Magnum Tonic Wine

The only drink here that was designed, from the first meeting, to be the drink of the dancehall.

In 1998 Lascelles deMercado wanted a "front end lifter" to compete with Red Label Wine, and asked a twenty-year-old for ideas. Carrie "Quizz" Sigurdson gave them the name — borrowed from a wine-like aphrodisiac sold by a Rasta stall man across from her high school — and the brief that mattered: take the dancehall from Guinness. She specified the bright red and yellow that would stand out from every bottle on the shelf, adapted a Keith Haring-esque painting of a blue man and a red woman entwined into the label art, and wrote, recorded, produced and directed a full-length dancehall record for the brand. It launched in July 1999 at a nightclub, with her performing the theme song.

It worked, and it kept working: fortified, ginseng-bearing, sold on energy and libido, Magnum became a fixture of Jamaican nightlife and then of the diaspora and West Africa. Lascelles was acquired by Gruppo Campari in 2012, and Magnum is now second only to White Overproof rum among that company's Jamaican exports.