Vodka

What vodka is

Vodka is a spirit rectified until the character of its raw material has been largely removed. Grain is the commonest base; potatoes, grapes, molasses and sugar beet all work. Its aim is the opposite of most spirits: not to carry the raw material forward but to reduce it, which is how European law defines the category — distilled and filtered so that the organoleptic characteristics of the raw materials are selectively reduced.

The name comes from the Slavic word for water, and the traditional producing countries lie in eastern and northern Europe. Its arrival as a default base behind international bars is a story of the second half of the twentieth century.

How it is made

Ferment, rectify through a continuous column still, filter, dilute. The number of plates in the column decides how clean the spirit runs; filtration, usually through activated carbon, trims what remains; water brings it to bottling strength, commonly around forty per cent. No cask is involved, so the bottle holds more or less what left the distillery. Flavoured vodka takes a second path: peel, spices, berries or tea steeped in the spirit and filtered out again, of which lemon vodka is the most familiar.

Styles and differences

Vodka has no regional map comparable to whisky's. The variables are quieter: the raw material (wheat clean, rye peppery, potato fuller in the mouth), how many times it is rectified, how it is filtered, the water used to reduce it. The differences are real, but smaller than the advertising implies. Judge a vodka by what it does in the glass, not by the story on the label.

What it tastes like

"Tasteless" is a misreading. Most of what a vodka says, it says through texture: smooth or coarse on entry, a trace of sweetness in the middle, more or less heat at the finish. Aroma, when there is any, is a faint grain or mineral shadow.

Vodka in cocktails

It is a carrier. Vodka supplies strength and length and leaves the stage to everything else: tomato juice and spice in a Bloody Mary, ginger beer in a Moscow Mule, coffee in an Espresso Martini, cranberry and orange liqueur in a Cosmopolitan. It also shares a glass with gin: the Vesper is both of them plus Lillet, and it takes its name from an Ian Fleming novel. Flavoured bottlings behave the same way — a Lemon Drop Martini is built on lemon vodka.

Choosing a bottle for mixing

No brands, three questions. How exposed is it? The shorter the recipe, the more the vodka's texture shows; a long drink with several ingredients is far more forgiving. Is the strength enough? A low bottling can disappear into juice once shaking has added its dilution. Flavoured or plain? Use a flavoured bottling only where the recipe asks for one; it brings its own sugar and aromatics, which is not the same thing as fruit you steeped yourself.