Shunpiking

Recently, I sat between two folks at a dinner party as they debated the myths and realities of gold in cocktails.  Not the color gold.  Actual gold.  At one point, one of the disputants (I call them that, because the chat really wasn’t all that civil) referenced the “Smirnoff Gold hoax,” and that really amped up the level of agitation in her opposite.  (There had been a fair amount of consumption of non-gold-infused spirits up to that point, so their back-and-forth was not lucid, or sweet).  But the mention of Smirnoff Gold piqued my interest.  We’ve all heard of Goldschlager.  But Smirnoff?  The not-quite-top-shelf staple that you can get in a plastic bottle, like a liter of Coke?  What the heck was Smirnoff doing being mentioned in the same breath as super premium liquors suffused with a precious metal?  Well, it turns out there is indeed a Smirnoff Gold. And it really does have gold in it. (That’s why one of the conversationalists was defending it against the massive injustice of being labelled a hoax... “Just because they make the non-premium stuff, doesn’t mean they don’t make a vodka infused with gold.” Sound point.).  For some reason the marketing team at Smirnoff thought the best angle was to make the flavor of Smirnoff Gold cinnamon and then emphasize that the gold accentuated the cinnamon notes.  Not the approach I would have taken, but so be it. The allure is not in the taste, as the metal is famously without any.  The allure is in the ritualistic thrill of consuming an age-old and incorruptible symbol of wealth—to take a precious metal to the tongue. The good (and surprising) news is that gold is edible, as Joe Schwarcz points out in an interesting piece for McGill University’s Office of Science and Society. The Egyptians thought gold could “purify the body, mind and spirit. In Elizabethan England, the wealthy served meals decorated with gold leaf, and in Italy desserts decorated with gold were supposed to ward off heart disease.”  And the Germans and Swiss have been drinking gold for centuries.  Goldschlager, it turns out, is essentially derived from (or at least inspired by) German Goldwasser, an herbal liqueur from the 16th century.  I myself do not partake, given the fact that the one and only time I tried Goldschlager, it resulted in a 14 karat hangover.