Worried about pesticides in the food chain? Concerned about your carbon footprint? Just pondering the planet's fate is enough to drive some of us to drink.
Fortunately, that's one activity we don't have to feel so guilty about any more. The latest cocktail craze? Ethical booze.
It started with Rain organic vodka, which landed in B.C. stores two years ago, and Juniper Green Organic London Dry Gin from England, available in British Columbia, Ontario and Alberta.
Next week, about 90 LCBO stores in Ontario will roll out a pair of virtuous vodkas, Square One Organic and 360, both from the United States. The latter, while not organic, is made in high-efficiency stills and packaged in recycled-glass bottles with a "post-consumer, waste-paper" label.
They join another unusual product, Utkins Fairtrade Premium Single Estate Rum, made from sugar cane grown by 800 small-farm holders guaranteed a fair market price for their produce.
Nova Scotia is also embracing the high-minded-hooch movement. Instead of getting wasted away, enlightened Jimmy Buffett fans can bartend their way to a better planet with margaritas based on 4 Copas organic tequila (also available in Alberta). It's all enough to give new meaning to the familiar liquor-ad caveat, "Please drink responsibly."
While organic wines have been available for decades, distillers have been slow to jump on the pesticide- and fungicide-free bandwagon. A big reason is that the wine industry is still dominated by small producers, many of whom have made personal choices not to work with chemicals.
In contrast, the spirits world is dominated by multinationals, which tend to rely on vast swaths of factory-farmed grains such as wheat, corn and rye. It's difficult, and expensive, to supply their needs with organic grain.
But the emergence of small, boutique distilleries has altered the landscape. So has the growing obsession among vodka consumers in particular for not a single molecule of foreign matter that could possibly add flavour to their prized blend of water and alcohol.
As vodka makers started one-upping each other, distilling their products over and over to achieve supposedly greater purity (and thus, apparently, no afterburn), Allison Evanow, a former North American marketing manager with Jose Cuervo tequila who started her own vodka company, took the logic to its limit.
"I just thought, if it were so darned pure, wouldn't it be organic?" Ms. Evanow said. The founder and chief executive officer of Square One Organic Spiritsin Novato, Calif., makes her two-year-old brand at a certified-organic facility in Idaho from organic rye grown in North Dakota.
She also uses a natural fermentation process, eschewing non-organic enzymes normally used to break down proteins and fibres in the rye, a tough grain she believes is superior for vodka production but more challenging to ferment than the more popular corn and wheat.
"We lose 50 per cent of our yield in fermentation because we can't use aggressive processing aids," Ms. Evanow said. "And it does actually impact the flavour. It doesn't have the so-called bite of the Old World rye style. It's lighter and sweeter."
For what it's worth, I found Square One to be nicely balanced, with an attractively floral, almost fabric-softener note to it (but then I love the shaving-cream blast of a classic, juniper-heavy gin, too).
Ms. Evanow says she's not concerned about appealing to the mass market. Several of her best clients are what she describes as "Iron Chef" accounts, referring to restaurateurs who have competed on the Food Network series Iron Chef America. These include Tom Douglas of Seattle and Mario Batali, whose high-end Los Angeles pizzeria, Mozza, for some reason sells more Square One vodka than any of Ms. Evanow's other clients. Pizza with vodka? Either that's a Hollywood starlet's idea of a good wine pairing or I'm out of the loop on some new southern California diet.
