What's Old is New Again

Your Polish dzia-dzia's moonshine has gone luxury. Bottles of nalewki, (pronounced nah-LEV-key) making a come back with $25 half liters.


The latest trend in Poland's drinks industry is small-batch, expensive versions of traditional homemade fruit-infused vodka. Poles are getting a chance to return to their drinking roots — if they're willing to shell out higher prices for tasty hooch made on the family farm.

Equipment normally used is a de-pitting machine, a 25-ton press and a small bottling machine. The sun and alcohol reaps the best things from the fruits — taste, smell, color.

After a couple months, the taste is adjusted with sugar composing a taste as you would with wine or whiskey. Then it's stored away in the cellar to mature for at least a year before bottling.

The stuff is being sold in exclusive liquor shops in France and Switzerland. Watch for it coming to America in the next year or so.

Unlike mass-market flavored vodkas, which are often colorless and have more of the fiery taste of the alcohol, these infusions are a mellower experience, with richer, complex flavors and a sweeter taste better suited to sipping as aperitifs than drinking by the shot.

Poland's bigger drinks makers, such as Polmos Lublin, are going after the handcrafted competition with their own products. The company owns a majority stake in Nalewki i Inne, whose specialty shops sell over 25 different flavors, ranging from cranberry to blackthorn to wild plum. Polmos Lublin — a vodka maker — supplies the alcohol base from its distillery in eastern Poland. While Stolichnaya and Finlandia make flavor-infused or flavored vodkas, they are distilled differently and aren't nalewki.

When communism collapsed in Poland in 1989, the handful of well-heeled Poles sipped western whiskies and cognac. Now, many are returning to their native drinking tradition, even as the economy grows at over 6 percent a year, putting more spending money in people's pocket. "There is a lot of interest in a return to tradition, in a return to our roots in Poland," said Polmos Lublin spokeswoman Dorota Zdanowska.


Primary source: AP


To paraphrase Henri Beraud, the French thinker: Drinking alcohol is life, tasting it - science, discussing it - art.