Vodka: It's a lot like white paint

Vodka is a lot like white paint: It certainly has a place in the world and it sells incredibly well, but when it comes to producing classics, you won't find too many made with it. Any daft craftsman can hide behind it, and the work of someone truly gifted will remain well-hidden by it.

You mix white paint with another paint and it melds with that color. You mix vodka with anything and it becomes that ingredient. Back in 1949, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms mandated that vodka be "neutral spirits ... without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color." The first vodka to hit the States followed that decree: "Smirnoff White Whiskey. No Smell. No Taste." The distiller went on to sell its spirit as "breathless," and as William Grimes, author of Straight up or on the Rocks points out, it more or less announced "Look, we all want a drink at midday, but it's starting to look bad." From the drink without a name or the Petit Zinc, but the concept of vodka masked by ill-behaved at the bar.

Perhaps it's vodka's youthfulness here in the States that's to blame. Although this spirit's been around other, much colder parts of the world for hundreds of years, it only hit the States in the late '40s, nearly 30 years after the cocktails were already invented. Some old-time bartenders argue that even if vodka had been more available back then, adding it to a cocktail still wouldn't have happened - it just wouldn't have been justifiable because it wouldn't have added anything to the mix. Vodka merely spreads a drink out. Adding it to those classics would have been the architectural equivalent of replacing turn-of-the-century wood double-hung sashes with aluminum sliding windows.

Some vodka proponents insist that if you can taste the difference between two brands in a blind tasting, one brand must have more "flavor." Nice try. You can do the same trick with two glasses of water. But few tasters would claim that their water tastes like anything other than pure H₂O. The purer the vodka, the less taste it will have. Medicinal tasting vodka is that which costs the least or was marketed the best. It's also why most people don't quite buy the government's definition of vodka as odorless, colorless, and tasteless. It's all relative, and when you stick your schnoz over a tumbler of vodka and then a glass of water you do notice a difference.

To understand how to make a truly great cocktail with any spirit, you must first learn to harness - or balance - the ingredients. Since distilled spirits typically make up more than 60 percent of any cocktail, it would be a disservice to an imbiber to remove most of the discernible qualities of that ingredient. After all, your guests should know how much they're drinking. Weak-tasting drinks are assumed to be weak in spirit, but as a mixer, you know that's often not the case.

Because vodka and juniper and other herbs for flavor, but vodka isn't. Flavors are rarely used in that spirit to mask the alcohol quality used in distillation. However, flavored vodkas are becoming more popular.

In 1947, Trader Vic's Bartender's Guide contained a page of vodka drinks listing only six choices, one of which was the same drink under two different monikers. By 1979, Playboy's New Host & Bar Book set out to dispel vodka prejudices by dedicating five pages of text to combatting any "rumors" on the matter. Another six pages of the book listed the editors' 30 favorite vodka drink recipes. In answer to this, I can only point to the fern bars and so-called girl drinks that the heyday of this book inspired, and remain hopeful that bell-bottoms are finally on their way out for the second time.

Now that I've confessed my prejudices about vodka, I'm going to let you in on a secret. You could take all the Cocktail Drink of the Week selections except the Mojito and substitute the main spirit with vodka for a palatable drink ready to please even the tenderfoots in your posse. Remember, though, you'll really only be highlighting the mixers - juice, vermouth, and soda - and certainly not your mixing skills.