concept of Synesthesia, where stimulus of one sense triggers a reaction in another, to bring flavour’s wide ranging nature to life.
Welcome to the Synaestate—a multi-sensory learning space that explores how flavour works in every direction. A space that’s part Dali painting, part science lab. Where sight affects your smell. Where you taste the music. In this highly immersive space, we’re about to go deep and get wide on flavour. The experience, which took over two floors of common space and saw over 300 visitors in 4 hours, included a signature cocktail program developed with their world class bartenders, a hands-on experimentation lab where bartenders could try out techniques using the latest mixology chemistry tools, a “sensploration” experience developed in partnership with Oxford professor Charles Spence, and an art installation that used changing light and color to reveal the story of three Campari Classic cocktails. This ultra-immersive experience was the most attended and talked about event at Tales of the Cocktail, and one to be not just remembered, but savored for years to come.
