Drink - Victoria Moore goes on a quest to satisfy her springtime Vodka cravings
My tiny little glass is filled with a pink liquid that has the brightness and translucency of a watermelon. It smells of damp gardens and Fry's Turkish Delight. When I touch it to my lips, the alcohol stings and my mouth fills with a soft fragrance that rushes up to my nose. Just as it threatens to cloy, the inside of my cheeks prove their susceptibility to the icy temperature of a liquid that cuts through with the still certainty of a glacier. Rose-petal vodka.
I imagine the liquor steeping for weeks in a flurry of freshly picked petals, pink at the tips, softening to a creamy yellow where they were attached to the stamen. Clare, with whom I am drinking, reminds me of the potions I made as a child: rainwater carefully collected from the hollows of leaves, grass cuttings, spiders' legs and, always, shredded rose petals. She says I made her swallow them down, thin brown spiders' legs and all, telling her that, if she did, she would be able to fly. The vodka is much more effective in this area than my concoctions ever were.
It has taken some determination to find it. Just a few years ago, flavoured vodka was to the new generation of earners what penny sweets had been to them 20 years before. It was hard to walk through Soho in London without tripping into some darkened bar with vodkas decorating the walls with bright colours like jars of boiled sweets. Now my old standby, Red on Greek Street - always a good place to drink until you toppled off your stool - has disappeared. The menacingly named Garlic and Shots bar on Frith Street is still there, but I don't feel up to it. In the end, to satisfy my springtime vodka craving, we have settled for something more upmarket. Wodka is a Polish restaurant where we can eat puffy buckwheat blinis with dark smoked salmon and chew on chunky, vinegary gherkins in between shots.
Wodka buys in a lot of its vodka, but it also makes some of its own. Strawberries and cherries are squashed to a pulp, mixed with sugar and then stirred into an alcohol that is 98 per cent proof. "Then we just leave it for a long time - a month, perhaps - for the flavours to mix."
Many traditionally flavoured Polish vodkas sound as though they come straight from some snow-sprinkled forest. From the Lancut distillery, you can buy Jarzebiak, made with essence of "lightly pre-frozen rowan-berries composed into a background of prune, raisin and fig essences", as well as the famous Zubrowka, which is made with bison grass which grows only in the Bialowieska Forest, and which has a blade of it in every bottle.
At Wodka, my favourite is the honey, served hot so that it soothes as it bites. I like it especially now, under the bright but grey sky, in between red and white wine as we are. Yet, Absolut flavours aside, it is harder to find than it was: time, perhaps, to start making one's own. Here is a recipe for colourless blackcurrant vodka:
Pour one litre of 96 per cent proof alcohol into a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid. Wrap 1kg of clean blackcurrants in muslin and, rather than immersing them, suspend them over the alcohol, taking care not to let them touch the liquid. Close the jar and leave in a warm spot for at least two months.
Over this time, the alcohol will absorb the rich aroma from the currants but not the pigment. When it's ready, chill and serve in glasses taken straight from the freezer. Your fingers will stick to the frosty bits on them, but that's all part of the fun.
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