Avoiding the gin-eric in South Carolina

March 23, 2019March 23, 2019 ~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

I leave Sunday for three days in Charleston, South Carolina, and already I can smell the aromatics and botanicals, those ultra-fragrant plant compounds often used in alcoholic potables, most popularly in gin. Aromatics and botanicals furnish a strong herbal, floral or fruity tang that sets flowery, pungent gin apart from insipid vodka, which tends to smell and taste like undiluted alcohol (and which is why producers are always grossing up their swill with flavors like cherry, vanilla, mango and peppar, whatever that is).

In Charleston is the award-winning High Wire Distilling Co., which claims to be the city’s first distillery since Prohibition. Like a boozy boutique, the outfit “produces a distinctive line of small batch spirits, including gin, rum, whiskey, and vodka using premium, specialized ingredients.”

I’m there.

And I’m taking the $10 tour and tasting, which (more canned copy here) “provide an overview of the distilling process and allow guests an opportunity to see the still, mash tun, fermentation tanks, barrel aging, and bottling operations.” Tour-takers “receive a traditional tasting flight of four High Wire spirits.” (Yes!)

This has got to beat the tragic, gimcrack Heineken Experience brewery tour I signed up for in Amsterdam last year (my head still hurts from the strobes and electronica). And it might just match the exemplary Russia Vodka Museum in St. Petersburg, where the tastings exuded high European class. Or the fine, frothy, free tour of the Sam Adams Brewery in Boston.

I have my eye on one of High Wire’s specialty gins, which goes for $27 a bottle (I don’t yet know the size), the “Hat Trick Extraordinarily Fine Botanical Gin,” described in detail:

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“Made with crushed juniper berries and fresh lemon and orange peel, this bright and flavorful gin is well-balanced and pleasing to the palate. Balancing botanicals include licorice root, angelica root, coriander, and cardamom. From a straight up martini to a more complex Fitzgerald, this gin dazzles even the most discerning gin drinker.”

Proof: 88

Tasting Notes: Floral, licorice, lemon, orange, pine, rounded/full texture, well-balanced, long finish.

Cocktails: Gin & Tonic, Martini, Fitzgerald, Collins, Negroni, Gimlet, Martinez, Gin Gin Mule

I’m sure I don’t know what at least three of those cocktails are, but they sound ravishing with this nifty gin, which, you never know, might suck. I’ll taste it during the tour’s tasting segment. If I like it, I’m buying a bottle. And then, you know, drinks on me.

Tippling, Russian style

October 24, 2017April 4, 2018 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

In St. Petersburg, Russia, recently, no one in a bar bumptiously offered me a shot of vodka as I had been cautioned they would. (Sad face emoji.) The only offers came from poised waiters in nice restaurants — not from chummy, drunky, rambunctious imbibers who wanted me to be their new American comrade in guzzling. This, surely, is a good thing.

I took it slow and easy, tossing back my first shots of the typically clear, but sometimes amber, libation in the controlled environment of the illuminating Russia Vodka Museum, an expansive and engrossing shrine to Russia’s national beverage.

*Guide Veronica explaining the vodkas I was about to gulp.*

In a brisk and fact-packed 30 minutes I was shown the place by the delightful, fluently-English Veronica as my personal guide. I learned scads about the history of Russian vodka, from pre-Ivan the Terrible days in the 12th century to Putin’s relationship with the gullet-stinging spirit. The museum is top-shelf, full of text (in Russian, alas), colorful bottles, distillery artifacts, Stalin-era propaganda and unintentionally comical human wax figures. It’s thorough and classy.

If you opt for it — and you must — the tour concludes with a vodka tasting of three regional samples, and includes “chasers” of pickle, herring and onions and something else that escaped me but was fishy and delicious. The tour and tasting cost barely more than $10 US, a steal.

Before my only official shot of vodka in a bar-restaurant setting, I became a regular at the enchanting Dead Poets, a relaxed, stylish gastrobar where the bartenders are hipster mixologists with expert instincts and eye-crossing dexterity. They fashion quite the concoctions — like my favorite, the whiskey sour, which they do with care and panache — that are elaborate and fanciful but just the right amount of modest and unembarrassing. Nothing was too fru-fru, too tawdry, despite the simpatico bartenders’ twee haircuts and rococo facial hair.

*Best whiskey sour, ever. Notice the egg-white froth.*

No, my sole shot of ice-cold vodka (curiously, the shots at the museum were room temperature) occurred at the acclaimed Duo Gastrobar, a tiny, mid-range restaurant, serving delectable meals, like amazing bone marrow with ginger sauce and crunchy apple pork rib.

Dessert menu? Pass. Let’s move on to liquid pleasures. For about $4 Duo offered one kind of vodka, the classic Beluga Noble, in a shot. Vodka in Russia, they say, must be served chilled, otherwise send it back. This was a frosty, good-sized shot, with lemon slices to bite after quaffing it down. Vodka, of course, is the smoothest liquor to shoot, as it tastes of hardly more than alcohol fumes. It has character if scant flavor.

*The lone chilled vodka shot in Russia.*

As he delivered it, my server volunteered his confusion as to why vodka is his country’s national drink when tequila and whiskey, for instance, contain so much more texture and nuance. True, I nodded, and we laughed. But it was bracing and fine and if I wasn’t heading over to another bar, the youthful, disco-lighted Mishka, where drinks are two-for-one during a very long happy hour, I’d have ordered another. When in Russia …

How to drink vodka (or not) with that Russian swagger

September 15, 2017 ~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

It sounds like the most rancid cultural cliche, but I keep hearing that vodka shots are a compulsory part of visiting Russia if you go to local bars, which I most surely am. Ritual reigns. Toasts, garrulous and heartfelt, are mandatory. Friendships are forged over the clear, biting liquid. Backslaps, perhaps high-fives (please no), succeed the flaming gulps. Vodka is a social lube, a social glue. After a week in St. Petersburg next month, I fear that I’m going to have made dozens of new (bibulous) friends and wind up with the squinchy elfin aspect of this fellow:

“The national drink is an inseparable part of Russian social life. Vodka is drunk everywhere, with the intention of breaking down inhibitions and producing a state of conviviality Russians refer to as dusha-dushe (soul-to-soul). When a Russian taps his throat, beware: it’s impossible to refuse this invitation to friendship.”

So writes The New York Times. “Impossible to refuse this invitation to friendship”? I will find ways. I can be terrifically anti-social. I don’t want to be around too many guys who “taps his throat” as an alarm bell to guzzle a shot I might not want. I get more than two shots from these tipplers, well, then, comrade, my nice relaxing night at the bar may quite be over. I’ll take a beer, sir, and the check, and … who in hell pays for those shots? I have a stinky feeling I’m getting stuck with the bill.

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I hate Russia. I hate vodka.

Not really. Indeed, I have firm, jazzed plans to visit St. Petersburg’s newish Russia Vodka Museum, dubbed “excellent” by Lonely Planet, a glassy, liquidy historical survey of the beverage through storied, stumbling Russian yore. A 30-minute guided tour in English and sizable samples of three vodkas with traditional Russian snacks — pickles! herring! — is about $10, and I’m dimly gobsmacked. That sounds pretty fine.

I love Russia. I love vodka.

*Russia Vodka Museum. Looks like a well-stocked vodka bar. As it should.*

Vodka in Slavic means “little water,” but it seems more like big water in Russia. Supposedly invented in Poland, the drink’s name was first recorded in Russia in the late 1700s. Today there are hundreds of brands of vodka available there, though I doubt my go-to, Tito’s Handmade Vodka, a Texas upstart, moves many units.

Imbibing the spirit, as I said, is a ritualized affair, almost a drinking game, freckled with frat boy machismo and cornball sacraments. The Times notes the dubious “vodka procedure,” which entails guzzling a nice big shot, neat, of course. It continues: “Prepare a forkful of food or chunk of bread. Inhale and exhale quickly, bringing the food to your nose. Breathe in and tip the vodka down your throat. Now breathe out again, and eat your food.”

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I don’t think so. That sounds a bit like yoga for alkies. Can’t I just order a vodka tonic, a Cape Cod, a, huh-hum, White Russian, vodka martini, or something divine and aquamarine, conjured magic-potion-like by a multi-tentacled mixologist? Of course I can. And I will.

But I also want Russia’s traditional, unalloyed vodka experience. I’ll do a shot or two, hopefully with guys who don’t whoop a lot or slam their glasses down on the table and beat their chests. I can’t speak a lick of Russian, so who knows what kind of rigamarole I might find myself.

I’ll just say this: Temperance is golden, abstinence is mournful, more than five shots is suicidal, and eating herring with your vodka is, plain and simple, foolhardy. Na zdorovie!

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