Travelling to Bialowieza, Poland
Going to the source for a vodka tour of Poland.
I’m down on my hands and knees at 5 a.m. in the wet underbrush of the Bialowieza forest in northeast Poland, so close to the former Soviet border that my cellphone beeps with a text erroneously welcoming me to Belarus. My Lululemon pants are soaked in thick dew and fragrant mud – at least I think it’s mud. The dinner-plate-sized piles might just be the leavings of the huge, shaggy beasts that like to feast on what I’m searching for here: bison grass.
The object of my obsession is Zubrowka (zubrow means bison in Polish), an herbaceous-tasting, chartreuse-tinged Polish vodka that’s infused with bison grass, a botanical with spiritual significance in Polish culture similar to that of sweetgrass in North American native culture. Plus, bison grass has a larger-than-life mythological lore: drinking bison-grass vodka is thought to imbue the drinker with the bison’s power, and even to have an aphrodisiac effect, I’ve heard.
We were hoping to spot wild bison this morning in the ancient, UNESCO-protected forest, but we haven’t seen a single one. Our pudgy, serious guide apologetically explains, “It’s mating season, and the male bison, they have other business.” So we settle for foraging instead for bison grass, the animal’s favourite treat. Unfortunately, its tall green blades are virtually indistinguishable from any other, until you turn them over to see the subtle, silvery powder-like coating that gives the vodka its unique cut-grass taste, lavender-tinged nose and pale-green colour. Locating a single blade is a thrill; stroking it releases gossamer dust onto my fingertips.
The original Zubrowka has been made at the same factory for nearly a century in Bialystok, the town nearest to the forest. When we visit later that day, after warming up from our morning expedition, I expect a grim, grey worker complex. Instead, I find a gleaming modern factory, the shiny tanks and columns of the Polmos Bialystok distillery producing up to a million litres of bison-grass vodka a day.
A behind-the-scenes tour gives me a whiff of the bison-grass storage room, which looks and smells like a greenhouse and is lined with six-kilogram brown paper sacks of the fresh-picked grass in its “hay” form. A storage cooler containing smaller boxes of the dried, aromatic grass has the rich, musty vegetal smell of a Havana cigar humidor. These dried blades are macerated in giant stainless hot-water tanks to produce the extract that flavours the vodka, a dark concentrated potion that looks like vanilla extract. Later, to my delight, I’m escorted to the bottling line to stuff as many blades of precious bison grass as I like into my own personally labelled bottle, which is later dressed in an adorable furry green faux-bison-grass bottle jacket.
Its origins may be Old World, but bison vodka is wildly hip in Poland’s cities. I see it shaken with apricot jam (the Polish palate tends toward sweet drinks, like vodka and apple juice cocktails) and poured into cookie-spice-rimmed shooters at Sense Lounge in Warsaw. At the elegant Amber and Ma Maison restaurants in Warsaw, along with expert wine pairings for elegant meals of duck and sauces studded with sturgeon caviar, I receive shot glasses of chilled bison-grass vodka between courses, a palate cleanser that beats the hell out of sorbet.
And what of its fabled, mythical powers? I can attest that when I drank bison-grass vodka in Poland, it made me feel more powerful and attractive every time. That is, at least until the next morning.
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