Boozehound (21 page)

When I mentioned to Nicolaysen that I had a bottle of Linie in my freezer at home, he nearly fainted. I told him that I’d been introduced to aquavit in Denmark, and that’s how my friends always drank it, ice-cold from the freezer. “Ah,” he said, “that’s because the Danes and Swedes don’t have this tradition of aging in casks like we do. For them, aquavit is a white spirit.”

He told me never to put Norwegian aquavit in the freezer. “It goes all the way to Australia and back to age … and then you put it in the freezer! Good god, that’s a sacrilege for those of us who make it!”

I began our tasting in the Hotel Munch with Henrik’s brand, Nansen Aquavit. Nansen had already launched a Norwegian-owned cognac that had gained popularity when France was testing nuclear missiles in the South Pacific in the late 1990s, which Norwegians firmly opposed. “People were saying, ‘I want a cognac, but not a French cognac,’ ” Henrik said. In 2007, they launched an aquavit.

Nansen’s flagship aquavit tasted a lot softer than many of those I’d tried previously—light, with bright citrus fruit and a bit of approachable vanilla, which comes from younger oak casks. Henrik had a marketing reason for this: “It’s a tradition in families to drink aquavit at Christmas, but maybe only three people in the family really like it. Women and young people say it’s too rough. They sit through Christmas dinner saying
‘skål’
and pretending to like it.”

I’d heard the same thing the day before at Arcus. There seemed to be a great deal of concern that people only drank aquavit at Christmas—and then mostly the older men of the family. Close to 90 percent of Norway’s aquavit consumption actually happens during that season. There was talk of finding a wider audience and diversifying the aquavit market. Arcus has recently rolled out a label called Sommer Aquavit, which, like Nansen’s, has lighter, brighter citrus notes. Sommer Aquavit was targeted at, of course, young drinkers: the Cosmo crowd—young women who liked vodka cocktails.

It’s still unclear how successful this effort has been, though I can say that I saw an awful lot of bottles of Sommer Aquavit on deep discount at the duty-free shop in the Oslo Airport. Generally, I find that changing an ingrained tradition—such as “Aquavit Only at Christmas Dinner”—is nearly impossible. Creating a market for summertime aquavit seems as elusive as recapturing the mythic summers of one’s youth.

After we tasted Nansen’s second aquavit, a more traditional caraway-flavored offering, Sven (who had now fully sweated through his dress shirt) unwrapped and presented his new aquavit brand: Edvard Munch Premium Aquavit, its label in English. He also handed me a press release: “Edvard Munch was a forerunner of the expressionist art movement. His best-known composition,
The Scream
, is part of a series,
The Frieze of Life
, in which Munch explored the themes of life, love, fear, death, and melancholy. Therefore we are proud to present this exceptional, luxury aquavit as a taste of his art.” Fear and melancholy—not to mention Munch’s darkly erotic love-and-death axis—being ideas that one may or may not want to ponder when drinking shots of an 80-proof spirit.

Edvard Munch Premium Aquavit is a lovely spirit. It spends twelve months in sherry casks, yet retains intense, fresh herbal aromatics and flavor. But I worried aloud about who was going to buy it, especially with its English label, and especially with the local aquavit market clearly declining among the younger generation. “Our plan is to find some partners outside of Norway,” Sven said. But most people outside of Scandinavia and Germany have no idea what aquavit even is. In fact, in my experience, most people fear it, just as they fear grappa.

Perhaps in answer to my skepticism, Sven expressed even more excitement about his second spirits project: Scream Vodka, named after the famed Munch masterpiece. “It’s French grain vodka, from Cognac,” Sven said. “Like Grey Goose.” Scream Vodka would directly target tourists at duty-free shops and and also, he hoped, at the Munch Museum itself.

Sven admitted that he really didn’t have much experience in the spirits business, but he did have a long background in the music and entertainment industry. He said one of the first big acts he’d managed was Norway’s winning entry in the 1985 Eurovision Song Contest, Bobbysocks. In a strange way, this career path made sense to me. I think spirits share an emotional space with pop songs. And I’m guessing the generation who listened to Bobbysocks as young people is probably the same one that’s moved away from aquavit appreciation. Maybe they were drinking other things on those summer nights when they got drunk and fell in love. On my flight to Oslo, my Norwegian seatmate, a woman about my age, nearly jumped out of her seat to point out a member of a-ha, the 1980s Norwegian one-hit wonder, who’d wandered down the aisle. Later, when she asked what I was doing in Oslo and I told her about my aquavit research, she said, “Ah, I only drink aquavit at Christmastime at my parents’ house.”

After Hendrik, Sven, and I finished tasting all three aquavits, I dumped the spit cup into the bathroom sink—water was still soaking the floor—and they packed up their bottles. Later that afternoon, alone and feeling some of the usual post-tasting tipsiness, I started thinking about Edvard Munch and summertime and decided to pay a visit to Oslo’s Munch Museum.

The Munch Museum was the scene of a brazen art heist in 2004, when masked, armed bandits stormed in and stole both
The Scream
and another of Munch’s paintings,
Madonna
. Both were eventually recovered, and now you must pass through a metal detector to see the paintings.
The Scream
, of course, is the highlight that most tourists come to see. And in the gift shop, you can buy Scream T-shirts, Scream mouse pads, and, perhaps soon, Scream Vodka. I bought a Scream tote bag because I needed something to cart all my aquavit samples home in.

But the painting I came to look at was
The Voice (Summer Night)
, which depicts a woman, with her hair let down, standing in a secret lovers’ spot near the shoreline on one of those endless Scandinavian midsummer nights. Most agree that the painting depicts Munch’s great love, Millie Thaulow (the wife of his benefactor’s cousin), with whom, as a young man, he had an affair one fateful summer in the coastal village of Aasgaardstrand. “When love grew!” wrote Munch in diaries. “Nature gave of her beauty and you became more beautiful the summernight cast over your face and your hair—only your eyes were dark—and sparkled with a mysterious glow.”

After their first tryst, Munch wrote, “something very strange happened—I felt as if there were invisible threads connecting us—I felt the invisible strands of her hair still winding around me—and thus as she disappeared completely beyond the sea—I still felt it, felt the pain where my heart was bleeding—because the threads could not be severed.” Eventually, inevitably, Millie ended the affair, and that summer rendezvous haunted poor Edvard for the rest of his life.

The thing about Munch is that, no matter how dreamlike or metaphorical or obvious or depressing he becomes, his landscapes are somehow always right. He caught the seductive yet ominous mood of those midsummer nights. He knew better than anyone that the flip side of the glorious midnight sun is the long, dark, melancholy winter to come. That even within the moment, great happiness is already swiftly moving into the past tense.

I have stood, literally, in such a landscape. It was near the end of an Icelandic summer long ago, as a bunch of friends passed around a bottle of brennivín—the rougher Icelandic cousin of aquavit—while we quickly stripped down to our underwear and jumped into a hot spring. We relaxed as bubbles of hot water floated up from between the moss-covered rocks on the bottom, all of us settled in, chin deep, steam rising around our heads, the wind whipping across an impossibly blue fjord. Everyone was impossibly happy, but the midnight sun was finally beginning to set and soon it would be autumn and we’d all have to go home.

I have also been there figuratively. Let’s say it was a late August, many years ago, in a lifeguard stand on a midnight beach in Ocean City, New Jersey. Perhaps I was there with a girl with whom I was hopelessly in love, who would go back to college in September and never call again. There may have been a bottle of sloe gin (or was it Jägermeister, or even peach schnapps?) and “Livin’ on a Prayer” was surely playing on a cassette tape in the boom box.

In his essay on Munch, Schjeldahl writes, “My heart pledges allegiance to old revelations of truth—truth-to-me, truth-of-me, truths involved in the project of being a person—that seem still true. I may be humbled to reflect that I have advanced little on those lessons since receiving them years ago.” I stood before the painting that afternoon in Oslo, the taste of premium aquavit in my mouth, similarly humbled, and feeling the distinct tug of those unsevered summer threads.

A Round of Drinks:
From the North

I acquired my taste for aquavit over numerous visits to Copenhagen, sipping it ice-cold in small frozen shot glasses, accompanied by
smorrebrød
, the traditional open-faced rye-bread sandwiches piled high with smoked salmon, pickled herring, or smoked eel. My Danish friends gave me a very nice bottle for my birthday a few years ago, because they know how much I’ve come to enjoy their traditional spirit (which they actually call
snaps
). I also enjoy the traditional toast: lifting your glass and staring silently into everyone’s eyes for moment before saying
skål
and taking a sip—or draining the glass, if you’re so inclined.

At home, however, I find it nearly impossible to find others who share my enthusiasm for aquavit. I’m often met with a response that frankly irritates me: “Isn’t that stuff rocket fuel?” It’s been the same thing with grappa. What is it about strong foreign spirits served in tiny glasses that scares so many Americans? It feels a little xenophobic to me, and I get impatient with the rocket-fuel label. I can honestly say that after years of traveling and sampling local firewaters, there are only three spirits I would file in that category: Central American
aguardiente
(literally “burning water”); a backyard-distilled, 160-proof Serbian moonshine—the memory of which still gives me night terrors; and Icelandic
brennivín
(nicknamed “black death”).

And even that might be unfair to brennivín, which for me is wrapped up in happy memories of Iceland, as well as horrible ones of using it to wash down
hákarl
, the infamous rotten shark that’s served at the midwinter feast, Thorrablot. I can still remember biting through rubbery layers of skin, and a sensation not unlike a rush of ammonia flying up my sinuses, then the shot of brennivín, burning like kerosene all the way down my esophagus.
Skål
, indeed.

Anyway, aquavit is like none of these rocket fuels or firewaters. Aquavit is a lovely, complex spirit, and I have made it my mission to spread its gospel. Though aquavit is usually served cold in small glasses, it’s not meant to be downed as a shot, as vodka is in Russia. It’s much more rounded and flavorful, and it’s traditionally meant to be sipped straight with food, particularly winter-holiday Nordic cuisine.

We’ve been hearing a lot about the “new Scandinavian cooking” over the past several years, led in the United States by chefs such as my
Washington Post
colleague, Norwegian chef Andreas Viestad, or Swedish-born Marcus Samuelsson at Aquavit restaurant in New York. For years, Samuelsson has been serving tasting flights of housemade aquavits flavored with nontraditional ingredients such as horseradish, lemongrass, coconut, and citrus. In 2006, the restaurant’s owners launched a retail aquavit. Their spirit, Aquavit New York, is flavored with fresh white cranberries, unlike the Scandinavian imports. “Traditional aquavit doesn’t really fit the American palate,” said Christian Gylche, a Swede who was the brand ambassador in New York.

Though styles vary throughout Scandinavia, aquavit is basically a vodka flavored with spices and herbs such as caraway, fennel, dill, coriander, and anise. Two standard brands are widely available in the States: Aalborg from Denmark and Linie from Norway. House Spirits, a craft distillery in Portland, Oregon, also recently launched the wonderful Krogstad Aquavit, which has a slightly higher star anise profile than traditional Scandinavian versions. Christian Krogstad, the distiller, said that the initial demand came from local chefs who had tasted small batches he’d been experimenting with. “We approached it with very low expectations for sales,” Krogstad said. “But people have come out of the woodwork to buy it.” One reason is that aquavit is one of the few spirits in the world that pairs well with food. “I like that aquavit is savory,” Krogstad said. “It pairs with some foods that nothing else will pair with.” For instance, oily fishes such as pickled herring, mackerel, and salmon. I also like aquavit with cheeses such as Havarti, with sausage and sauerkraut, and, of course, with rye bread.