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These Days, Vodka is Dressed Up, Globalized, Fetishized and Over-Marketed
• by Jordan Mackay - Photo by Shana Cook
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When it’s really cold and the wind is howling through the naked branches of the trees, and ice has encrusted my car’s windshield wiper blades, I like to ask myself, “What would the Russians do to keep warm? What would the people do in Oymyakon, Siberia, which has reached minus 96.16 degrees Fahrenheit and is the coldest permanently inhabited place on Earth?”
According to National Geographic, they wear a lot of fur in Oymyakon. But they also swim naked in the lakes in the middle of winter, meaning that there is something internal that keeps them warm beyond the piling on of reindeer skins. Indeed, what the Russians know is that the most effective way to heat yourself up is from the inside out (as your car does – notice that you put antifreeze into the engine, not on it) and the way they do that is vodka.
These days, the thought of vodka as necessity – to wake up on a winter morning and do a shot to get the blood flowing back into the legs – is sort of charming and old-fashioned. These days, vodka is something else: dressed up, globalized, fetishized, over-marketed, abstracted. Today, what is vodka, after all, but for its brand?
Of course, it didn’t used to be this way. Vodka wasn’t really even known in this country until people saw Stalin toasting with it at the Yalta Conference in 1945. Since then, it’s been a steady onward march for vodka, which is more often made of grain than potatoes. The clear spirit has insinuated its colorless, flavorless self into American cocktails one by one like a virus. The Gin and Tonic became Vodka and Tonic. The Gimlet, formerly a gin drink, became squarely vodka. And, of course, the Martini – somewhere along the way – became vodka more often that it was gin.
Not that there’s anything wrong with vodka, it’s just that strange symptom of cultural evolution that sees something like gin and its definable character and flavor replaced by something without those things. The legal definition of vodka, by the way, is “something without distinctive character, aroma or taste.” Why does emptiness so often trump substance?
Well, vodka had several things going for it. In a nation of bored suburban teenagers looking to get drunk and a newly middle-class society of middle-brow tastes, an alcoholic beverage that could get you drunk without having to bother with acquiring the taste for gin or whiskey was a boon. Also, as you know, vodka disappears into any drink, making it compatible with any number of fruit juices and, thus, America’s sweet tooth.
Along the way, though, marketers realized that they could sell tricked-up versions in fancier packages for more money to richer consumers who felt they could get a status bump from a smarter cocktail. Thus came Stoli and Absolut and, now, Grey Goose, Chopin, Belvedere and all the rest. I can attest that there are an infinite number of vodkas on the market. To get a sense of the number, it’s useful to surf around on ivodka.com. There, you can see that Poland alone produces over 250 different vodkas.
At my local liquor store, you have a choice of vodka that’s $7.99 a liter up to $30 for Belvedere. That’s a pretty big price differential and, clearly, much of what you’re paying for is packaging. The expensive vodkas have beautiful painted or frosted bottles with little see-through windows that allow you to gaze through the cylinder at a picturesque image on the interior far side of the bottle. The inexpensive products, like Vladimir vodka, have bottles that seem like they came from white shelves of some pharmaceutical laboratory. But is packaging the only difference? Are there actual qualitative differences in the different vodkas?
Of course there are. The Vladimir is practically undrinkable. It tastes rather vile and feels like it’s dissolving the external membranes of your throat as it scorches its way down. On the other hand, a swig of the fine Swedish product Precis went down smoothly, like an ice cube dropping into a glass. Of course, neither of them had any flavor, which is the intent.
But if you’re just going to mix it with cranberry juice, Cointreau and lime, what difference does it make if it goes down smooth on its own? Not much. Even so, I’d be scared to use the Vladimir in anything except maybe as a solvent to get the crud off some leaky pipes. While I don’t think you need to use a $50 bottle of Jewel of Russia vodka (the most expensive on the market) in a Cosmo, maybe it’s best to use a middling version of this middling spirit – something safe and inexpensive, like Skyy.
Because the truth is, that no matter how cold it gets here, we just don’t drink vodka like the Russians do – straight up and hard core. And if we were drinking vodka to stay warm, would we really want something ultrasmooth and soft or would we want something scorching and flammable? Probably the latter. So which would it be, high-priced vodka to disappear into a glass of cranberry juice or radioactive rotgut that’ll keep me warm throughout the night? The answer, I think, is gin.
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