SUPER-SUPER PREMIUMS | A NEW BREED OF VODKA
According to drinks company Whyte and Mackay, the last few years have been tough. Spirits, including vodka, have taken a serious hit. But there’s one area that’s bucked the trend: super-premium vodkas. In other words, seriously posh vodka sells.
We’ve now entered a brave new world of even higher-end, wilder and more innovative voddie, with truly rarefied brands nibbling up a decent fraction of market share. Complete with ornate, subtle marketing and luxurious additives, the new fleet are a truly suave bunch. Your Bloody Mary need never be the same.
One remarkable (relative) newbie is Pinky, created to “taste” pink by a team of champion wine (yes, wine) tasters in Sweden. It’s distilled from slightly sweet winter wheat and glacial water, with 12 botanicals that are hand-blended into the vodka, giving it its flavour and aroma. It goes down so easily you need to be careful, but it does give a Bloody a great edge.
For the truly premium-obsessed, there is Black Moth, a vodka infused with Périgord truffle, launched last month. Distilled five times and triple filtered, it’s probably the best vodka to accompany food; as for cocktails, the options are endless.
And let us not forget about Camitz sparkling vodka, made from ice-age Swedish springs and Scandinavian wheat, and carbonated with what the makers call the “purest gas in the world” (they would, wouldn’t they). Talk about adding a zing to your cocktail, though.
Other frontrunners – favoured by top London mixologst Joe McCanta, of Saf – are Ciroc, made from grapes grown in Cognac rather than from wheat; Akvinta, from the lush Imotski region of Croatia and made using Italian wheat, and Chase, a family-run distiller producing the UK’s only potato vodka. McCanta describes the latter has having “toasted almond, white pepper and a slight buttery finish”. Now that’s what I call premium.