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Remember Mendeleev? He was the Russian chemist who invented the periodic table, the chart that enabled scientists to make predictions about the behaviour of elements yet to be uncovered. Don't remember the periodic table? Wow, you must have skipped more high-school chemistry than I did.

But I digress. What they didn't tell us in straight-laced Catholic private boys school about Mendeleev is that the 19th-century genius did his PhD thesis on the “Combinations of Water with Alcohol.”

Even back in high school, many of us liquor-savvy teens could have told you that water and alcohol mixed together went by a more popular name, vodka, which in the 1970s was most commonly consumed in a highball glass with orange juice in the laziest cocktail ever invented, the screwdriver.

Being Russian and an alcohol expert, Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev knew more about vodka at the time than anybody else. After retiring from St. Petersburg University in 1890, he became director of the central board of weights and measures, where he led the formulation of Russian standards for the production of vodka.

This week, more than a century after the good doctor's pioneering work, Russian Standard , the bestselling premium vodka in the spirit's homeland, officially landed in Canada. Purportedly based on a Mendeleev formula, the 11-year-old brand is distributed by Beam Global, the spirits giant behind Jim Beam and Canadian Club whiskies and a bunch of other brands. There's even a facsimile of Mendeleev's signature on the label.

Is it as good as Grey Goose and all those other $40-plus brands? I don't think it needs to be. At half the price, or roughly $25 across the country, I'm not sure it needs to be.

It's very good value, given that much of the “value” in super-luxury brands amounts to bottle design and back-label stories. Produced from winter wheat, this brand has a nuance of that bread-like flavour that is supposed to characterize good Russian vodka. It has a sweet core and good balance. Distilled four times (not five or six like other boastful brands), this seems to me honest vodka trying to be neither innocuously ultrasmooth nor completely flavourless. It makes a lot more sense in cocktails than Grey Goose. And, yes, the package is kind of cool. The frosted bottle inspired by a bell at the Ivan the Great Bell Tower in the Kremlin is more regal and handsome and timeless than the already slightly dated Grey Goose bottle.

One beef about the vodka: The screw cap on my bottle wasn't easy to snap off and seemed pretty cheap and loose. But, of course, this brand is more about the chemistry than the physics.

Today marks the auspicious return onto the wine scene of Donald Ziraldo, co-founder in 1974 with Karl Kaiser of Inniskillin, the first Ontario winery granted a licence since 1929, two years after Prohibition in that province.

Ziraldo, who spent much of his time at Inniskillin, now a property of U.S. giant Constellation brands, spreading the gospel of Canadian icewine around the globe, has launched an icewine under his own name. Ziraldo Riesling Icewine 2007 ($59.95 for 375 millilitres at select stores in Ontario and also available in British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba and Quebec through distributor Authentic Wines at awsm.ca) hails from the great 2007 harvest and is very good. Intensely sweet and ripe, with opulent flavours of preserved apricots, peaches and honey, it's balanced nicely by enough acidity to cleanse the palate. Just 8 per cent alcohol.

Ziraldo also recently cleared a 60-year-old cherry orchard next to the original Inniskillin winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake and planted it with riesling vines that should start producing fruit in two years. Canada's fine-wine patriarch is back and I'm thrilled he's devoting time to riesling, one of Niagara's most compelling varieties.

It's time to come out of hiding from the recession. At least that seems like the message at Vintages, the fine wine and spirits department of the LCBO in Ontario. Today's holiday-goodies release is teeming with iconic and expensive wine brands: Opus One and Caymus Special Selection from California; The Dead Arm Shiraz from Australia; and Solaia and Luce from Italy.

Even in that company, the relatively low-priced Château de Beaucastel Châteauneuf-du-Pape 2007 ($89.95, No. 968750) stands out for sheer balance. Beaucastel often can overwhelm the palate with its massive shoulders and ripe flavour, but in this excellent 2007 it has found an unusual elegance.

Relatively light on its feet for a Beaucastel, it shows perfectly ripe dark fruits woven with seductive herbs and spice. A great cellar candidate for 15 years.

Other luxury standouts include Caymus Special Selection Cabernet Sauvignon 2006 ($129.95, No. 711663), an almost syrupy-thick but dry and superbly balance blockbuster weighing in at 15.4-per-cent alcohol; Luce Della Vite Luce 2006 ($99.95, No. 685263), a merlot-sangiovese blend from Tuscany that seems to get better almost with every vintage; and Anaperenna by Ben Glaetzer 2007 ($59.95, No. 72926), a superb Australian blend from the Barossa Valley of shiraz and cabernet sauvignon that shows a dense core of Christmas cake and dark fruits with super-fine but copious tannins and a hint of pipe tobacco.