Would you pay $43
for a martini like this one?
When Hangar One released Fog Point earlier this year — a vodka supposedly made with San Francisco Bay fog — I mentally filed it under the “stunty and dubious” category.
Also in that category: Ivanabitch’s menthol-cigarette-flavored vodka, UV’s Sriracha vodka, Oddka’s “electricity” flavored vodka. (I still have a lot of questions about that last one.)
But Hangar One, based in Alameda, is ours — and it’s possible, I now see, that a region whose residents have given its condensed water vapor a human name (Karl the Fog) might be more receptive of fog-related gimmicks than I’d initially assumed.
This city’s embrace of Fog Point vodka became exceedingly clear when, two weeks ago, Epic Steak introduced the
Fog Point Martini to its menu. The price: $43. Hold on. Forty-three dollars? For a martini? Even in a town where a one-bedroom in a sinking tower will cost you nearly $4 million, that’s an expensive drink. The Fog Point joins a new movement of shockingly priced martinis around San Francisco, heralded by Wildhawk’s $25 version and Black Cat’s $23 one — the former ostensibly justified by its supersize serving, the latter by an accompaniment of pickled vegetables.
The luxury of the Fog Point Martini, meanwhile, comes entirely from Hangar One’s Fog Point vodka itself, a bottle of which costs $125 retail. (The cocktail contains 3 ounces of vodka; Epic also offers a 1-ounce pour of the vodka, straight, for $23.)
When I go to Epic to taste the Fog Point Martini, I encounter a bartender who seems a little incredulous herself. I ask her, before ordering: Does the spirit really taste like fog?
She gives me a look, as if to ask, What kind of
sucker are you? “It tastes like vodka to me.”
Has Epic been selling a lot of Fog Point Martinis? “Well, in the two weeks it’s been on the menu, we’ve already gone through a bottle,” the bartender responds. So they’ve sold at least eight.
She recommends going sans vermouth, and informs me they’re out of blue-cheese-stuffed olives. OK, so the martini is no longer quite a martini. (Maybe it never was: A true martini is made with gin.) The vodka arrives in all its naked, foggy glory, a frosty glass of chilled Fog Point adorned with nothing but ice shards.
Despite not being gin, there is something distinctly botanical about Fog Point vodka. It’s fragrant (for vodka), with a sweet aroma that suggests a dewy flower petal. Faintly, I can smell rose, verbena. On the palate, it’s round, delicate, clean. Its glassy texture builds to a chalkiness on the finish, giving the impression of minerality.
Does Karl deserve credit for that?
Fog Point vodka is diluted with fog-derived water, but it’s distilled from wine. Specifically, from Bonny Doon’s 2012 Le Cigare Blanc, a blend of Picpoul, Roussanne and Grenache Blanc grapes from Arroyo Seco AVA in Monterey County. It’s a beautiful wine, and aptly from a vineyard called Beeswax; it tastes chalky, floral, delicate, fresh.
“The vodka has a lot of grape characteristics,” says Caley Shoemaker, Hangar One’s head distiller, about Fog Point. I agree. As for the fog’s contributions, she finds that the water adds “salinity and earthiness.”
The impetus for creating Fog Point, says Shoemaker, was Hangar One’s desire to find alternative sources for water in a time of drought. “I moved to California from Colorado three years ago and didn’t realize how terrible the drought was until I started talking to farmers,” she says. Like farming, vodka distillation requires a lot of H2O: An 80-proof vodka is 60 percent water.
The obvious alternative water source in these parched parts? Fog harvesting, apparently. Hangar One commissioned FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit that helps developing communities harvest fog for water, to set up fog-catching stations at Sutro Tower, the Outer Sunset, the Berkeley hills and El Sobrante.
FogQuest’s fog catchers are remarkably lowtech: They’re polyethyleneor polypropylene-derived mesh nets, suspended on wooden poles, that resemble gray striped flags from a distance. When fog rolls in, water droplets collect on the mesh and drip into a gutter, which can then direct the flow into a vessel.
It’s a slow drip — one fog catcher typically collects half a liter to a liter of water per day. To make the 2,500 bottles of Fog Point required about six months of fog collection.
What does the fog water taste like, fresh off the mesh? “It reminds me of standing next to a stream smelling stones on a warm day,” says Shoemaker — though, to be fair, the water is never tasted quite fresh off the mesh, where it’s full of pinecones and rocks and other Bay Area flora. It gets filtered and boiled before it’s safe to drink.
Even though my recent trip to Epic was on a sunny day — as I sat at the outdoor bar on the Embarcadero, overlooking the Bay Bridge, there was nary a cloud in the sky — I easily summoned, for the sake of tasting the Fog Point Martini, the full evocative power of San Francisco fog. We all know what fog smells like. It smells like more than just water — in fact, it smells like more than most vodkas. It’s fresh, maybe smoky, often sweet, grassy, marine-salty. Shoemaker’s river-stone image resonates.
Does the Fog Point Martini taste like fog? I don’t think so. Does it taste like the 2012 Bonny Doon Le Cigare Blanc? Not quite. But those ingredients share with their product an evocation of something delicate, fresh, floral, sweetish.
Whether you should pay $43 for a martini — or, in my case, for a chilled glass of vodka — at Epic Steak is a different question. To my bartender’s credit, she did belatedly provide me with an olive skewer, and obliged my request to add a little vermouth; in the end, I was drinking a vodka martini. I still thought the Fog Point vodka tasted like good vodka, delicate, expressive, lacking the brashness of lesser versions.
Hangar One’s standard vodka, too, is made with California wine grapes, in addition to Midwestern grains. At Epic, a 1-ounce pour is $11.