Wednesday, August 29, 2007

Pot Distilled Vodka?

Yesterday, I saw an ad for a super-premium pot-distilled version of Smirnoff vodka in the British edition of GQ. I wasn't able to find a reference to it on the Smirnoff website, so perhaps it's only been released in Britain so far. I have to confess that it makes absolutely no sense to me except as a marketing ploy.

Consider what vodka is supposed to be: colorless, odorless, flavorless. Those characteristics are achieved by distilling something (usually a mash of grain, although some vodkas claim to be made from grapes) to a very high proof to remove almost all of the congeners that give alcohol its flavor and character. It doesn't matter what kind of still you use to produce the liquor if the spirit comes off the still at 190 proof. There's nothing left in the spirit at that point. That's why it's called a neutral spirit. Pot-distilled vodka is just another load of marketing hokum. Of course, I guess that it's no worse than a bottler buying 190 proof grain neutral spirits from Archer Daniels Midland, shipping it to Europe, diluting it with local water, packaging it in a fancy bottle, and selling it as a foreign super-premium vodka for $35 a bottle.

Another thing that bothers me about this is the assumption that pot stills are necessarily better than column stills. Well, they're certainly less efficient than column stills, but inefficiency doesn't necessarily translate into higher quality. The product of pot stills is different from the product of column stills, not necessarily better.

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