Zach Selch describes how Russians drink vodka at home in frozen glasses, not bars, and prefer it ice-cold in traditional half-liter bottles. American marketing pushes lukewarm vodka for flavor, but Russians care more about texture and mouthfeel.
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So I don't drink a lot of vodka, and I certainly don't order that much of it in bars, but I am in Moscow and that's what you drink here. And I have to say, I honestly don't come into bars that often, even in Moscow, to order vodka. Most of the time I've drunk vodka in Moscow, it's been at people's houses. But this was a special occasion. I wanted to to show what vodka in Moscow is like. That is very good vodka. Very, very good vodka. Most of the time that I've drunk vodka. In Russia, it's been in somebody's house. People will invite you over, they'll pop open a bottle, and I'll tell you what it used to be. You didn't see bottles with screw caps. Bottles would have a corkscrew, would have a cork, and you'd pop it with a corkscrew because the idea was, why the hell would you close a half-liter bottle of vodka once you opened it? And people would just sit around, a couple of friends, drink a half-liter of vodka. Then the bigger bottles, the fifths, came around and became more popular. But for the most part, it was these bottles of— half-liter bottles of vodka. Very nicely made, very pure. Sometimes people would flavor them with things like buffalo grass or pepper or something like that. But for the most part, just like this. And I know that in America now, marketing gurus are trying to tell us that we should drink lukewarm vodka. I'll tell you what, there is something about an ice-cold vodka in terms of the texture and the mouthfeel that really, you know, the whole argument I think in the States with marketing people is they're saying You know, you're gonna get more flavor with a warm vodka, but a lot of drinking vodka is also the texture and the mouthfeel. And when it's this cold in a frozen glass coming out of the freezer, you're gonna get a lot more texture, a lot more mouthfeel. It's almost gonna be like olive oil.
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