It is a bright blue day in Cognac. A cheerful picnic table is laid out on the lawns of a country mansion. There is baguette and cheese, fresh fruit and flan. A sprinkling of fashionistas and Bollywood celebritydom — designer Rohit Bal, actors Arjun Rampal and Diana Penty, among others — are in attendance. All of us chat amicably about this sweet life, here in the heart of the French countryside fabled for its grapes and gastronomy. The highlight of the afternoon, however, is not the food or the banter; it is vodka. Not the shooters we are used to quaffing, but a spirit crafted more carefully, to be savoured slowly in these sylvan surroundings.
Le Logis, the country house, is the spiritual home of Grey Goose vodka, presided over by its maitre de chai (cellar master) Francois Thibault, a Cognac celebrity. He was already a well-known cognac maker before Sidney Frank, a client, approached him in the mid-1990s to make what he perceived would be a high-end craft vodka for the American market. Thibault agreed, causing an outrage of sorts in Cognac where vodka was thought of as a frivolous spirit. But he went about applying the principles of terroir and careful sourcing of ingredients ingrained in every French wine or cognac maker to vodka making. Grey Goose, made from fine French wheat and water from a nearby stream in Cognac, was thus born. The rest, as they say, is history.
Toast to change
Twenty years later, a fresh chapter in the history of fine vodka seems to be in the writing. As global sales of the white spirit, often dismissed as odourless, colourless and, therefore, charmless by connoisseurs, continue to be in decline — according to reports such as Global Vodka Insights by drinks market analyst IWSR — the sales of premium and super-premium categories are increasing. “Globally speaking, vodka is pursuing a clear trend of premiumisation,” the report states. What this has resulted in, in markets such as the US and the UK, is a trend towards craft vodka. Yes, you heard us right: where provenance is key, and where the market is being disrupted by superior products carefully created for a millennial consumer who is conscious of where his ingredients come from, and of flavour and taste.
Pursuing this trend, last year, Thibault teamed up with celebrity chef Alain Ducasse to produce a unique vodka, which is billed as the world’s first gourmet vodka. Ducasse, known for his obsession with high-quality ingredients and everything natural, apparently made it clear that he was not interested in creating yet another flavoured vodka. Thibault agreed. The result: a three-year collaboration where they went back to basics, with wheat. “The first time we experimented, the chef cooked the wheat first in a pan, then in a coffee roaster, and finally in an oven to show how cooking at different temperatures changed the flavours,” Thibault says. The maitre dechai then spent the rest of the time trying to figure out how to incorporate the rich caramelised notes of cooked, darkened wheat into his vodka.
Shedding its image
When it was released last year as a limited-edition product (at roughly $100, or ₹7,500, for a 750 ml bottle, making this the most expensive vodka yet), Grey Goose Interpreted by Ducasse, as it is called, immediately became a vodka expression with a difference. Thibault’s recipe incorporates soft winter wheat from Picardie cooked in three different stages — light, medium and dark. The result is a spirit full of complexity and various notes of caramel, hints of butter and fruit that come through as you sip it. “The best way to drink it is in a balloon-style glass, so that you can savour all the notes,” says mixologist Nitin Tiwari, one of India’s top bar consultants. You may not find the bottle in your favourite bar in India as yet, but it has recently been made available in travel retail and airport duty frees.
The gourmet vodka may be the first-of-its-kind collaboration, but craft vodka is already trending internationally. Much like the craft gin trend — where the focus has been on small-batch productions, ingredients sourced directly from farmers and complexity in mouth feel — craft vodka is focussing on all these factors too, trying to shed its image of an indifferent party drink. Most of these spirits may not be available in the country as yet, but should you want to collect some when you travel abroad, look out for spirits where the distillation has been done from scratch. Craft vodka is where the raw ingredient itself has been sourced by the maker and the spirit is made from scratch.
Small vodka makers like Nikka, with its Coffee Grain Vodka (2017), are following this time-consuming but rewarding method of production. The Japanese brand distils several different kinds of distillates (from corn to barley), and blends these to produce a unique texture and flavour. Then there is Black Cow, a vodka from England, made, unbelievably, from milk, on a dairy farm in Dorset. It is unique and creamy and has a rounded mouth feel, state its champions. There is also Reyka, an Icelandic vodka that is evaporated and passed on to volcanic rocks to get that flavour.
All these vodkas can be sipped on their own or made into interesting cocktails that rely on their unique flavours rather than flavour-lessness. As Thibault points out in his faltering English: “The only reason people drank vodka at freezing temperatures was to mask how badly it was made.” No longer so.
