Eric Felten is just redolent with schadenfreude: vodka, it seems, is dead.
In his most recent column in the WSJ, Felten crows unabatedly that Food & Wine’s Cocktails ’09 has documented the decline of vodka-based drinks. He heaps scorn upon the faux-martinis that dotted the barscape since the turn of the millennium.
Well, take a look at the ingredients of said concoctions: they weren’t about the vodka, they were about the sweet, colored crap that went into them, and the snoot-factor of making such a mish-mash, giving it a loopy name and charging $10 a pop.
I mean—anything with blue curaçao is de facto going to be nasty to look at and to drink.
Felten’s animosity to vodka is of long standing. A couple of years ago he reluctantly and somewhat sullenly discussed a few types of the liquor. He does this periodically to various quaffs—Irish whiskeys, gins, aromatic bitters… But with these he couldn’t even be bothered to rank or price them.
Presumably that was because at a tasting “hosted by the head of a prominent luxury liquor house”, “I found myself hard-pressed to discern much difference.”
Well, whatever. If vodka cycles out of fashion, it’ll be replaced by another mindlessly “in” liquor, in over-priced cocktails marked by nothing so much as the chutzpah of the bartenders.
A couple of the examples Felten cites from Cocktails ’09 bear this out: Strawberry-Basil-Balsamic Daiquiri (is that a drink or a salad?), the Autumn Daiquiri (spiced rum and cinnamon syrup) & La Bomba Daiquiri (pomegranate molasses and muddled raspberries).
Felten loves obscure ingredients—he’s particularly big on elderflower liqueur in this column. Well, as someone who moved from a state with no free-market liquor stores to one with even more dire state-owned liquor stores, I know I have no hope of ever finding this stuff. Or even the Calvados or mescal.
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