Boozehound - Jason Wilson [3]
There is much more going on in the glass when we sit down to drink a particularly profound spirit: a smoky 1928 rum from Fidel Castro’s cellar, a cognac that was bottled before the nineteenth-century phylloxera plague destroyed acres of Europe’s vineyards, one of the only vintage Calvados to have survived the German occupation of Normandy. And it’s about more than just being rare and obscure for the sake of being rare and obscure.
Perhaps what I’m describing is the exact opposite of what’s become the most widely consumed spirit in the United States: vodka. About a year into my job, I looked around and something struck me: people slowly had begun discovering, and getting really interested in, spirits. Readers sent me emails with lots of questions, and it became clear that although many people were game to learn, there were major chunks of cultural knowledge about spirits that had not been passed down. Just like me on that long-ago day with the dapper gentleman and his Stinger, people really didn’t know very much about what they drank. So, despite an increased awareness of spirits, people still mostly drank vodka.
Liebling already saw vodka’s surge coming in the late 1950s, as it began to usurp whiskey and gin. He, predictably, deplored the vodka trend, writing in Between Meals, “The standard of perfection for vodka (no color, no taste, no smell) was expounded to me long ago … and it accounts perfectly for the drink’s rising popularity with those who like their alcohol in conjunction with the reassuring tastes of infancy—tomato juice, orange juice, and chicken broth. It is the ideal intoxicant for the drinker who wants no reminder of how hurt Mother would be if she knew what he was doing.”
That was 1959. The twenty-first-century American consumer is not content to rest with the standard vodka available then. We’ve become an insatiable audience for new ways to buy pretty much the same old thing, and vodka has grown into an industry with more than fifteen billion dollars in annual sales. Not a week passes that I don’t get an email from some public relations professional extolling the virtues of a new superpremium vodka from A Very Special Place (Latvia, Kyrgyzstan, Idaho) or infused with some wild new taste (energy drink, açai berries, bacon) or associated with a celebrity (P. Diddy, Dan Aykroyd, Donald Trump) or tied to a political cause (Absolut Global Cooling, anyone?).
“Does the world need another vodka?” is a question that surely has been pondered by those of us who’ve seen liquor store shelves sagging under the sheer volume of premium vodkas on the market. I can only assume that the development of new vodkas—each in a fancy bottle and with a romantic story—will go on until the world ends in fire or ice. In fact, I have a recurring dream in which the true first sign of the Apocalypse is actually a press release for a vodka that has been quintuple-distilled from the tears of flaxen-haired angels and flavored with the ambrosia of Mount Olympus. And it’s promoted by Miley Cyrus.
This is not to say there is anything pernicious or immoral or wrong about liking vodka. Plenty of good, decent people do, and some of these people I count among my friends. Some of them are even dedicated, enlightened foodies—people who pray at the altar of Slow Food and shudder at the thought of inauthentic cuisine. But when you come by their homes, they will still serve you a drink made with an overpriced vodka and perhaps also an artificial fruit mixer. I always accept their hospitality. Likewise,