Breaking Up With Vodka

I Even Wrote About It For A Russian Newspaper

When I got sober, breaking up with vodka was the hardest part. It had been the one true love in my life for almost 40 years.

It had its beginnings in Russia and Poland. The nomenclature is almost identical: the source word "voda," in Russian, and "woda" in Polish, means water. Vodka, or Wodka, means "little water," which is transliterated as distilled water, which is vodka.

I didn't like drinking at first, but I liked the effect. In high school, I felt I was finally adapting to the new neighborhood we moved to at the beginning of ninth grade when in eleventh grade, I started getting invited to beer parties. The drink of choice was Colt .45 malt liquor. This is not brew for sipping and watching a ball game and chatting with pals. Colt .45 tasted harsh, but as malt liquor it had a high alcohol content. You chugged it to get high. Two cans would get a nice buzz, but a nice buzz wasn't enough. Three cans would get me smashed, and also, eventually, throwing up. Didn't like it at the time, but couldn't wait to do it again the next weekend.

My dad drank vodka martinis when he came home from work. In the 1960s, all vodka was thought to be the same: Our house brand was Fleishmann's,  which nowadays you might find on a middle shelf in a dive bar. Fleishmann's great attribute was it was cheap, and it had sort of a Jewish name. (It was, in fact.) In the 1960s, Ian Fleming's Cold War spy hero James Bond, Agent 007, made the vodka martini iconic: He ordered dry Smirnoff martinis, stirred, not shaken. It's a fake fetish, by the way: It matters not whether a martini is shaken or stirred. Smirnoff has a  Russian name. . .almost all vodkas had Russian sounding names. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has resulted in stores taking Russian vodkas off their shelves, and saloon boycotts of Russian vodka. But Bond's sipping of Smirnoff was patriotic: for years it had been the flagship brand of the Heublein company of Hartford, Conn.

I had already boycotted Stolichnaya, the Russian vodka which, as it turns out, is now made in Latvia, an independent Baltic state that was once part of the Soviet Union. I had bought a bottle of Stoli on my way home from work at CBS Records in the early 1970s. I liked to pour myself a drink and watch the network news in my apartment on West 22nd Street. The top story was about how Russia was cracking down on Jews wanting to emigrate to Israel. In most cases, in New York State, liquor was not returnable or exchangeable once it left the store. But I went back to the store, told them it was a gift for a friend who asked for a certain brand, and I bought the wrong one. I felt crazy neurotic about this, but they were accommodating, so I left with a bottle of Finlandia, from Finland. Its glacial glass bubble-shaped design felt good to grip. It remained my preferred vodka until the end, in 2010.

I was introduced to vodka martinis by my late friend Elliot, whose family owned D's restaurant in Syosset, which was as close as Long Island got to fine dining in the 1960s. Elliot was tall and mustachiod, and looked good in the bartender's vest he wore at the restaurant, mixing drinks on Saturday night. Elliot preferred shaking martinis, because it was like a little show for the customers.  He'd take a short break, we'd go outside for a few tokes, and come back to the bar.

It was soon evident that as elegant as a straight-up vodka martini looked and tasted, it was also the effect I was after. In the summer of 1972, when I had graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder, Elliot and I spent the summer at my mother's unoccupied condo in North Miami Beach. We weren't far from the hotel/clubs near the north end of Collins Avenue, like the Newport. And a lounge band Elliot had seen in Las Vegas while he was stalking Elvis Presley, called Los Blues, was playing. We went to the hot and crowded club and I ordered a vodka and tonic. I told Elliot, "I'm not getting any buzz from this at all." He knew all about watered down drinks, so he suggested I order a vodka martini. I ordered it on the rocks, because no one in the place was drinking martinis. It was all beer or tonic drinks. It was a slight improvement. This was true of almost any rock club or night club; I don't think I ever ordered a vodka martini at My Father's Place in Roslyn: I knew the bartenders, and they were always very busy. I'd just order a double shot of Smirnoff on the rocks. I did order a vodka martini once at the Bottom Line, and it was subpar: it tasted 50-50 vodka and vermouth, when the correct perentage should be 98 parts vodka to two parts vermouth for an extra dry martini. Or, as some wags liked to tell a bartender: "pass the vermouth bottle over the cocktail shaker, but don't open it." Or, just say, "vermouth" in the direction of the shaker. At a restaurant in Queens where I had gone to relapse in the early 2000s, I ordered a Finlandia vodka martini, no vermouth. The bartender said: "then it's not really a martini." I promised never to speak to patronize this patronizing bartender again, and I kept my word.

I was a vodka sleuth. I would frequent the Russian Tea Room next to Carnegie Hall on West 57th Street, where an editor friend gave me $100 advance on a story just to try all the vodkas on display. I liked the Polish Zubrowska, which came with a blade of bison grass.  Zubrovka disappeared for a number of years because the blade contained coumarin, a blood thinner; it has supposedly made a comeback and is now coumarin-free. And it was one of the few places in the city that sold Pertsovka, a red pepper flavored vodka. When Truman Capote mentioned Pertsovka in a short story, I immediately went to one the city's larger liquor stores to buy a bottle. It could really spice up a bloody mary, but it was better as a chilled shot on a cold winter's day.

As vodka became more popular, more countries started exporting it to the United States. At an Irish bar on West 72nd Street I ordered Celtic vodka on the rocks once. The bartender laughed at me. Instead, he went to the shelf and gave me a few shots of clear Irish moonshine. I was told by colleagues I went into a nasty blackout, in which I said and did things I did not recall at all.

Before I left for Russia for the 1987 Billy Joel tour, word was passed to me that a VIP there would really appreciate a bottle of Smirnoff Silver (90 proof) vodka. It was like being asked to carry coals to Newcastle, but what the heck: a messenger appeared at my Moscow hotel, I handed off the bottle, without knowing who the recipient was. In our westerners-only hotel, Stolichnaya and other export brands were available for purchase with our dollars. Most Russians drank far inferior, generic vodka that would come in a bottle, perhaps plastic, with a tear-off cap. The idea was that vodka drinking Russians would always finish the bottle as soon as it was opened: Most of the time, groups of three would share their rubles to share the bottle until it was gone.

During this tour I also made friends with a Russian journalist, who had official state journalist-endorsed credentials so he, unlike other typical Russian citizens, was allowed in our hotel. I was a little skeptical at first, but he was a good guy who wrote about records for the youth magazines, using the pen name "Boris Karloff." A few years later, Boris Karloff became an editor at the slightly alternative weekly Komsomolskaya Pravda, its name reflecting its official status as the broadsheet of the Communist youth organization. He asked me to write a story about why Russia was losing the vodka war in America: Stoli's market share was plummeting, and Sweden's Absolut had become the go-to vodka thanks to its inventive, celebrity driven ad campaign: "Absolut Warhol," for example, with Andy's (paid) endorsement. At the bottom of the page is my story that led the business section one day in 1995:

I did a number of interviews for the story with vodka manufacturers, marketing and advertising analysts. The problem with Stolichnaya is that they had no marketing plans, no sales plan. Sound familiar?  Worse than that, after Communism, they didn't bother to register their trademark, so buying Stoli became a dicey proposition. During the last three decades, in fact, liquor companies and their parents have been bought and resold to so many international conglomerates that it's hard to keep track of who owns what, and where it is made. But at the time, when Hartford's Heublein made both Smirnoff and the lower priced Popov, I asked their marketing VP what the difference was. He told me it was exactly the same stuff, with Popov going through the distilling process two or three times, while Smirnoff went through the distillery five or seven times, for that extra smoothness. I still have the story, but Boris Karloff translated it into Russian for publication. I do not speak Russian, but I am trying to learn a few words of Ukranian. Some Ukranian vodkas include Ukranian Heritage rye vodka, and Khor, distilled from corn, so it's gluten-free.