Top four vodkas with provenance

Big vodka’s latest bugbear has been its unfashionable blandness, so the focus of large producers now is to trumpet their spirit’s provenance and philosophy.

In an attempt to move away from its “bland” reputation, vodka is increasingly focusing on terroir and provenance

Spirits categories, like life forms, have to adapt to survive. Without reinvention and evolution, they will wither and die as consumers grow bored and pass on to the next great fashion. The trick is to find a new path without entirely sacrificing your own identity – and, beyond the commoditised world of entry-level and mainstream brands, this is where vodka finds itself in 2015.

After years of dominating the world’s spirits markets – and, let’s be clear, it’s still doing pretty well in the Americas and Asia-Pacific – there’s a growing sense of vodka being out of step with fashion. As millennial consumers rediscover flavour and craft, vodka’s association with big brands and malleable, cocktail-friendly neutrality risks becoming yesterday’s story. And bartenders? They might wax lyrical about an obscure mezcal or an esoteric central American rum, but when did you last hear a mixologist enthuse about a vodka? Unless they’re being paid to, of course.

And yet that “blank canvas” status is a relatively recent phenomenon, cemented into semi-permanence by the success of “white whiskey” brands like Smirnoff in the US during the second half of the 20th century. You don’t have to look too far back in vodka’s history – or indeed too far east geographically – to find a very different and more characterful spirit.

As such, the new wave of vodkas trumpeting their provenance and raw materials are not so much innovating as rediscovering vodka’s true roots. And, in so doing, they are closing the gap between themselves and the craft (often brown) spirits that are their biggest threat.

It’s a process which arguably began with a brand such as Diageo’s Cîroc, where the source material (grapes) and the provenance (the Cognac-producing Charente) became a key part of the original marketing. Others have also plumbed elements of this – most notably, Grey Goose, particularly in its recent “Fly Beyond” campaign focusing on its French origins.

But these brands have mainly exploited these factors in marketing terms, rather than using them to shape every element of their identity, including taste and texture. Several others are taking this philosophy one stage further, harking back to vodka’s early history in Russia and Eastern Europe, but simultaneously giving it their own imprint at locations as diverse as Poland, Sweden, Armagnac and Herefordshire.

Click through the following pages to see our examination of provenance-focussed vodka brands.

Lactalium – Cazeneuve, Armagnac, France

“To me, vodka is at a turning-point,” says Nicolas Sinoquet, president of Distillerie Gimet, producer of Lactalium, a vodka produced from French mountain milk (more specifically, sourced from cows grazing in the natural park of the Auvergne volcanoes). “It has been considered for too long (like rum or gin before) as a cheap alcohol, easy to make and to mix. But vodka can taste great – of course it is a white spirit and the taste has to be clean enough – but the texture, the subtlety is important.”

Lactalium has a collage of diverse influences: that mountain milk, the fermentation and distillation of which recalls the Mongolian arkhi tradition, the distillery’s location in the heart of Armagnac-producing Gascony, not to mention Sinoquet’s other job as MD of Bordeaux-classed growth Château Gruaud Larose.

His wine background makes him, he says, “extremely careful” about the raw materials used in any of his products (vodka, Armagnac or wine), but it’s not just the ingredients that are important. Sinoquet counts three main factors that can set your vodka apart: the raw materials, the distillation process (i.e. pot or column still) and the way that distillation is controlled.

In Lactalium’s case, that means – after clarification and fermentation – a three-times distillation in Charentais (not Armagnaçais, note) copper pot stills, with not a computer in sight, but the human factor completing the picture. “There is a talented man who follows the distillation 24 hours a day and tastes the product to know when we need to cut the heads or the tails, or if we need to decrease the temperature under the pot still,” says Sinoquet.

“Of course this has a cost, but I think there is a market for authentic products, proud of their origins and their terroir. I am making vodka like I am making Armagnac or wine.”

Chase – Herefordshire, UK

“With distilling, you’re distilling down what you start off with,” says James Chase of Chase Vodka. “If you start off with rubbish, you will end up with rubbish… Vodka isn’t neutral – it may be the US definition, but I ask anyone to taste wheat, grape, potato and rye side-by-side and to understand the difference.”

Herefordshire farmers for three generations, the Chases sprang to wider fame with the Tyrrells premium crisp brand (since sold on to private equity) before turning their hands to vodka. Marketing focuses squarely on the process and provenance, with an emphasis on the fact that the company doesn’t buy in NGS (neutral grain spirit) to supplement its potato base. “[Herefordshire’s] rich red soil provides the perfect pH levels and drainage for our chosen variety of potatoes,” Chase says. “Potatoes are hard to grow – you can only plant a field with potatoes one in five years – wheat, for instance, you can plant more regularly and will have a better yield. It’s all about the taste, and we believe potatoes provide the best taste.”

The potato vodka route, of course, is one well-trodden by the Polish polmoses through the centuries, but Chase has added an extra local dimension with another product for which Herefordshire is famous: a cider apple vodka – a kind of “blanche Calvados”, to mangle French terminology.

“Trends are changing fast,” Chase says. “Wine has always followed food and look at where food is now: people take care and attention where their food is sourced from – it’s on the tip of the tongue of every major chef. You wouldn’t dream about buying a bottle of wine over £20 without knowing the vineyard, bins and even the winemaker. Spirits are following and, with the rise of craft starting in the US, people take pride in knowing the producer.”

Purity – Ellinge Castle, Scania, Sweden

“I am very optimistic regarding the future of vodka as the trend for craft spirits driven by millennials is bringing ultra-premium vodka back to its roots as a genuine craft spirit with character and authenticity,” says Purity Vodka master blender Thomas Kuuttanen.

He acknowledges that the base ingredients have little impact on mainstream – or, as he describes it, “industrial” – vodka, but contrasts this with Purity’s 34 “slow, integrated” distillations and no filtration. “Raw material means everything [to us],” he says. “Everything we do is about maintaining character, complexity and body.”

Purity combines winter wheat and malted barley with mineral-rich water resulting, says Kuuttanen, “in the smooth, mineral-rich elegance of old-school vodka and the complexity and body of single malt whisky”. Again, a new vodka using other spirits categories partly to frame its terms of reference.

Brands like Purity aren’t entirely turning their backs on vodka’s stylish reinvention over the past couple of decades – the Purity bottle is as “look at me” as any noughties style vodka before it – but instead switching the emphasis back in favour of the liquid inside.

“Taste matters,” says Kuuttanen. “It is important that consumers understand differences in vodka. Quality-focused vodka distillers aim for character and complexity, while industrial brands aim for a neutral spirit with maximum mixability. We work actively with taste challenges and enter spirit competitions to distance ourselves from the competitors.”

Belvedere – Żyrardów, Poland

Belvedere may be a super-premium vodka owned by a luxury multinational (LVMH) and only launched in the US in 1996, but its origins connect it inextricably with vodka’s Eastern European roots – and even with the current whiskey revival Stateside.

LVMH makes great play of its use of local Dankowskie rye for Belvedere, and Dankowskie Diamond rye for Belvedere Unfiltered, emphasising its contribution to both flavour and texture.

Such concerns are not how rye vodka originated. Early distillers (and brewers before them) simply used whatever surrounded them, whether it was wheat, corn, potatoes or rye – and rye, a hardy cereal crop resistant to the privations of eastern winters, has long been a favoured staple of the Mazovian Plains surrounding the Belvedere distillery, Polmos Zyrardów.

The early colonists of what was to become the US similarly turned to rye when planting their first arable fields – and the natural consequence was the development of rye beers and then rye whiskeys, which spearheaded early American distilling.

Bourbon (and Tennessee whiskey) may have stolen rye’s thunder in the centuries since, but today’s millennial generation has rediscovered the unique character and flavour of rye.

Having done so in its whiskey form, might they do the same with rye vodka? Maybe these rival spirits categories have more in common than you might think.