Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  “Smell alone?” I said.

  “This is only by smell,” she said. “The minute you put it in your mouth, it’s game over. The difference is night and day.”

  She could imagine some wines that would be less obvious—Beaujolais, for instance, has less tannin than most red wines—but basically she thought that the astringency of red wine would be a giveaway if you were allowed to taste as well as smell. She offered to demonstrate this on the spot, and after ducking across the hall into her lab she returned with two wines in black glasses for me to taste. I tried both of them, and then I said, “The first one was red and the second one was white.”

  Professor Noble seemed taken aback. “It was the other way around,” she said.

  She was kind enough to come up with some mitigating circumstances. “It could have been test anxiety,” she said. Then she tasted the wines and added, “I should have gotten a different red wine. This is not as astringent as I thought.” Then she said that the red was, in fact, a weird wine, from Georgia. She didn’t mean Georgia as in Tbilisi, where wine consumption is among the highest in the world; she meant Georgia as in Waycross. Then she mentioned that I hadn’t had a warm-up taste.

  I tried to help her think of other excuses. I told her the sun was in my eyes. I thought I’d reserve my other standard excuse—the ball hit a pebble—just in case she suggested that we do the Test again.

  Professor Noble said she’d ask around among other faculty members whose concerns were most likely to have included a red-white test, but by the weekend of the test that Bruce Neyers had agreed to set up she had e-mailed me that no one at Davis seemed to know about such a test. (Neither, it later turned out, did the people in charge of the Culinary Institute of America’s six-week California course that our winery guide had apparently been referring to.) By chance, both of my sons-in-law, Brian and Alex, were in San Francisco that weekend, and they were willing to act as tasters. Both of them have some interest in wine. My daughters, neither of whom drinks much wine, opted out; when we discussed the test over dinner in San Francisco the night before we were to drive up to Bruce’s house, someone suggested that the sort of wine descriptors my younger daughter would use if asked to taste two wines might be “yucky” and “yuckier.” Both of my sons-in-law seemed pretty free of test anxiety. “I’m not worried about failing,” Alex said, partway through dinner. “I’m worried about failing and Brian passing.”

  Rather than repeat the sort of test he’d taken years before, Bruce had avoided wines he considered particularly likely to fool the tasters; he had gathered eight French wines that he thought of as typical products of the grapes they’d been made from. Not wanting to skew the results, I didn’t mention what Ann Noble had told me about the way to increase your odds—take about three sips instead of one, building up the astringency of the tannin if it’s red wine to produce a drying sensation in your mouth that would be hard to miss. As Bruce stood where he couldn’t be observed and poured the wine into black glasses, he said that a couple of visiting wine retailers from Springfield, Missouri, sometimes known as the Gateway to the Ozarks, had dropped in just before we arrived and identified eight out of eight wines. Although he insisted he was telling the truth, I figured he was trying to make Brian and Alex nervous with some sort of Napa Valley version of trash talk, and I tried to keep them calm. “I want you to know that I’m totally evenhanded on this,” I said to them. “Either one of you guys can be humiliated. I don’t care which one it is.”

  As it turned out, they both did pretty well. Each person, wearing sunglasses as an added security measure, was asked to go through the wines twice—once trying to identify the color by smell, and then by taste. Alex got seven out of eight both times. Brian got only four by taste, but he got six by smell. By taste, both of them misidentified as white a Sancerre rouge made from Pinot Noir grapes in the Loire Valley. That was also one of two wines misidentified when tasted by another guest, Larry Bain, a San Francisco restaurant proprietor considered by Bruce to be knowledgeable in oenological matters—which means that if your brother-in-law is particularly arrogant about the sophistication of his palate you might consider keeping a bottle of Reverdy Sancerre rouge on hand, along with a black glass and a pair of sunglasses.

  And what other information did the test at Bruce’s provide? Taking an average of the three participants I witnessed—if Bruce’s earlier guests really were from Missouri, they will understand that I can’t count anything I didn’t see with my own eyes—I concluded that experienced wine drinkers can tell red from white by taste about 70 percent of the time, as long as the test is being administered by someone who isn’t interested in trying to fool them. That made me wonder whether there were similar statistics somewhere in a file drawer in Davis. If the Test never existed, after all, what test was that young man who showed us around the New York State winery taking when he got three out of seven? What test did I keep hearing about in California all those years? I sometimes ponder these questions when I listen to wine talk while sipping the amber microbrew the waiter brought when I asked him if he had any fancy beers on tap. At least, I think it’s an amber microbrew.

  2002

  “Sweets?”

  THE RUSSIAN GOD

  VICTOR EROFEYEV

  In the beginning was the word. And the word was with God. And the word was “vodka.” In the vast but secluded expanse of Russia, vodka gives and vodka takes away. At the start of the twentieth century, a third of the Russian Army was supported by the excise duties paid on the Smirnov brand alone. At the same time, vodka has inflicted more suffering on the country than any war has. Some fourteen thousand Russian soldiers were killed during the ten-year occupation of Afghanistan, but more than thirty thousand Russians die of alcohol poisoning every year. The yearly consumption of alcohol is higher here than anywhere else in the world (almost four gallons of pure alcohol per capita, at least half of it in the form of vodka), and vodka has scarred virtually every family, just as the Second World War and the repressions of Stalin’s regime did. (The only thing I know about my mother’s father, for instance—other than that he divorced my grandmother soon after they were married—is that he was an alcoholic.) The very mention of the word “vodka” triggers unpredictable behavior in Russians. It seems to punch a hole directly into the subconscious, setting off a range of odd gestures and facial expressions. Some people wring their hands; some grin idiotically or snap their fingers; others sink into sullen silence. But no one, high or low, is left indifferent. More than by any political system, we are all held hostage by vodka. It menaces and it chastises; it demands sacrifices. It is both a catalyst of procreation and its scourge. It dictates who is born and who dies. In short, vodka is the Russian god. And, in 2003, that god will celebrate his five hundredth birthday.

  One day in the early 1970s, Andrei Gromyko, the Soviet foreign minister, was traveling back to Moscow from his government dacha in the village of Zavidovo. His driver that day was Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the Communist Party. The two leaders were alone in the car, and Gromyko felt able to broach a sore subject. “Leonid Ilyich,” he said, “something has to be done about vodka. The people are turning into alcoholics.”

  Brezhnev didn’t answer. Five minutes later, Gromyko was regretting having raised the issue when Brezhnev suddenly replied, “Andrei, there’s no way the Russian people can do without it.”

  I heard this anecdote from Mikhail Gorbachev—who had heard it from Gromyko himself—when I paid him a visit, earlier this year, to talk about the vodka anniversary. We sat in his sombre, English-style office on Leningrad Prospect, as his late wife, Raisa Maximovna, gazed down at us from a large oil portrait.

  As everyone in Russia knows, Gorbachev disagreed with Brezhnev, and he became the only Russian leader in the history of vodka to launch a relentless campaign to eradicate it. “The statistics were appalling,” he told me. “Injuries in the workplace, falling productivity, diminishing life expectancy, accidents on the roads and railways. In 1
972, they discussed the problem in the Politburo, but deferred it. It was impossible to solve, because the state budget itself was ‘drunk’—it relied on the income from vodka sales. Stalin set it up that way—temporarily, but there’s nothing as permanent as a temporary decision. In Brezhnev’s time, the ‘drunken’ component of the budget increased from 100 billion rubles to 170 billion—that was how much profit vodka brought to the state.” He went on, “In the course of my career, I saw massive drunkenness in the Party. Brezhnev drank, especially at the beginning. Yeltsin even used the fact that he drank to attract women—‘He’s just the same as we are!’ Women couldn’t keep their hands out of his pants. But in the West they were afraid—he had his finger on the nuclear button.”

  In May 1985, just two months after Gorbachev became the Party’s general secretary, he issued a decree entitled “On Measures to Overcome Drunkenness and Alcoholism.” He began his war on vodka by testing the public’s commitment with a survey that was carried out in two hundred of the country’s leading factories. The factory workers responded that they were against prohibition but in favor of restrictions on the use of alcohol. In practice, however, the anti-alcohol campaign turned into one of Communism’s typical “bureaucratic excesses.” Gorbachev destroyed vodka factories; closed most liquor stores; banned the serving of alcohol at receptions in Soviet embassies abroad; and, finally, even bulldozed vineyards in the Crimea, Georgia, Moldavia, the Kuban, and Stavropol—all to the howls and moans of the drinking nation, which soon dubbed him “the mineral-water secretary.” Although the campaign, according to Gorbachev, led to “wives finally getting to see their husbands”—the birthrate rose, and so did life expectancy—some people started hoarding sugar to make moonshine, thereby creating an extreme sugar shortage. Others poisoned themselves with more dangerous intoxicants, including brake fluid. I remember, in those days, coming across a sign in a village store not far from Kostroma, near the northern end of the Volga: EAU DE COLOGNE ON SALE FROM 2 P.M. In the restaurants in Kostroma itself, the waiters were surreptitiously serving liquor in teacups.

  Perhaps because Gorbachev came from south Stavropol, an area of Russia where, atypically, people consume mostly wine, he had failed to appreciate the extent of vodka’s psychological influence. In the 1980s, in a country where vodka had become a currency that was often more reliable than the ruble, and where drunkenness was a factor in more than 70 percent of murders, vodka proved to be stronger than the power structures that Gorbachev had at his command. When he saw the poisoning statistics, he told me, he gave up. Perhaps the statistics had been distorted, in order to undermine his authority, he suggested bitterly. But then he laughed and told an old joke on himself: “There was this long line for vodka, and one poor guy couldn’t stand it any longer. ‘I’m going to the Kremlin, to kill Gorbachev,’ he said. An hour later, he came back. The line was still there, and everyone asked him, ‘Did you kill him?’ ‘Kill him!’ he said. ‘The line for that’s even longer than this one!’”

  Little has been recorded about the actual invention of vodka, and there is really nothing surprising in that: in Russia, vodka is thought of as a sacred and eternal substance, impervious to historical interpretation. In 1977, American vodka companies accused the Soviet distillers who were trying to make it in the U.S. market of “inauthenticity,” and the ensuing commercial scandal lent some impetus to the study of vodka’s history. But the cruelest blow was struck later that year, when Poland, at the time a faithful member of the Warsaw Pact, declared that vodka was really a Polish drink and that Russians had no right to use the name “vodka” for the alcohol they were producing. Alarmed Soviet functionaries searched for someone who could reconstruct the genesis of the drink and settled on a historian named William Pokhlebkin, who soon produced a treatise showing that the Poles had begun making vodka several decades after the Russians. (Pokhlebkin was killed, two years ago, in his apartment in the town of Podolsk, some twenty-five miles south of Moscow; one rumor has it that the murderer was a vengeful Pole.)

  Some historians compare the Russian national dependence on vodka to the Tatar yoke, and there’s a certain historical irony to the analogy. According to legend, vodka was first produced by monks at the Chudov Monastery, in the Kremlin, in the late fifteenth century, around the same time that the Russians finally freed themselves of Tatar rule. At first, the monks worked with alcohol imported from Genoa, through the Crimean port of Feodosiya. Later, it became common to make vodka out of the local grain alcohol, which was produced from rye or wheat and soft spring water. Almost everything about this story seems overly symbolic: the involvement of men of God, the name of the monastery, which no longer exists (chudov means “miraculous”), and its setting in the Russian capital. Evidently, many of the documents relating to the birth of vodka were destroyed in the mid-seventeenth century by the Russian Orthodox Church, which later declared vodka an invention of the Devil. (This despite the fact that Russian clergymen themselves have always had a healthy respect for the drink.)

  The act of mixing alcohol with water could be a carryover from Mediterranean culture—in particular from the ancient Greeks, who mixed their wine with water—but it is more likely that the mixture was initially intended as a disinfectant for the treatment of wounds. Vodka quickly escaped the grip of medicine, however, and transubstantiated into the “burnt wine” some Swedes reminisced about after an expedition to Moscow in 1505. A few decades later, that burnt wine had set all of Russia aflame. The drink became so popular that by 1533 the Russian state had farmed out vodka production to local tavern owners, who—although they had to kiss the cross and swear to tell the truth—were soon wallowing in corruption. In the centuries before, when people had drunk mead, drunkenness was reserved for occasions of “revelry” vodka transformed that revelry into the status quo.

  The good times were short-lived. In 1648, a tavern revolt broke out in Moscow and then spread to other towns. The situation was dire. A third of the male population was in debt to the taverns, and for several years the peasants had been so drunk that they hadn’t bothered to cultivate the land. In an attempt to put things right, the state assumed a monopoly on the sale of vodka, which meant that the vodka distillers’ profits fell. This was when vodka acquired its long-term doppelgänger—home brew. People learned how to make a vodkalike drink at home and, in defiance of all prohibitions, continue to make it to this day. (Rural populations consume as many as four and half bottles of home brew for every bottle of vodka.) So far, the state has abrogated its own monopoly six times (the last time under Yeltsin, in 1992), and then reinstated it (in 1993, Yeltsin took fright at the rapid criminalization of the vodka sector), but each reversal has only tightened the grip of dipsomania.

  “I feel sorry for the Russian people, who drink so much!” Tsar Alexander III told his minister of finance, Sergei Witte. In 1894, Witte launched a wide-reaching initiative to improve the quality of vodka, and thereby firm up the state monopoly. Dmitry Mendeleyev, the god of Russian chemistry, was brought in to do the job. Until then, vodka had been made simply, by processing equal volumes of alcohol and water with a number of trace additives to soften the taste. (Stolichnaya, for instance, has a small amount of sugar.) The water-alcohol mixture was then filtered, using charcoal. Mendeleyev observed that when alcohol and water were combined there was a mysterious contraction of the total mixture. (500 milliliters of water and 500 milliliters of alcohol produce 941 milliliters of vodka.) In order to obtain what he asserted was the optimum proportion of alcohol—40 percent—Mendeleyev said, water and alcohol needed to be measured not by volume but by weight. At the same time, the Russian physiologist Nikolai Volovich determined that the most beneficial dose of vodka to stimulate the working of the heart and to cleanse the blood was fifty grams a day. Temperance societies began to form across the country, but before they could have an effect the First World War began, and prohibition was introduced.

  Prohibition remained in force during the 1917 Revolution and the civil war that followe
d, though followers of Reds and Whites alike took advantage of the mêlée to loot the vodka warehouses and drink to excess. (Pokhlebkin, in his treatise, jocularly suggested that the Reds won because they guarded the warehouses better and punished drunkenness by shooting.) Prohibition was repealed under Lenin in the mid-1920s, in a bid for popularity. He authorized the production of rykovka, a milder form of vodka, which was 30 percent alcohol. (It was named after the finance minister at the time, Aleksei Rykov.) But after Lenin died, vodka returned to its full strength, and its sale helped pay for the socialist industrialization of the USSR.

  When the war against Hitler began, every Russian soldier at the front was given a daily “commissar’s ration” of a hundred grams, as stipulated by the ministry of defense. Vodka manufacturers claim that the drink was as important as Katyusha rocket launchers in the victory over Nazism, because it bolstered the Russian army’s spirits. But Vladimir Nuzhny, a professor of narcology and one of Russia’s best-known theoreticians of alcoholism, thinks otherwise. Those hundred grams were a disaster for the entire postwar generation, he told me. Alcohol dependence soared, and the result was a downward spiral of dissolution that continued into the 1960s. When the monopoly on vodka production was abolished again, in the early 1990s, the vodka sector was thrown into chaos: the rich New Russians, who kick-started the motor of Russian “bandit” capitalism, were essentially old-fashioned bootleggers.

  Mendeleyev not only created the classic standard for Russian vodka; he also gave the concoction its name. For several centuries, official documents had referred to vodka as “grain wine.” To this day, there are probably more euphemisms for vodka than for anything other than the male sex organ. Its aliases range from “hot water,” “the mono-polka,” “the bubble,” “crankshaft,” “the bitter stuff,” and “the white stuff” to the classic Soviet “half liter” and “quarter bottle” (also known as a “daughter”). Etymologically, the word “vodka” is derived from voda, the Russian word for “water.” (The addition of the letter “k” makes it diminutive.)