At first the press releases were mostly trolling, but over the months they escalated to include elaborate fabrications. In one, ArKay claims to have reached a deal to acquire Seedlip and Ritual. A Diageo spokesperson says the company “never considered selling Seedlip, nor a stake in Ritual, to ArKay.”
“It’s like me putting out a press release saying I’ve joined the Beatles and taking credit for ‘Hey Jude,'” says Ritual co-founder Marcus Saki. “That doesn’t mean I can sing.”
In September 2021 another press release confusingly announced that Kentucky 74 was launching a new product called ArKay. In it, Kentucky 74’s official business website was listed as Kentucky74.com – the fraudulent domain Spiritless discovered the previous year. A subsequent press release said ArKay had taken “full control” of Kentucky 74. Grattagliano says it holds the trademark for Kentucky 74; records show he appears to have successfully registered it in Mexico in 2021, more than a year after Spiritless launched the product. Spiritless, meanwhile, holds the Kentucky 74 trademark in Canada and international markets. The United States Patent and Trademark Office listed applications from both as “pending” as of late February 2022.
“The moment it made an impression on me was when someone sent me [release] that were syndicated on Yahoo,” says Larsen, one of the co-founders of Spiritless. “I thought, ‘What the hell, why is this guy talking about us?’
Around the same time, another press release announced the launch of NOLOalcohol, a new e-commerce marketplace for soft drinks. It is supposed to have been founded by Sylvie Gratagliano, Reynald’s wife. (He says the couple is in the process of divorcing.)
The now-defunct site featured products from a number of brands, but if you try to add any of them to your cart, it’ll say they’re out of stock — and invite you to try one from ArKay instead. Lancaster says that as the campaign ramped up, she and her co-founders heard from several customers who thought they had bought Kentucky 74 but never received anything or received bottles that didn’t look right.
A week after NOLOalcohol launched, Grattagliano announced that a nonprofit he founded called the American Alcohol Free Spirits Association would begin “holding brands accountable” for introducing soft drinks that actually contain little alcohol. (Many of these brands contain 0.5 percent alcohol by volume or less, rather than literally no alcohol; the Food and Drug Administration considers this “trace” and considers them soft drinks.) AAFSA soon announced an investigation into Ritual Zero Proof and Seedlip, the latter of whom he accused of “INTRODUCING REYNALD GRATALIANO AND STEALING HIS IDEA.” Branson says he did not impersonate Gratagliano, nor did he steal his idea.
The AAFSA website currently lists Reyland Grattagliano as its sole founder. One of its only members appears to be an e-commerce site called Drinksalikes.com, which sells fake versions of Kentucky 74, ArKay, Seedlip and Ritual Zero Proof, with each product page claiming to be “not affiliated in any way” with none of the brands. The About page for Drinksalike.com includes a product photo of ArKay’s alcohol-free vodka and says, “Arkay started in our kitchen lab over a decade ago.” Grattagliano acknowledged that the site is his project, but says, “We’re not promoting it right now.”
Grattagliano may have coined the AAFSA concept from his own experience. In 2019 A trade group called the Scotch Whiskey Association said it was investigating ArKay over how the company labeled its non-alcoholic version of the whisky, arguing it could mislead consumers and damage the category’s reputation. ArKay later said it changed its product descriptions to emphasize that they were not actually made with the help of alcohol.
