A tale of conflicting realities

How should we interpret the rise and rise of vodka in the UK? Let me offer you two possible scenarios. I'll call one the Road to Perdition, and the other Rosy-Fingered Dawn, for reasons that will shortly become obvious.

First of all, though, what is vodka, once you strip away all the marketing flimflam? It's alcohol with the flavour distilled out of it. It's a pure hit. It's the drug itself. Liquid hilarity, liquid amnesia, liquid oblivion, often in quick succession.

Personally, I find nothing more terrifying than one of those macho Eastern European meals accompanied by 17 little glasses of vodka, followed by a toast and obligatorily drained in one go.

Your hosts take it as an affront if you don't get drunk with them and land yourself a splitting headache, universal nausea and whole-body trembling the next day which, for a professional drinker like me, is a lose-lose situation.

One of the saddest spectacles

Vodka drunks in Poland or Russia, moreover, are one of the saddest spectacles I know: you see them, halfway through the morning, swaying in the freezing wind in a state of near-total anaesthesia, staggering down the pavement towards an absurd traffic accident or death by hypothermia, hidden behind a collection of dustbins. It probably all began with a 15-year-old's toast or two.

I'm not, of course, suggesting that everyone who likes the odd Smirnoff and Coke is pounding down the Road to Perdition. It's just that there's something knife-like about vodka at times and, in practical terms, its chief function is as a useful way of putting an alcoholic hit into a drink that doesn't taste of alcohol.

This may simply allow the flavour-timid to enjoy the same health-bringing social warmth as ale-lovers and winebibbers: great. But if you do happen to have an addictive personality then drinking for effect rather than flavour is always going to be a risky business, especially when you start to take the habit home.

A sign of moderation

A health visitor making a house-call would be liable to interpret a half-empty bottle of wine on the kitchen table as a sign of moderation; a half-empty bottle of vodka on the stairs nearly always means the opposite.

Last week, though, I found myself sitting in a bar in Knightsbridge listening to former estate agent Tim Day tell me all about a drink he had created called Wokka Saki. Despite its name, it is in fact a flavoured 40% vodka - flavoured, in this case, with sake and with unspecified flavour essences based on Asian fruits. More to the point, it didn't taste like vodka at all.

Aromatically, it had an intriguing floral charm, filled out with some of the yeasty warmth of saki, while its flavour was firmly marked by sake, too, with the vodka component providing a kind of viscous warmth, and the essences perfuming the aftertaste. It made attractive drinking, though I couldn't have managed a lot of it.

Creative blossoming of vodka

Eureka! Perhaps that's the point. One of the great revolutions to take place at the aspirational end of the UK on-trade over the past decade is the sudden creative blossoming of vodka, with exotic origins and flavoured variants galore. The more interest you take in a vodka's origin, or the more flavour you put into a vodka, the less likely you are to use it as a rapid-transit system to the nearest A&E department.

For all I know, there may be circles of vodka connoisseurs spending Monday nights carefully annotating the differences between Snow Queen from Kazakhstan and 42 Below from New Zealand, or deciding whether Grey Goose L'Orange is more subtle than Absolut Mandarin; I hope there are. The Rosy-Fingered Dawn scenario, in other words, is that vodka is ceasing to be mere alcohol, and becoming a sort of alternative malt whisky for lounge lizards, Islingtonians and those who have covered themselves in plasters from living life at the cutting edge.

But no sooner had I signed up to this gratifying vision than I stumbled across the AC Nielsen figures for vodka brands in the off-trade. Smirnoff is annihilatingly dominant - more than twice as big as the next brand.

Not much to get excited about

And what is the next brand? Er... Glen's. Not much to get excited about there, particularly when consumers can choose from an array of brands on shelf. And when I saw that the next three big movers are Chekov, Vladivar and Red Square, my spirits slumped further. The vodka hit parade, it would seem, is just that. They do say it's the hour before dawn that is the darkest.