On my way to the potato farm, I wondered if there were such a thing as a vodka critic. It certainly wouldn't be me. I've always felt pretty indifferent about the clear elixir. Mass-produced and made these days mostly from wheat, vodka doesn't exactly charm the palate. Even here in rural Sweden, the vodka critic must be a rare bird. But when the farmers of the Bjäre Potato Growers Association came out to meet me, they wanted to know if I was a vodka critic. They looked doubtful at first, pointing out that even though they grew the best potatoes in the world — and made the best vodka in the world from them — a vodka critic was a dubious proposition.
"I am not a vodka critic," I protested as they surrounded me at the edge of a luminous field planted with the noble Gammel Svensk Röd (Old Swedish Red) varietal. "I am not even a vodka drinker." They put their thumbs into their pockets and tilted their heads back. Then one of them came forward and pronounced in prophetic tones, "Dis is de Mecca of de potato."
The place: Cape Bjäre on Sweden's mild west coast, two hours north of Malmö. The conditions: sandy soil, Gulf Stream warmth, and wide-open skies. You should also know that Ingmar Bergman filmed The Seventh Seal on these flat, moist meadows and wetlands that dip down to a Viking sea called the Kattegat. The local village is Torekov, considered the Hamptons of Sweden, and I was there with the 53-year-old millionaire entrepreneur Peter Ekelund, who, almost 30 years ago, invented Absolut. (It remained a government-owned brand until it was sold to Pernod for $9 billion this year.) Ekelund has a vacation house nearby, close to where he spent his boyhood summers, and he came back to Bjäre a couple of years ago to create an elite potato vodka called Karlsson's.
Packaged in what looks like a bulbous medicine bottle (designed by Hans Brindfors, who brought you the Absolut bottle), Karlsson's is supposed to be a vodka unlike any other. Made by septuagenarian master distiller Börje Karlsson (also of Absolut fame) at a former stable near Stockholm, it's a return to Swedish roots (literally) and to a taste that incriminates the starchy, sweetly soapy tang of most vodka produced today. "I think of it," Ekelund said, "as the nemesis of Grey Goose." His idea was to search for potato terroir — that concept so dear to the hearts of winegrowers. And so he and Karlsson sifted through the cape's potato varietals looking for something unique — "something," as Ekelund put it, "totally Bjäre."
