At Berlin’s Michelin-starred First Floor restaurant in Berlin they have a water menu with 40 different selections and a water sommelier to guide diners who find it important to know which type of water would go well with an acidic Riesling.

But the highlight for me of the report on the posh water phenomenon is this description in the German magazine Der Spiegel of a gourmet spring water, whose label claims that it has been “bio-energetically charged.”

His name is Markus Stegmaier, and he is the CEO of a company called Q-Aqua. He asserts that water has “memory” and that the memory of the water that he sells is loaded with what he calls bio-energetic vibrations. “Information” is gathered from healing crystals, gemstones and medicinal herbs and is captured by something — he won’t say what exactly, or how it works. The captured frequencies are then transferred into the water, he explains, adding that the water is also cleansed of negativity and then has its positivity enhanced. Lavender, myrrh, jade, smoky quartz and many other essences make for water that is calming, while club moss, ginseng, malachite and other things create vitalizing water.

How does all of this work? Does it all go into one big tank?

No, Stegmaier answers. “These vibrations all pass through the bottle, through the glass,” he says. Some people in the audience begin to mutter quietly when they hear this, but Stegmaier is not deterred. “It’s just like what happens with a cell phone — the radiation passes through the walls,” he says. “After all, you can make calls in closed rooms.”