WINE & SPIRITS

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"There's vodka made from sugar cane, rice, wheat, barley, corn—you name it," he says. Dorda believes that Polish vodka should be highly regulated to insure that only the finest ingredients are used. "In Russia, an estimated 46,000 people die every year from contaminated spirits, presumably called vodka," he says.

Chopin, the king of potato vodkas, has a super-premium sibling in rye-based Belvedere, distilled an hour's drive from Warsaw. Where the Chopin distillery is a countrified operation, Belvedere's facility is an industrial behemoth. With a highly secretive maze of control rooms, gauges and valves, it resembles an enormous space station come down to earth. Five-story-high copper stills, circuitous piping and enormous stainless steel rectification tanks (where the alcohol goes through its quadruple distillation) complete the science-fiction picture.

I wore a shower cap and paper lab coat before entering the hermetically sealed rooms where blending, testing and bottling occurs. Assembly-line workers give the gorgeous bottles the final seal before shipping them off to 55 countries.

After the tour, Clare Smith, an expert vodka mixologist from London, offered a primer on how to taste vodka. "There should be a balance between purity and character," she said. "Old World-style vodka, that is Eastern European style, has much more character than many of us are used to. We've come to expect our vodkas to be as neutral as possible."

"For me tasting is a very sensuous experience. It's in the second sip that the vodka reveals itself," she said. "Look for texture, body, mouth-feel and finish." Once we'd tasted the Belvedere, she pointed out its "white pepper mid-palate" and "oak-aged vanilla" finish. "The finish is long, which makes it great for cocktails."

After we'd tasted the richer, subtler Chopin, Smith mixed her own cocktail creations, each more delicious than the last. I left Poland as enamored of the country's vodkas as Pablo Picasso famously was. The artist, lauding postwar Paris, once said that his favorite things about the City of Lights were "Brigitte Bardot, modern jazz and Polish vodka."