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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Indulge/  The enigmatic history of vodka
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The enigmatic history of vodka

Neil Ridley visits the home of vodka, eastern Europe, to see if he can get a clear picture

Employees pass storage tanks of Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka at a distillery in Bialystok, Poland. Photo: Bartek Sadowski/Bloomberg (Bartek Sadowski/Bloomberg)Premium
Employees pass storage tanks of Zubrowka Bison Grass vodka at a distillery in Bialystok, Poland. Photo: Bartek Sadowski/Bloomberg
(Bartek Sadowski/Bloomberg)

Vodka is one of the most simply made of all drinks available today. Unlike single malt Scotch whisky, for example, which is produced by distilling a beer made from just barley, water and yeast, and then matured in oak casks for a minimum of three years, vodka is simply a distillation of a brew made using any available agricultural product, from wheat to grain to potatoes, and bottled as a pure, white spirit.

As a result, for centuries, vodka has been perceived as perhaps the purest of all spirits. But ironically, the origins and historical significance of this ubiquitous drink are considerably cloudier. Neil Ridley visits the home of vodka, eastern Europe, to see if he can get a clear picture.

Usually it is fairly simple to uncover the stories and histories behind many a fine alcoholic beverage. Single malt whisky from Scotland, rum from the Caribbean, or port from Portugal...some are rooted-deep in the fabric of a nation, while others have a clearly defined discovery point. The same cannot perhaps be said for the history of vodka. Its origins are much more enigmatic, while at the same time, hugely symbolic in the development of many great Eastern European states throughout the last several hundred years.

Vodka has often fuelled mythology, been the centrepiece of political conflict, and has loosened tongues in countless espionage chronicles the world over. Today, the global vodka market is larger than any other spirit, accounting for around 20% of all spirits sold globally. Such is its impact that a case of the hugely popular Russian vodka, Smirnoff Red, is said to be purchased every two seconds and that production of vodka now exists in over thirty countries.

It would be an exhaustive process to detail the history of the spirit from a worldwide perspective, so this commentary will focus specifically at spirit produced in what has widely become known as the ‘Vodka Belt’—an area running across the agricultural countries to the North-East of Europe and Scandinavia.

It is unclear where the very first vodkas were actually distilled, although both Russia and Poland can lay claim to shaping the spirit into what we have become familiar with today. In the late 1970s, both the erstwhile Soviet Union and Poland waged a battle over the exclusive rights to label their brands with the word “vodka", both sides citing many historical texts alluding to its origins.

It is almost certain though that the term “vodka" can be traced back to the Slavic word Woda, meaning water. Polish court documents reveal that as far back as 1405, reference had been made to this word, relating to medicinal and pharmaceutical use of the spirit. In Russia, the description goes a step further with the term “vodka of bread wine" or khlebnoye vino, referring to the “dilution with water" of a grain-based distilled spirit for medical purposes. There are also suggestions that the etymology of vodka shares much with the Slavic word “to burn"—in Polish, gorzalka, perhaps referring to the exceedingly high temperatures required during the distillation process.

By the end of the 1600s, vodka had become a more widely consumed beverage across Eastern Europe, with differing grains being used according to crop harvests. The Polish author Jakub Kazimierz Haur, in his 1693 book, A Treasury of Excellent Secrets about Landed Gentry’s Economy, discussed the use of rye as a key ingredient in vodka distillation (the same base product for much of the production of bourbon whisky in the US).

The alcoholic strength had been considerably reduced by the addition of water, and by the end of the century, some of the very first brands such as Goldwasser (one of the first commercially available herb-infused spirits) and Zubrówka started to emerge, as the Polish nobility were given a production monopoly of the spirit.

Over in Tsarist Russia, vodka distillation and distribution had become a government-regulated process, which provided huge levels of taxation revenue. The first “Tsar’s Kabak" opened, a place where various alcoholic drinks, including vodka, could be bought and consumed. Around the mid-1700s, state-manufactured vodka soon became the drink of choice for everyone, with consumption growing enormously with strict laws governing production dropped and the spirit became affordable to the rich and the poor alike.

As demand grew, the quality of the spirit had to be refined and the purity levels increased, leading to the first breakthroughs in “rectification", or filtration by redistillation. By 1768, it was commonplace for the spirit to be distilled three times to increase strength and reduce impurities. By 1894, the national standard for vodka was established in Russia, based on the chemist Dmitri Mendeleev’s research into the optimum alcoholic levels in filtered spirit, being 38% abv (alcohol by volume). Since the taxation laws on alcoholic drinks were based on their strength, this number was rounded up to 40% to simplify matters—and the state monopoly on vodka gradually spread all over the country.

While it is now commonplace for some brands of vodka to use a single grain in the production of the spirit, a multitude of base ingredients have been used to produce quality vodka. Traditionally, potatoes and sugar beets produced a cheap fermentable “beer", which were often seen as inferior to that of distillation using more expensive wheat or rye crops. Ironically, today some of the best vodkas in the world are distilled using potatoes. Its distillation follows similar procedures to that of rum or single-malt whisky, using a traditional pot-still, but the redistillation and following filtration differ.

Today, purity is the key element to premium vodka and sometimes the spirit is redistilled up to eight times, then filtered slowly through long columns of charcoal, quartz sand and, in some extreme cases, precious metals to remove unwanted flavours and aromas. But even in its purest form, traces of the base ingredient remain, for instance a creamy, buttery note can be detected in vodkas manufactured from potato, such as the polish brand Chopin, and a sweet, crisp fruitiness in brands such as wheat-based Ketel One, from the Netherlands.

Neil Ridley is a well-known whisky writer in the UK and co-founder of the website Caskstrength.net

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Published: 01 Dec 2012, 12:31 AM IST
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