Yeah, you read that right: Vodka, sparkling. The idea of carbonated vodka is either genius or stupid. I mean, you can pour your vodka into a little soda and it’s got plenty of carbonation right there, doesn’t it? Well, maybe you don’t want soda… maybe you just want sparkling vodka. Great idea! I think.

Those looking for a Coke-style fizz will be instantly disappointed in O2. The carbonation here is extremely light, and in a cocktail you’ll likely have trouble picking it out if you don’t already know it’s in there. Even straight, the carbonation is very light. It comes across more as a spicy, peppery note initially. Only after you think and roll it around for a few seconds do you realize it’s not a flavor that’s tickling your mouth but bubbles popping on your tongue.

O2 vodka comes from Britain and is distilled from grain, then filtered three times and bottled at 80 proof. Putting aside the carbonation factor, the flavor is very, very mild, surprising for a grain-based spirit. It’s got a hint of smoke and nuttiness, but otherwise is quite neutral.

O2 works well in cocktails, departing just the faintest amount of bubbling into the beverage. You can watch a couple of columns of bubbles rise up for a few minutes, then they dissipate.

If nothing else, O2 is at least an interesting conversation piece. All the more so if you try one of O2’s recommended cocktails, some of which include caviar and raw fish. (Check them out on the O2 website.) Whoa.

B+ / $33 / sparklingvodka.com

In the world of wine, Portugal is known for two major things: Expensive, fortified dessert wines (Vintage Port), and super-cheap whites (primarily from the Vinho Verde region). Recently, nearly 40 Portuguese wineries, importers, and distributors gathered in San Francisco to offer an updated perspective on the wines of Portugal. The verdict: About the same as it was in the ’70s.

That’s not meant as insult, and in fact I met a number of Portuguese winemakers who’d flown all the way here to show off their wines, standing stoic in their suits with nary a grin as they earnestly, yet calmly, intone that the wine you’re tasting costs 3 euros a bottle. It’s safe to say this is the only event I’ve attended where you could try both Mateus and Lancer’s — and yes, both brands are still around, though hardly as strong as they were 30 years ago.

On the other hand, a smattering of producers were on hand with Tawny and Vintage Ports, some of which were truly dazzling.

And then there were the oddities, wines made with every grape under the sun, many of which I’d never thought would work in Portugal — Pinot Noir!? — but far more that the average U.S. wine drinker will have never heard of: Trincadeira, Moreto, Bical. The list never stops.

I tasted nearly 40 wines at the event and, I’m sad to say, you won’t find a lot of them on the shelves at your local wine merchant. Many of these wines haven’t made it to the U.S. yet, and even fewer of them have arrived on the west coast. If you’re in New York, your odds are better, but I can’t imagine a lot of people will spend days seeking out a $12 bottle of Vinho Verde. (That’s pretty common here for Portuguese whites, though the dip as low as $6 or $7. Prices were unavailable for most of these bottlings and aren’t included below.)

Some highlights. A lot of Portuguese white is surprisingly good. At its best, Vinho Verde can be a refreshing, lemon- and apple-like wine with light floral notes and without that overpowering butter and woodiness in a lot of American whites. Look for wines made from Alvarinho grapes, if you can find them. My favorite of all, a bottle called Clemen Reserva (I doubt there’s a non-Reserva), which embodied all the characteristics I mentioned above; it’s a blend of Alvarinho and Trajadura grapes.

Some interesting reds emerged, too: Goanvi sells a full line of reds, and the two I tried were surprisingly nice. The cost of the Capote Velho Reserva, a blend of Syrah, Touriga Nacional, and Aragones? $6.

Naturally, there was plenty of Port to be had, though many of the major producers were absent from this event. Barros’ 1957 Colheita was a treat, a wonderful, caramel-and-chocolate sipper that has mellowed perfectly in 51 years. Quinta do Portal’s 2003 Vintage Port, while representing a much younger wine, was surprisingly mellow for being in the bottle for such a short time. If you are looking for Vintage Port to drink now and don’t want to pay out the nose (maybe $60, if you can find it), I highly recommend tracking this bottle down.

Bottom line: Looking for something light, easy, and fun? Serve a Vinho Verde and ask your guests to guess what it is. For a more unique experience, pick up a Portuguese red. Quality is all over the map, but you likely won’t spend a fortune on the experiment.

A full tasting report follows.

Vini Portugal Full Tasting Report

2005 Entre II Santos Doc Bairrada - B
2005 Campolargo Doc Bairrada - C
2005 Coisas Antigas Doc Bairrada - B+
2005 PV VT’05 DOC Douro - B
2007 Terras de Alter Fado - A-
2006 Terras de Alter Fado Reserva - B
2005 Ramos-Pinto Adriano White - B-
2006 Ramos-Pinto Adriano Red - B-
2004 Ramos-Pinto Duas Quintas Reserva - C+
NV Ramos-Pinto Porto Quinta Ervamoira 10 Years - B+
NV Ramos-Pinto Porto Quinta Ervamoira 20 Years - B+
NV Ramos-Pinto Porto Reserva Collector - B
1998 Krohn Colheita - B
1987 Krohn Colheita - B-
1978 Krohn Colheita - B+
NV Krohn Lagrima - B
2007 Catarina Regional Terras Do Sado Peninsula De Setubal - B+
2006 Casa Santos Lima Sousao, Regional Estremadura - C+
2006 Palha-Canas Regional Estremadura - C+
2005 Goanvi Capote Velho Reserva - A-
2006 Goanvi Terra Grande - A-
2003 Quinta do Portal Grande Reserva - B
NV Quinta do Portal Moscatel - A-
2003 Quinta do Portal Vintage Port - A
NV Quinta do Portal 30 Year Tawny - B+
NV Quinta do Portal 40 Year Tawny - A-
2007 Azul Vinho Verde - D
2006 Companhia Das Lezirias Fernao Pires - B+
2007 Clemen Reserva Vinho Verde - A
NV Barros Very Old Dry White Port - B
1957 Barros Colheita Port - A
1975 Barros Colheita Port - A-
1994 Barros Colheita Port - B
2005 Barros Vintage Port - A-
1995 Smith Woodhouse Late Bottled Vintage Port - B+
2005 Post Scriptum Douro - B
2005 Messias Vintage Port - B+

Continuing on the summer theme here at Drinkhacker we turn to this unique summer beer, a pre-mixed shandy! Leinie’s Summer Shandy is a Weiss beer mixed with lemonade (or at least, per the bottle, “with natural lemonade flavor”), and it doesn’t take long to find both flavors in the bottle.

The beer side is very light, almost like a Mexican lager, but any nuance of Weiss beer is lost to the lemon overtones, which are obvious in every sip. Alas, it’s less lemonade and more lemon juice. Frankly I think the brew is missing some sweetness that would make it taste a bit more like a homemade shandy.

Overall impression: Not bad, very drinkable, light (just 4.2 percent alcohol), and indeed very “summery,” just as the name implies. A little tampering with the recipe ought to make this brew a real standout.

B / $8 per six-pack / leinie.com

Summer is nearly here, but summer fruit is already available at the market. Here’s a new recipe for strawberries that doesn’t have the overpowering sweetness of a frozen daiquiri.

Vaya Con Fresas (Go With Strawberries)
4 strawberries, destemmed
2 oz. spiced rum (preferably Kilo Kai)
1/2 oz. peach-flavored brandy
1/2 oz. Chambord
1/2 oz. agave nectar

In a tall rocks glass, muddle the strawberries until they’re thoroughly crushed. Add remaining ingredients and stir. Fill with ice and stir again until cold.

Sub in sugar for the agave nectar if you don’t have it. For fun, sub tequila for the rum, and any other flavoring for the peach brandy (maybe maraschino, Cointreau, or even melon liqueur).

Sloe Gin Fizzes were the first cocktail I mastered, but it’s been years since I’ve had one. No reason why, really. Sloe gin, a liqueur flavored with sloe berries, the fruit of the blackthorn tree, has hardly seen the renaissance that other spirits have in recent years. There hasn’t exactly been a clamoring for the stuff in the market.

Well, Plymouth (which I’m on record as stating, unequivocally, makes the best gin on the market) is trying to change that by introducing a premium sloe gin, perhaps the first of its kind. Plymouth threw a swanky party for its new bottling last night at Bourbon & Branch here in San Francisco, and I was fortunate enough to try the spirit along with a number of cocktails made with it.

First, a bit more about sloe gin: It’s made by steeping sloe berries in gin (Plymouth gin, of course), and watered down to 52 proof. 26 percent alcohol makes it a pretty standard liqueur rather than a true gin, so plan accordingly. Served straight, it’s quite tart, really too sour to enjoy on its own, but in cocktails it really shines.

Sloe gin’s natural habitat is the Sloe Gin Fizz, and in its preparation here (with fresh lemon juice, simple syrup, fresh egg white, and a splash of club soda) it was a real delight, creamy, with a good mix of sweet and sour. In a good cocktail, sloe gin tastes a lot like cranberry, and in The Wibble (recipe below), you get the essence of sloe gin at its best. This concoction, which includes grapefruit juice and blackberry liqueur, is like a Cosmo on steroids. Really good.

Amazingly, the addition of sloe gin to gin and Campari made the “Sloegronie” impressively drinkable, still quite bitter, but much better than a real Negroni. Finally, I finished up the night with Plymouth’s Southside (pictured, because it was so cool looking), which actually didn’t include sloe gin at all. Essentially a Mojito with gin instead of rum, I was impressed with how much more interesting this now-tired drink could be. Sub in lemon for lime and add a shot of sloe gin and you’ve got a Sloe Gin Genie (pictured at top, next to the bottle). I’ll give it a try when I get a bottle of my own to play with.

Plymouth Sloe Gin isn’t quite yet available in the U.S. yet, but keep an eye out for it. (If it’s sold at the same price here as it is in Britain, it’ll run about $35 a bottle.)

The Wibble
1 oz. Plymouth Gin
1 oz. Plymouth Sloe Gin
1 oz. freshly squeezed grapefruit juice
1/4 oz. freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/8 oz. simple syrup
1/8 oz. Wild Blackberry Liqueur (Creme de Mure)

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

Get ready for this. 3 is the world’s only soybean vodka. And by “soybean vodka” I mean “vodka that’s made from soybeans.” No, really.

If you were to ask me what a soybean vodka might taste like, I’d probably come up with something like this: A meaty spirit with strong overtones of bitter herbal liqueurs — think Jagermeister or Fernet Branca — pungent like a Turkish bazaar. It’s the least-neutral “neutral” spirit I’ve ever tasted.

That isn’t to say it’s terrible. I can’t imagine drinking this straight for long (despite the bold claim on a sticker affixed to the bottle that it’s scored a “Perfect 100 Rating!”), but in certain heavily herbal/bitter drinks — something with Campari or Sambuca, perhaps? — it would probably work well. That said, most people looking for something to toss a splash of tonic into are going to be knocked off their barstools.

C+ / $20 / 3vodka.com

Today I wrapped up two months of filling in as the interim editor-in-chief of Mac|Life magazine. Fun times, and some really good people there (click the thumbnail to see the staff in all its glory).

To celebrate the completion of our June issue and go out with a bang, I created this cocktail specifically for the magazine. May all Apple fiends drink it up with gusto!

The Mac|Life Cocktail
2 oz. Tito’s Handmade Vodka (no substitutes! Tito’s is the official vodka of Mac|Life)
3/4 oz. St. Germain liqueur
1/4 oz. Calvados (or Applejack)
1 dash peach bitters

Shake with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with an apple slice.

And there you have it. Oh, and if you’re a Windows or Linux guy, I promise you’ll like the concoction as well. Garnish with a peach slice instead if you hate Steve Jobs. (See also: The iPhone Martini.)

Premixed cocktails are usually a mixed bag. In fact, they’re hardly cocktails at all but rather heavily carbonated malt liquor, watered down to about 6 or 8 percent alcohol and flavored with a variety of components that can be either reasonably tasty or very nasty.

Bacardi (which makes it share of the aforementioned malt liquor drinks) offers something new with the Bacardi Classic Cocktail Mojito, a pre-mixed cocktail that continues to build on the Mojito craze, the drink that simply will not die.

Thankfully, this is something new. Bacardi Classic Cocktail Mojito is 15 percent alcohol and made from real rum and natural flavors, not leftover King Cobra.

The taste is surprisingly good, with real rum, lime, and mint present all in the glass. The sugar flavor is a little off, tasting more saccharine than it should, but overall it’s quite pleasant. Note that the drink is not carbonated (a traditional Mojito includes club soda), so you might want to add a little if you need fizz… but then you’ll probably want to add rum too, to compensate.

This would be a fine item to serve at a party when you don’t have time to make fresh cocktails and guests aren’t expecting the world out of you. Just pour it over crushed ice and add some fresh mint and maybe a squeeze of fresh lime… most people won’t know the difference.

B / $20 (1.75-liter bottle) / bacardi.com

“Red Nosed Taster” writes: Tasting expensive but not so good wine on my trip to the wine country last weekend made me think… How do they price wines anyway? A recent study showed that in blind tastings, cheaper wines consistently do better than their more expensive brethren. I was hoping you could elaborate on this mysterious world in your blog.

Like any product, wine prices are determined by myriad inputs. It starts with the type of grapes used, where the grapes are grown, and what the yield of those grape vines are. (Grapes pruned down to two tons per acre are more expensive than those pruned to five tons per acre.) Then there’s who’s making the wine and how they make it. Everything from the type of barrels used to age the wine to whether cork or a screwcap is used to close up the bottle plays into it.

But all of that is academic. Of course, the real price of a bottle of wine ultimately comes down to what the market will bear. Wine pricing is one of the truer examples of pure supply and demand pricing you’ll find in economics. Because there’s a finite supply of any given wine in a year, and a new, but different, supply the following year, you’ll almost always see prices change for a wine from one year to the next as producers try to capture every last dollar for a given bottle of wine. If not all the wine sells one year, the price will go down or stay the same. If it sells out, watch it start to climb. I was drinking Caymus Cabernet for $20 a bottle in 1995. The wine became a big hit right about that time, and the 2005 vintage goes for about $70 today. That’s just simple economics: Caymus knows it can sell out even at 3 1/2 times the price. If it doesn’t it just knocks the price down a few bucks for 2006 and people think they’re getting a bargain.

For some real fun try tracking the price of a given bottle of wine on the secondary market. Auction prices fluctuate up and down just like the stock market. It’s fascinating stuff.

But to your other point, does a high price mean you’re getting a quality wine? Studies are studies, so I decided to look into my archives of wine ratings to see if there were any patterns in my own data. Below you’ll find the chart of all the ratings of wines that I’ve done where I had a reliable retail price available for the wine (which excluded a lot of older bottles, auction tastings, and restaurant wines). I ended up with about 1,800 data points. Because letter grades don’t plot very well, I converted everything to the widely-used 50-100 point scale. A+ got 100. F got 50.

The results are interesting, I think. There’s not a lot of order to the data for most wines; for wines under about $50, the ratings are all over the map. Things get more interesting when prices start to climb. I don’t have any ratings below a B- for a wine over about $50, with one exception. And as prices tend higher, the ratings tend to go up as well. That said, only one of my 100-point/A+ wines cost more than $50, and some cost in the $20s.

Overall, the trend line points vaguely upward, but even the cheapest wines merit an average rating of a solid B. Also interesting: Virtually all wines costing more than $80 fell below the expected trendline, so maybe the big takeaway is that yes, you can buy quality, but with each extra dollar you spend, you get only a marginally better wine.*

(click for full-size version)

* Fair warning: I’m not an economist by trade, and all data is based on my own tasting reports, which may very well be skewed, particularly since very few of my ratings are based on blind tastings. Ultimately it’s just one man’s data, but I have tried to be as honest and accurate as possible.

Does price matter? Russian Standard offers an “original” version of its vodka in addition to a “Platinum” bottling and its vaunted “Imperia,” which I’ve previously reviewed. All are made in basically the same way, with a few differences, namely in the filtration systems they employ. But Russian Standard “Original” is just $22 a bottle, while Imperia is $34 (though I can find it on sale for $29 right now. Is it worth $12 more? Or even $7?

I put a shot of Imperia side by side with Original Russian Standard, and to tell the truth, any difference was extremely slight. Imperia was a tiny bit smoother, while Original had a stronger tone of wheat to it (or what is commonly referred to as “bread”). The Imperia was faintly sweeter than Original, too.

But on the whole, unless I was drinking these straight and competitively, I’d never be able to tell the difference. Add a mixer, and you can forget about noticing a difference at all.

So there you have it: Russian Standard’s cheapest and priciest vodkas are, for all intents and purposes, pretty much identical.

B+ / $22/ russianstandard.com