Vodka

The shortest of the nine volumes — by design. Vodka is the spirit whose defining trait is what it removes, and a treatise on neutrality cannot afford to be long.

Volume VI argues two positions that bartenders trained in the post-Prohibition American canon often resist. First, that vodka is not tasteless — base material (wheat, rye, potato, grape) and water source produce measurable, defensible flavor differences, and the volume cites the laboratory work to prove it. Second, that vodka’s history is not the breezy marketing story of cosmopolitans and Smirnoff Mules but a story of state power: the Russian kabak monopoly system, the Polish propination feudal control of distillation rights, and the so-called Vodka Wars of the 1970s — a marketing fabrication whose lasting consequence was the EU’s category definition.

The middle of the volume covers the bottle-by-bottle: the production differences between Polish Belvedere and Russian Stolichnaya and French Grey Goose and the new wave of single-grain expressions. The chapters on the Smirnoff escape (the family’s flight from the Revolution and the brand’s American resurrection) and the espresso martini (the cocktail that revived vodka’s cultural standing in the 2010s) anchor the modern story.

Read this volume even — especially — if you think you do not like vodka. You may be arguing against a marketing campaign rather than a spirit.