Vodka

My favirite vodka: Imperia (Русский Стандарт)

One of my personal etymological and alcoholic favorites, Vodka (водка), is another Russian borrowing that was first recorded in English in 1801.  The drink, however, is many centuries older with the first “identifiable” vodka appearing in Poland in the 11th Century and in Russia in the late 14th Century.

The word vodka is a diminutive from the Slavic voda (вода), “water.”  The colorless liquid does look like water, but it was named so because such spirits were once – and in Russia, for instance, still are thought to be essential to life as water.  Scottish / Irish whiskey and Swedish aquavit also derive their names from the word “water.”

A kind of distilled liquor resembling what would later become defined by the Russian word vodka, was introduced to Russia in 1386 when the Genoese ambassadors gifted the aqua vitae (“the water of life”) to Grand Duke Dmitry Donskoy.  The drink was distilled from the grape and was considered to be a concentrate, a “spirit” of wine (spiritus vini in Latin).  Hence the origin of the English word spirit and Russian word spirt to denote hard liquor.

Since 1430, the “bread wine” – as vodka was originally called in Russia – was distilled exclusively in the Grand Duchy of Moscow according to a special recipe by a monk named Isidore from the Chudov Monastery inside the Moscow Kremlin.  Until the 18th Century the drink had a relatively low alcohol content and was expensive.

Today vodka is one of the world’s most popular liquors.  It is distilled from fermented substances, such as grain or potatoes.  It is composed primarily from water and ethanol and contains 40% alcohol by volume.

There is one downside though, it is statistically proven that countries in the vodka belt – Eastern European and Nordic countries – have a higher mortality rate due to the consumption of this devilishly satisfying elixir.