Stoli’s new $3,000 bottle of vodka: Expensive tastes good!
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‘What’s that?’ you ask.
Oh, this old thing? Just a $3,000 bottle of vodka.
Yup, it may not look like it, but in that glass in the foreground -- the one on the left -- resides a $50 taste of booze. It’s the Himalayan Edition of Russian vodka-maker Stolichnaya’s Pristine Water Series. I tasted it just the other day at the invitation of mixologist Aidan Demarest, who happens to be in possession of the only bottle currently in the country.
Yeah, that’s how I roll. (OK, OK, on the way home I stopped by Vons to pick up trash bags and 10 cans of Fancy Feast for my cat, so my life isn’t all glamour all the time.)
Anyway, the Stoli Elit Pristine Water series is a new thing, and the company will release only 300 bottles globally (most of these will end up in my suite at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas).
The astronomical price of a bottle is justified, says Stoli, by the type of water used. This particular water is sourced from the Himalayan mountains, from an underground reservoir that has been pooling fresh melted snow. The water is then combined with 100% winter wheat harvested from Russia’s Tambov region. (For those of you sorely out of touch with world geography and wheat-growing regions ideal for producing high-brow alcohol, that’s southeast of Moscow.)
As an added bonus, your little nest egg of inebriation comes in a hand-blown glass bottle with a gold-plated decorative ice pick -- handy for poking your eyes out when your next credit card bill comes.
‘So, how does it taste?’ you ask.
Although you can’t afford to know, I’ll tell you. It’s smooth and crisp -- with a shivery aftertaste, like an angel is giving you mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after your spouse divorces you for squandering junior’s college fund.
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--Jessica Gelt
