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

How Russian is ZYR Vodka? There’s a picture of the Kremlin on the bottle, that’s how. Distilled from Russian rye and wheat (”made from the rich black soil of Russia’s heartland”) and created with water drawn from deep in Russia’s aquifers, the only way this could be more Russian is if the ghost of Lenin delivered it to my doorstep.

Intriguingly, the brand new ZYR is bottled based on recipes recorded by Dmitri Mendeleev (much like Russian Standard’s Imperia claims), creator of the Periodic Table of Elements and officially responsible for standardizing vodka production and proof levels for Mother Russia in 1893. If anyone knows chemistry, it’s gonna be Mendeleev, and his nine filtration processes and five distillations speak to some serious smarts in the booze-making department. (That said, I doubt Mendeleev had a UV filtration system in place in the late 1800s, but still, I like the idea.)

Oh, so how’s it taste. One whiff and you’ll know this is vodka, and it’s distinctly Russian in origin, too. One taste and it almost knocked me down, a bracing jolt made stronger by intense cold straight from the freezer. It mellows when it warms up a few degrees, ultimately leaving you with a lemony, peppery, and surprising buttery character to the mouthfeel, not oily like so many other vodkas. There’s quite a bite to it which makes it feel at once very traditional and still difficult to sip for more than a shot. It works well as a mixer, though at $30 a bottle you might not turn to ZYR for Long Island Iced Teas…

A- / $30 / zyrvodka.com

Here’s the recipe that launched this blog, reprinted here from my personal blog, just for kicks and the sake of completeness.

The Appletini, iPhone Edition (aka The iPhonetini, The iPhone Martini)
2 oz. vodka
1/2 oz. Apple Pucker Schnapps
1/2 oz. Goldschlager
1/4 oz. Cointreau (or Triple Sec)

Combine in a shaker with ice. Shake well and strain into a chilled cocktail glass, optionally rimmed with sugar. Garnish with your old cell phone (or an apple wedge).

It actually tastes pretty good: Apple and cinnamon are a natural fit. The off-white color recalls many an Apple gizmo (though not, of course, the iPhone itself), and the little touch of gold reminds you exactly what you’re paying for. (Oh, and if you like a stronger apple flavor, add a bit more Apple Pucker.)

Here’s a spin on the Casino recipe that I love so much, adding St. Germain (which I also love so much) to give it an extra dimension of taste.

The Downtown Casino
2 oz. vodka
1/2 oz. Maraschino liqueur
1/2 oz. St. Germain liqueur
1/2 oz. fresh lemon juice

Shake all the ingredients with ice in a cocktail shaker and strain into a cocktail glass. Garnish with a brandied cherry.

Use less Maraschino and lemon juice if you find either flavor too strong, and sub in gin for vodka at your pleasure.

As far as I can tell, Tenoch makes only one type of tequila, this reposado bottling that’s lightly golden, aged in oak, and bottled in a stoneware jug designed to look like an agave plant is enveloping it.

Tasty stuff, it’s lightly peppery and sweet like caramel, with herbal notes dancing around your mouth. For sipping tequilas, it’s just about perfect, creamy and lush, filling your mouth wonderfully.

The downside is the price. At $42 a bottle (or urn?) you won’t be making margaritas out of the stuff, and I woefully regret spilling half a shot on myself. Not just for the wasted money, I mean, but for the wasted tequila, too.

Highly recommended.

A / $42 / gviimports.com

Mad props to Ketel One. This brand is pretty much singlehandedly responsible for introducing ultrapremium vodka into the market, and it’s still going strong today. Made in The Netherlands from wheat, the 80-proof spirit is very traditional on the whole, and not in a bad way.

The taste is clean, lightly citrusy and tinged with lemon, with a touch of sweetness and a menthol aftertaste. (It’s appropriate that Ketel One released a citrus-flavored vodka some years ago; it really doesn’t need a lot of extra flavor to make it clearly lemony.)

It works very well in mixers and is doable straight, but an undercurrent of charcoal makes it a little rough for extended drinking. Not a bad vodka, and at a decent price for something that’s, on the whole, quite refined.

B+ / $22 / ketelone.com

If it weren’t for the many gravel roads and all the snow, I would have sworn that, while touring Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the crown jewel of its growing wine operation, I was in the heart of Sonoma. Willamette has everything you’d expect from Northern California wineries: Gorgeous tasting rooms, courteous staff, weekday crowds, and even outrageous tasting fees at some locations. What I didn’t see that you can’t miss in Sonoma? Ubiquitous gift shops in every tasting room.

Getting around Oregon’s wine country isn’t easy, but it’s not impossible either. There’s a lot of confusing, dirt-and-gravel roads, little signage, and nothing that seems to run straight and flat. All those hills make for good Pinot Noir, but they don’t make it easy for you to get around if you’re not local.

The Willamette Valley is less than an hour’s drive from Portland, and though you’ll run into traffic, two-lane roads, and lots of stop lights, it isn’t unpleasant. If you’re anywhere near the area, I highly recommend a trip. Best advice: Order a free copy of this Oregon Wine Country brochure, which includes a huge and detailed map of the area. It’s far better than the one you’ll find in any guidebook or magazine, and you’ll need it if you go touring in the area.

Best wine of the five wineries we visited would have to go to Penner-Ash’s (pictured) 2006 Carabella Vineyard Pinot Noir (its first ever bottling as a vineyard designate), pricey at $55 but sedate and smooth like old Burgundy, and stripped of any barnyard tones. Also a real surprise: An Oregon Syrah, made from grapes from the south part of the state, and a rose Pinot Noir, the first of its ilk I’ve ever tried.

A close second as a favorite wine: WillaKenzie Estate’s 2005 Pinot Noir Emery ($45). (WillaKenzie, incidentally, was unique among the wineries in that it has no tasting fee.) It also scored an A in my book.

Nothing at all bad at Archery Summit except the prices. All of its 2005 and 2006 Pinots (see below for full list) scored A- from me, though some fetch up to $100 a pop. (Not pouring: The $150 Archery Summit Estate Pinot Noir.)

Putting aside the $15 tasting fee, Domaine Serene had some nice wines, though nothing that blew me away. A shocking laggard, however, was the vaunted (and pictured) Domaine Drouhin (which is run by Burgundy expatriates), which failed to impress with much in its brief, three-wine lineup.

Bonus tip: While waiting for your flight at PDX, check out “Made in Oregon” in concourse C, which sells Oregon wines (few of which I can find in California at all) for shockingly amazing prices. And yes, you can legally carry them on your flight with you if it’s direct. I bought four bottles here. Score!

Oh… that’s right… I mentioned snow back there. Did I mention the insane weather? Check out these two photos, shot a few miles and hours apart on the same day. (click for larger) If you’re heading to Willamette any other time but the dead of summer, bring a jacket!

Full Tasting Report

2006 Penner-Ash Dry White Riesling, $24, B
2006 Penner-Ash Dussin Estate Vineyard Pinot Noir, $60, B+
2006 Penner-Ash Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, $48, A-
2005 Penner-Ash Oregon Syrah, $32, A-
2006 Penner-Ash Roseo (Rose of Pinot Noir), $15, B
2006 Penner-Ash Goldschmidt Vineyard Pinot Noir, $55, A-
2006 Penner-Ash Carabella Vineyard Pinot Noir, $55, A

2006 WillaKenzie Estate Pinot Gris, $9 (375ml), B+
2006 WillaKenzie Estate Pinot Meunier, $23, B
2006 WillaKenzie Estate Pinot Noir Willamette Valley, $25, B+
2005 WillaKenzie Estate Pinot Noir Pierre Leon, $26, C+
2005 WillaKenzie Estate Pinot Noir Emery, $45, A

2006 Domaine Drouhin Oregon Chardonnay Arthur, $30, C+
2006 Domaine Drouhin Oregon Pinot Noir Willamette Valley, $45, B+
2004 Domaine Drouhin Oregon Pinot Noir Laurene Cuvee, $65, A-

2005 Domaine Serene “Cote Sud” Chardonnay, $45, A-
2005 Domaine Serene “Yamhill Cuvee” Pinot Noir, $40, A-
2005 Domaine Serene “Two Barns” Pinot Noir, $75, A-
2004 Domaine Serene Rockblock “Del Rio” Syrah, $45, B

2006 Archery Summit Premier Cuvee Pinot Noir, $48, A-
2005 Archery Summit Renegade Ridge Estate Pinot Noir, $85, A-
2005 Archery Summit Red Hills Estate Pinot Noir, $85, A-
2005 Archery Summit Arcus Estate Pinot Noir, $100, A

Hawaiian vodka? Sure, why not? While you may be expecting a pineapple- or coconut-flavored spirit in Ocean, bottled on Maui (the first vodka ever bottled there), it’s actually a surprisingly supple, unflavored vodka, lightly sweet and incredibly smooth. In fact, it’s one of the smoothest vodkas I’ve sampled in recent memory, fine straight or as a mixer.

Ocean is distilled from organic corn and rye, presumably not grown in Hawaii. The water, in a new twist, really does come from the Pacific Ocean (3,000 feet down, so they say), purified and desalinated and mixed into to the spirit to arrive at the requisite 80 proof. The result is something that nods at its Hawaii an roots without being cloying.

Altogether this is a shockingly light and very pleasant spirit that, despite the kind-of cheesy bottle and outrageous price tag (the only real problem with the thing), is hard not to recommend.

Stick this in your Chi Chi!

A- / $37 / oceanvodka.com