Uncorked: Soy vodka: an odd combination

Is the new 3 Vodka, which comes in third in our taste test, being marketed to the health conscious?

By CHRIS SHERMAN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 31, 2001

This one does call for two words -- soy vodka -- although its inventors brand it with a 3, a lipstick red numeral slashing across clear glass with a black cap that looks like the sport water bottle on a cyclist's panier.

Does that make for the oddest couple, marrying the supposed silver bullet of health foods to the super neutral spirit preferred by secret abusers?

To me it seems like a perfect wedding, a colorless, tasteless and odorless drink meets a colorless tasteless and odorless food.

Actually its inventors, a Chicago family with deep roots in Jim Beam, say they weren't interested in making health claims. They wanted to make a new and smoother vodka, one they could pitch as a "super-premium" with a $25 price tag, and the soy accomplished it.

"This is 2001 and we're using today's technology," says Brian Berish, whose father, Barry, spent 40 years expanding Jim Beam into one of the biggest spirits companies in the world. 3 Vodka introduced this fall in Florida and Chicago is the first brand of their new independent company, but others are in the works.

For reasons known only to the subconscious and marketing departments, clear spirits already had something of a health image. Maybe their colorless clarity was assumed to indicate purity and cleanliness.

In our health conscious and abstemious era, vodka and gin, known as white goods in the trade, outstripped the brown whiskies.

While gins at least had traditionally sported woodsy hints of juniper and other herbs, vodka was without flavor, a distillation of potatoes, wheat and other mundane products as purely as possible (even orange pulp can make vodka).

Usually vodka, especially high-priced brands, was 40 percent alcohol and 58 percent marketing. From my tasting, 3 Vodka is little different.

The chief difference between vodkas -- two percent is as much as my rum-drinker's palate can find -- is in the texture or smoothness. Those characteristics are variously credited to the quality or purity of ingredients but more accurately a product of the sophisticated manufacturing process, which could involve up to five distillations to filter out impurities. (Ironically, those impurities include congeners and other organic compounds that flavor the taste and aroma of a neutral spirit).

Consequently, many labels on the high end of the vodka shelf invoke a sense of cold sterility that comes from the laboratory or Dr. Zhivago's forests: Absolut, Fris, Skyy, Rain, Glacier, Iceberg, Sveda, Finlandia and so on. More are coming, including rare old Russian vodkas that sell for $40 and up. And as a whole, vodka makers appear to spend more money on fancy glassware than the Cognac bottlers.

To the younger Berish, it's as old hat as a Russian fur cap. And while he's proud of using soy isolates (together with unnamed grains), he insists that the kind of grains and water and the number of distillations used by other makers don't matter. Other vodkas brag on using traditional grains like potato (Chopin) or rye (Belvedere).

Nor does the rival advertising and packaging impress him.

"All vodkas look alike from a packaging stand point, they're taller and frostier than the next," Berish says. Hence his choice of a plain clear bottle. "The names are based on some guy's name that's 500 years old," he says. The number 3 means "balance, completion and perfection," Berish says, and on his bottle, it can be identified from 10 feet away.

So much for the bottle, how about when its contents are poured in a glass?

In an informal taste test, I tried 3 Vodka against four others and found it had a hot, sharp nose with the alcohol too obvious while the taste was clean, neutral and slightly medicinal. Its one great strength was the texture, a smooth mouth feel I'll attribute to the silky characters that soy can manifest.

However, that ranked it only in the middle of my little test. Stolichnaya was smooth but turned my breath hot and Smirnoff was strong on alcohol but with a slight sweetness in taste. Absolut was not as harsh in alcohol, full in mouth-feel with a rainwater taste and a friendly almost vanilla smell. Best of the bunch was Dutch Ketel One, with a clean aroma only a mild burn, very smooth texture and a full, warm taste I can compare to a good chocolate, not in flavor but in richness.

Berish was puzzled that 3 placed third on my palate. He says it's a consistent winner in blind tastings, especially with buyers for bars and liquor stores.

At Martini Bar where vodka and gin mix with a hot crowd in St. Petersburg's Baywalk, manager James Musgrave hasn't yet received a pitch. His best vodkas now are Polish and French. "Belvedere, Chopin and Grey Goose. There are still some people who drink Absolut but the connoisseurs, the ones who who really know, those are the three they like."

But he admits vodka drinkers are a big, tempting market. "There are sooooo many new vodkas out there."

Maybe 3 Vodka will be the next big one. If it is, I don't think soy will provide the muscle.

- Chris Sherman, who writes about food and wine for the St. Petersburg Times, is the author of "The Buzz on Wine" (Lebhar-Friedman Books, $16.95).

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