While I’m not a vodka drinker by habit, I harbor one strong opinion about it: The only truly cool way to drink vodka is as the Eastern Europeans do, ice cold and straight up. I came by this opinion at age ten, when I developed much of my other drinking wisdom, by devouring Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.
Bond’s dinner with M at Blades in Moonraker is the literary scene that most profoundly influenced my early gastronomic tendencies (it also features Champagne and marrow bones). It begins with M ordering Bond a rare vodka, noting that it was “not the stuff you had in your cocktail. This is real pre-war Wolfschmidt from Riga. Like some with your smoked salmon?” (Bond then drops a pinch of black pepper into his glass, a habit he’d developed when drinking bathtub liquor in Russia. The pepper, he explains, “takes the fusel oil to the bottom. I got to like the taste and now it’s a habit. But I shouldn’t have insulted the club Wolfschmidt.”
That Bond and M discussed it with connoisseurship conferred a certain glamour on vodka for me, much as Fleming coaxed glamour out of the Cold War. Treated as little more than a blank canvas in the States, vodka took on its own exotic, desolate allure behind the Iron Curtain. Drinking was not a game, but a necessity, a shot of ice-cold vodka transmitting that grim, end-of-the-world Cold War sensibility. Vodka may have no flavor or color; neither does a snow-covered, wintry landscape. Yet both can be beautiful for their starkness, purity and simplicity. In that sense, a shot of ice-cold vodka can be a thrilling experience—viscous, rich and mouth-filling, with a spine-tingling coldness followed by the warming glow of pure alcohol. Coldness in warmth, warmth in coldness.
This practical, more forthright appreciation of vodka is on the rise. The shallow, hyped image of vodka that fueled the Cosmopolitans and Appletinis of the 1980s and ’90s, which in turn fomented the great vodka backlash of the 2000s in the bartender community, somehow feels behind us now, a sentiment supported by several vodkas that have emerged in recent years, spirits that eschew glitz and go for directness. Take Portland’s rich, velvety Dystopia; Nelson D’Amour, its distiller, claims the name was intended as a counterpoint to “propaganda and outright lying in the marketing of vodka.” Or Brooklyn’s starkly packaged Industry Standard vodka, which tastes vaguely chocolatey and feels luxuriously smooth. Or there’s St. George Spirits’ recently released All-Purpose Vodka, the name getting right to the practical reality of the spirit.
In all three, flowery or aspirational marketing is conspicuously avoided, so the emphasis falls on how the spirits tastes, rather than how many times it’s distilled, filtered and otherwise stripped of flavor. By definition vodka has no flavor, odor or color, but in practice it has flavor, odor and, more important, texture. And producers today are heightening these qualities by focusing on smaller batches, better ingredients and less industrial processes. To create Dystopia’s voluptuous texture, D’Amour starts with local wheat and rye that he mashes, ferments and distills on site. Industry City Distillery makes Industry Standard in Brooklyn by fermenting beets with a homegrown and maintained yeast selection. St. George’s All-Purpose gets its light, smooth fruitiness from a bit of house-made pear eau-de-vie in the blend.
Even terroir is coming into the conversation. For example, Absolut debuted Elyx a few years ago, an expressive vodka of exceptional purity made from the wheat of a single estate. Then there’s Karlsson’s Gold, which is produced from seven potato varieties from southwest Sweden’s Cape Bjäre, a mild locale known for its spuds. Karlsson’s has potato vodka’s creaminess, but it also has unique flavor, highlighted in oddities like the Batch 2008, which was distilled from a single variety of potatoes, Gammelsvensk Röd. It tastes earthy, complex and somewhat dirty, a quality that would have been unthinkable in high-end vodkas only a decade ago.
Spirits made with such a strong ethos deserve to be drunk straight up, so it’s good to see a revival of this practice in a spate of new Russian-style restaurants that serve zakuski—small plates of Russian food—and have extensive vodka lists. One such place is Kachka in Portland, which, along with Ariana in New York City and Hammer & Sickle in Minneapolis, opened in the last year and a half.
Israel Morales co-founded Kachka with his wife, Bonnie, a first generation daughter of Russian and Belarusian parents. As he explains, “there are really only a couple of major rules with Russian drinking: You never drink alone, and you never drink without eating.” Morales was more into whiskey than vodka when he met Bonnie in Chicago, but as he hung out with her and her family, the pace and ritual of vodka consumption made him a believer. Now they carry on that tradition with more than 60 vodkas they store in a freezer and serve with dishes like eggs stuffed with beet “caviar,” crispy beef tongue, cured and smoked fish, and dumplings.
Zakuski, Morales explains, means “to follow” or “chase,” indicating that in Russian tradition the food is literally used to chase the drink, not the other way around. “It’s not necessarily about pairing certain vodkas with food,” he says. “It just needs to be vodka, it needs to be cold and it needs to burn.”
Cold and burning at the same time. That’s the simple truth of vodka, and it’s best experienced with an ice-cold bottle, a shot glass, some pickled herring and a basic, honest desire to drink.
from left to right: Karlsson’s Gold Sweden; Anchor Distilling, San Francisco, CA; 40% abv, $40; Dystopia Industrial Row Distillery, Portland, OR; 40% abv, $31; Absolut Elyx Sweden; Pernod-Ricard USA, NY; 42.3% abv, $50; All-Purpose Vodka St. George Spirits, Alameda, CA; 40% abv, $30; Industry Standard Industry City Distillery, Brooklyn, NY; 40% abv, $40
Jordan Mackay’s writing on wine, spirits and food has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Decanter, the Art of Eating and many other publications. While Secrets of the Sommeliers, the book he wrote with Rajat Parr, won a James Beard Award in 2011, it’s certain winemakers that he credits with some of his most important tasting lessons.
This story appears in the print issue of June 2015.
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