VODKA I SPIRITS
UW engineering grad pours expertise into vodka biz.
WHY, OH WHY would an editor suggest a wine writer with little experience with vodka — besides the occasional summertime Caesar and the infrequent burning shot — write about the one beverage he knows so little about? (Heck, I know more about tea than I do about the making of vodka.)
“Because wine people get it,” says John Vellinga, president of Multiculture Bevco, located in Oakville. “We talk about vodka the same way we talk to people about wine,” and this fact shows in the people he has chosen to surround himself with: people who know wine or have a wine background.
Vellinga grew up in Kitchener and spent the first 25 years of his life there. He studied at the University of Waterloo where he met his wife, Katherine (vice-president of operations), and where he got his degree in systems design engineering. He often gets asked about the “departure” from engineering to vodka, and he is quick to point out that his degree plays a very influential role in what he does today.
“In the end, it’s a product we have to create, manufacture and get here. And a lot of engineering-type thinking goes into the vodka; it was designed for a purpose. We were meticulous about how we created the liquid, the package, everything.”
Take the bottle design for Slava as an example. “At first we thought we needed one of those beautiful bottles because everyone was doing it. But when I found out how much they cost, I almost had a heart attack. From 25 cents per bottle up to $8, which is ridiculous because that was more than the vodka is to produce. So we decided against that and went another route. “Many people put their vodka in the freezer, so we made the bottle more convenient for them to do just that. It’s a shape that doesn’t roll around (triangular); we also made the bottle shorter, so it’s easier to get into the freezer.”
And here’s where his university experiences have come in handy. The bottle is also designed to fit into a dorm-room fridge/ freezer. “You can fit four bottles of Slava into that little freezer section. You couldn’t fit any other vodka into that freezer, unless on a diagonal with a bag of peas to keep it from falling out.”
Vellinga has two vodkas that he helped design and bring into Ontario: Slava Ultra Premium ($32.95 - #600585) and Zirkova Premium ($23.45 - #168617), but don’t just think he imports some regular old vodka he found on his travels.
“People think this is a spirit that we randomly found in the Ukraine and brought over. Truth is, we’re a Canadian product, we just went to the birthplace of vodka to have it made. All the branding and design was done here and for this market; it’s not even sold in the Ukraine.” John also defends his choice to make vodka in the Ukraine. “Think of it this way: we don’t expect Ukrainians to know how to make maple syrup, but they are the best at making vodka. If we could have manufactured this in Canada, we would have.”
He points out that Ukraine is the second largest producer of vodka in the world. “They’ve been doing it for over 600 years; they even have people with PhDs in it, so as you can imagine, they take vodka incredibly seriously. They’re sort of like the French or the Italians with wine. They have a long history of working with it and their standards are incredibly high. We thought it was just better to do everything there.”
Vellinga hired Ludmila Petrivna, who has a PhD in vodka. Ok, not exactly. Her degree is in chemical engineering, “but everything about her PhD has to do with spirits.” (As he mentioned, the Ukrainians take their vodka very seriously.) Petrivna would create samples in Ukraine through different filtration methods and concoctions of spirits. “There’s a myth about vodka being all the same,” Vellinga says. “That is absolutely false. There’s potato versus corn versus grain and all make a massive difference. What we do is buy already distilled spirits, and there are 240 types available ‘to play with’: different levels of quality, ingredients, ways made, cuts within the still, number of times distilled; all these differences, at the sake of repeating >>