J.A.Baczewski-Vodka-An-Illustrated-History

Yet the matter was not that clear; the committee did indeed deliberate, buta year later, and only regarding issues in the technological improvementsin production and matters of trade in alcoholic beverages, while Mendeleevspoke up at its conclusions only in regard to the value of the excise tax.Some experts on the subject claim that the truth is more prosaic, or to beprecise – economic; the ideal proportions of water to alcohol were definedby the tsar’s officials when Mendeleev was but 9 years old, and the reasonswere purely financial: in times most difficult for the economy, as much as40% of Russia’s budget came from excise (the similarity in the percentagevalues is totally coincidental), and as such the authorities were very keenon controlling the tax system, which until then had been far from tight.Nevertheless, this brilliant scientist was still to become the father of Russiandrinks – and for many years, information regarding Dmitri Mendeleev’sservices were to be found, among other places, on the labels on RussianStandard vodka.Ultimately, in the year 1982, a mysterious tribunal acknowledged that theabove story of the monk Isidore and his beverage was true. The Poles weresadly unable to present any documents confirming that their firewater(vodka) had been in production before ‘bread wine’ (‘table wine’) appeared.As such, the Russians were recognised as wining this dispute – at leastaccording to their documents. And this fact is painful for us to bear.The turn of the 1980s was abundant in many dramatic events, both inthe Polish People’s Republic and in the USSR, and the entire matter wasfortunately forgotten. In any case, the beverage by the name of WÓDKA(in Poland only) and VODKA (in other countries) continues to be distilledand to be available – much to its consumers’ satisfaction – worldwide.