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By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

New York

When I first saw the Commissioners’ Map of 1811 many years ago while researching Manhattan history, my reaction was shock and disbelief. This was no charming antiquarian depiction of Old New York. It was a bold plan for the city’s growth—a tight, rectilinear network of streets overriding natural terrain and private property, extending far beyond the small early settlement at the foot of the island into its wilder open reaches. It seemed ruthless and unreal, visionary or hallucinatory. Farms, homes, hills, valleys, woods and streams had disappeared under a relentless geometric overlay of right-angled streets: the famous Manhattan grid.

When I saw the map again in the current exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, “The Greatest Grid: The Master Plan of Manhattan, 1811-2011,” I still found it an unsettling combination of the visionary and the pragmatic. This amazing document, the centerpiece of a show celebrating its 200th anniversary, is responsible for the Manhattan street system and a city unlike any other in the world.

The exhibition opened quietly last December and has been so popular (who knew? a lot of old maps and photographs?) that its original April closing has been extended through July 15. Sponsored by the Office of the Borough President of Manhattan in collaboration with the museum, the New York Public Library and the Architectural League of New York, the show follows Manhattan’s radical transformation through original documents from city archives and historical collections, beautifully researched and organized by its curator, Hilary Ballon, university professor of urban studies and architecture at New York University, and expertly installed by Wendy Evans Joseph. The excellent book-length catalog, edited by Prof. Ballon, is a surprising historical page-turner. A coda of eight proposals selected from a competition held by the Architectural League suggests where the grid could go from here.

It’s a fair guess that New Yorkers want it to stay exactly the way it is. In a video at the entrance, people chosen at random state their home spot on the grid, confident that in their comfortable Cartesian world no one has to ask “Where?”

The miracle is that the plan actually got built. An explosion of wealth and population in early 19th-century New York prompted the Common (later City) Council to ask the State Legislature to establish a commission to “develop and choose a master plan to channel and direct” the city’s future expansion. Three commissioners, Gouverneur Morris, Simeon De Witt and John Henderson, were appointed in 1807 with a mandate to complete the work in four years. The measuring and mapping was done by the commission’s secretary and surveyor general, John Randel Jr., and the finished product was delivered slightly ahead of schedule in 1811.

The plan was accepted and implemented immediately as a massive public-works project employing armies of workers over the next 60 years. It was financed by assessments on adjoining property owners for the “improvements” of paved streets and utilities, a practice that met with violent resistance but proved profitable in the end. An early version of eminent domain allowed the city to take the land, reimbursing the owner at market rates, a cost made up for by assessments and sales.

The Commissioners’ Plan, nearly nine feet long, is flanked by their seals and by impressive portraits of the three substantial, serious men who held the future of New York in their hands. A sampling of the 93 large “Farm Maps” Randel made later, at a scale of 100 feet to 1 inch, records the topography and property boundaries underlying the grid. His handwritten field notes show street by street calculations in “chain lengths,” a painstaking process that used metal chains and heavy brass compasses, theodolytes and geodesic transits to reconcile the difference between true north and magnetic north readings. Most of Manhattan was measured in that way, an inconceivable feat in the age of Google.

No deviations from the grid were considered necessary. It ended at a nonexistent and hypothetical 155th Street, with everything neatly numbered; avenue names came later. The surrounding rivers and a few token spaces were expected to satisfy health and recreational needs. The commissioners were openly dismissive of ceremonial boulevards leading to monumental institutions like those being constructed in Washington according to Pierre l’Enfant’s plan. Because no one was able to anticipate the automobile or the city’s enormous future growth, the 1811 plan inevitably led to gridlock, New York’s notorious addition to the English language.

The grid was denounced for its obliteration of the natural landscape and fought as a taking of private land; later criticism focused on the lack of open space and the way the division into standard lots turned the island into negotiable real estate. Surveyors were driven off as trespassers; temporary street markers were removed until stone posts replaced them. One remaining stone column stands unmoored in the show. The grid’s unyielding regularity left an estimated 39% of existing houses in the middle of a proposed street. Many were demolished and about 900 buildings were moved. Clement Moore, whose large holdings were in what is now called Chelsea, denounced city officials as “men who would level the seven hills of Rome.”

A standard 200-foot block-front was established for the avenues, with narrower side streets and wider cross streets at irregular intervals. The blocks were divided into 20- and 25-foot house lots with a 100-foot depth, a module that could be assembled for a variety of configurations. Vacant land was sold at public auction, and speculation, fraud and corruption flourished as buying and selling lots became the biggest game in town. In the 1830s, John Jacob Astor transferred his fortune in beaver pelts and international trade into real estate, to become New York’s largest landholder and richest man.

It must have been hideous to live through. Workers dug and blasted earth and rock to reduce everything to street grade, leaving mounds of rubble behind. The process is recorded in surreal detail in photographs from the museum’s collection. There are views of new streets that seem to have been dropped from outer space. The Dakota, completed in 1884, stands in an uptown wilderness of streets to nowhere.

So what did we get besides gridlock? New York is a strange city of serendipitous side effects, where what seems wrong often turns out to be right. The first lesson of the grid is that scale is everything. The plan was scaled to 19th-century life and dimensions; it predated the automobile, which it accommodates badly. But what it gave us, with its short, 200-foot block lengths and small, 20- to 25-foot lot sizes, its direct and easy navigability, is a walkable, personal city at human scale, where every street is an endlessly varied and inviting series of visual experiences, of constantly changing shopfronts, restaurants and buildings of infinite styles and uses. When that scale and mix is threatened, we know it; if a revitalized, increasingly affluent area has an influx of look-alike chains demanding increased street frontage, we will use zoning restrictions to maintain scale and avoid what Manhattanites perceive as the mall-death of boring redundancy. Newness, novelty and the next thing are all encouraged by small-scale opportunities. This doesn’t happen in big boxes. Or parking lots.

When land is scarce and expensive you build close and high, and Manhattan is an island of solid street walls and shoulder-to-shoulder skyscrapers. The streets that border them are public social space; they are full of life and activity and the promise of whatever lies around the corner. Urbanist Holly Whyte found that people instinctively gathered on the most crowded parts of sidewalks, bypassing plazas. The worst idea that architects and planners ever had (what were they thinking?) was the superblock; we are still trying to knit the streets of the grid back together. Some are being restored and reconnected in the rebuilt, sterile superblock of the World Trade Center site.

Because the grid is a total democratization of space, with no area designated as more important than any other, every neighborhood creates its own distinct identity, with the capability of reinventing itself, like people, and moving on. That flexibility is unique to the grid. It has also accommodated major incursions and amenities like Central Park. Twice yearly, an accident of solstice, orientation and geometry sends golden shafts of setting sun straight through the grid from river to river, west to east, an occasion that would be celebrated by people less in a hurry.

The architect Rem Koolhaas has defined New York as a “culture of congestion,” and it is that close interaction of people and ideas that has produced one of the city’s greatest strengths—call it a culture of creativity. There is much to celebrate about the grid.

Ms. Huxtable is the Journal’s architecture critic.

A version of this article appeared March 28, 2012, on page D7 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Crosshatching a Miracle.

Type the words “empty wine bottles” into eBay’s search engine and you will soon be presented with a number of options to purchase all manner of empties from the world’s greatest wine estates. Within seconds, I found examples of magnums and bottles of distinguished vintages from Bordeaux and California. I can understand keeping a bottle as a trophy from a particularly special vintage or grower, but I have no inclination to start a collection of empties. So why would somebody want to buy an empty bottle, in some cases for hundreds of pounds?

As eBay says, there are myriad reasons for buying old bottles, from decorating a restaurant to storing homemade wine. But let’s speculate for a moment. How probable is it that one might be tempted to purchase an empty bottle from a particularly valuable and sought-after domaine, refill it with a similarly aged wine of above-average quality (but by no means as valuable) and try to pass it off as the original? It would be a fun trick to play at a dinner party. But could it actually fool an expert?

“There have been fakes for hundreds of years, certainly in France,” says wine authenticator Maureen Downey, owner of Chai Consulting in San Francisco. “As somebody who is experienced at looking at these things, you can tell when the capsule isn’t right. It is believed that one of the methods of making a fake wine is by refilling an empty bottle. We often find it is a very old bottle with a brand new cork but no indication of recorking.”

As the prices for fine wine have increased, so have fears about counterfeits. One Hong Kong merchant told me that restaurants there are now more diligent about smashing the empties of particularly prestigious wines. Although not an exact science, the authenticity of a product—which can be verified by the glass, label, weight and color of the liquid—remains a very real concern.

Take, for example, the European debut of California-based Spectrum Wine Auctions, which last week came to London for its much-billed “Evening Sale.” Hours before Spectrum and its local partner, Vanquish wine merchants, were due to accept bids at a sale room in the Mandarin Oriental hotel, they released a statement saying they were withdrawing 13 lots from the auction, including a number of bottles with the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti label, due to “apparent label discrepancies.” The domaine, through its U.K. agent Corney & Barrow, confirmed it couldn’t verify the wines’ authenticity. Eight lots from Burgundy’s Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé were also withdrawn. Richard Brierley, head of fine wine at Vanquish, says those lots were withdrawn “as a matter of precaution” after a specific request from the domaine. Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé declined to comment.

The red flag was originally raised by Los Angeles-based collector Don Cornwell. Mr. Cornwell, who also happens to be a lawyer, completed his own detective work when he viewed Spectrum’s wine catalog and noticed several incongruities in the labels of some of the rarest and most sought-after Burgundy wines. He posted his concerns, in forensic detail, on the forum of Internet wine site wineberserkers.com. This alerted Corney & Barrow, who then raised the issue with Spectrum. Among these concerns was the observation that on a bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1978, which had an estimate of £6,000, a label on the shoulder of the shipper, Percy Fox, misspelled the address as “Sackvilee Street” rather than Sackville Street.

“It is concerning to see a label on which the then-London address of Percy Fox & Co. is misspelled,” says Simon Lawson, general manager of Diageo-owned Percy Fox, which was the official U.K. agent for Domaine de la Romanée-Conti until 1993. “Our suggestion would be that any wine which displays labeling errors like this are referred to the domaine for verification before being offered for sale.”

In the auction catalog, Spectrum and Vanquish say all of their wines were carefully inspected and vetted by their team of international experts, who spent long hours meticulously scrutinizing each detail of every consignment. They also added, in a statement, that the wines were withdrawn “through an abundance of caution and in line with our commitment to excellence in due-diligence and verification,” so that the issues could be properly investigated. At the time of writing, Spectrum President Jason Boland says the investigation is ongoing. Mr. Brierley adds: “We are committed to resolving the matters raised and having the relevant producers involved in that process.”

But the incident does raise questions as to the provenance of old and rare fine-wine bottles coming onto the market, especially viewed in the present context of fine-wine prices. “Clearly there is a problem,” says Corney & Barrow Managing Director Adam Brett-Smith, and “clearly it needs addressing.” The withdrawn lots didn’t stop staggering sums being paid for rare wines at the Spectrum and Vanquish wine auction. A three-liter Jeroboam of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti 1990 sold for £40,250, while a single bottle of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti from 1945 fetched £28,750. These are sums that could only be dreamed of two decades ago. I wonder how much the empties would sell for.

Write to Will Lyons at william.lyons@wsj.com

By PIA CATTON And CHRIS HERRING

Louisville, Ky.

On a cloudy Sunday in mid-March, the fourth race at New York’s Aqueduct Racetrack didn’t go off quite as planned.

For about 30 seconds, a filly named Elle’s Vision lit up the track, blazing out of the gate on little more than natural speed and competitive instinct.

WSJ’s Pia Catton asks several jockeys to justify their existence as they get ready to race in the Kentucky Derby.

As thrilling as it was, it didn’t last. After the first turn, the horse drifted toward the outer rail and the rest of the field blew by. But a video of the incident was remarkable—not so much for the outcome, but for what was missing from the picture: the jockey. Elle’s Vision had unseated her rider, Junior Alvarado, while she was still inside the gate. So when the bell sounded, she took off running with nobody aboard.

Under the rules of racing, a horse that loses its rider during a race is either listed as a non-starter or a non-finisher or is automatically listed as coming in last. To the establishment, the idea of a horse crossing the wire alone is just about as preposterous as a jockey trotting to the finish without a mount.

But anyone who happened to see Elle’s Vision on that Sunday at Aqueduct couldn’t have helped being impressed by the effortlessness of the horse’s stride and shared some of the thrill of what was clearly a wild romp. They might have been tempted to ask themselves a radical question—one that would cause a lot of ears to perk up at Saturday’s Kentucky Derby: Are jockeys in thoroughbred racing really necessary?

The outcome of a typical horse race is “probably 95% horse, 5% rider,” said C.C. Lopez, a jockey at Monmouth Park who has competed in the Breeders’ Cup. When the race comes down to a head or a nose, he added, “I might have a role in it. But if the horse wins by five or 10 lengths, that is the horse.”

Lopez said he wouldn’t be surprised if jockeys, who earn about 10% of the purse money their mounts win, were someday replaced. “We’re talking about drone planes in Afghanistan,” he said. “Is it really that big a stretch to have someone at the race controlling a robot from the stands with a joystick? It isn’t far-fetched at all.”

To be perfectly clear, the horse-racing industry isn’t considering such a change. Since the early 18th century, when this sport became professionalized in England, horses in competition have traditionally been piloted by small, wiry humans. The sight of jockeys in their silks and goggles is as much a part of the track-day scenery as betting windows, decorative hats and the mint julep.

Darren Rogers, a spokesman for Churchill Downs, the venue for Saturday’s Derby, said of riderless horses: “We wouldn’t even entertain the thought.”

Terence Meyocks, national manager of the Jockeys’ Guild, a trade association that represents riders, said he doesn’t believe his membership could be replaced. “If you’re going to have racing, you have to have jockeys,” he said.

Dale Romans, the trainer of Dullahan, a horse that is 8-1 on the betting line in Saturday’s Derby, points out that to many people, the riders are the stars of the show: “Jockeys are pound for pound the best athletes in the world,” he said.

Nevertheless, horse racing’s staunch devotion to its roots doesn’t seem to be doing it many favors lately. Throughout the sport, there are concerns about track finances, attendance, declining purses and a general erosion of relevance. There are serious inquiries afoot into whether trainers take proper care of the animals and whether jockeys are adequately protected from injury. It’s often forgotten that jockeys, who weigh an average of 115 pounds, could become human projectiles when the 1,200-pound beasts they’re riding rear up or fall down at speeds near 35 miles per hour.

Given these troubles, there is no harm in asking whether a rules change—one that injects some novelty and puts more emphasis on the horses—might be a good thing for the sport. And it is hard to think of anything more novel than eliminating jockeys. “It would require radical change from the way things are done now,” says Walker Blankinship, the director of New York’s Kensington Stables. “But I believe it could be done.”

There are at least two historical precedents for the idea. Since the Renaissance, the small Italian village of Ronciglione, which is about one hour north of Rome, has hosted an annual jockey-less horse race. The race, which takes place on cobblestones and winds through a narrow central square, lasts about 54 seconds—or about half the length of Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. The horses that participate are trained year-round by groups representing the city’s neighborhoods.

The residents of Louisiana’s Cajun country began getting together to race their horses in informal match races. According to Ed McNamara, an author and expert in Cajun racing, the owners were given the option of placing a rider aboard, or not. And in the 1950s, there were instances where horses were allowed to run unburdened.

When considering jockeyless racing, the first questions that come to mind are how the horses would know when and where to run—and how they’d know when to stop. During that March race at Aqueduct when Elle’s Vision went off without its jockey, she lost her bearings the moment she reached the middle of the first corner. “She came out and competed with the other horses,” said her trainer, Eric Reed, “but she had nobody to guide her around the turn.” Racehorses, he said, still “expect the rider to help.”

In greyhound racing, dogs are lured around the track by a mechanical rabbit, but horse experts say the equine species isn’t so easily motivated: “There is no way to teach a horse to chase a carrot,” said trainer Gary Contessa. “He’s not going to chase anything at full speed—unless it was a male horse and you had him chasing a female horse. That might work.” Without jockeys, he added, “You’d have a lot of 1,200-pound objects running in every direction.”

Video of the annual riderless race in Ronciglione shows that horses there do make turns, although the surface is slippery and they don’t seem to be running at full speed. In the Cajun match races, McNamara said owners who didn’t use jockeys would hedge their bets by tying beer cans filled with rocks to the horses’ manes to scare them into running harder or, in some cases, fastening on a live chicken. To save the horses from missing turns, he said, the tracks were laid out as straightaways of about a quarter mile.

Most experts agree that an open oval such as the mile-long track at Churchill Downs would present problems for riderless horses. “The momentum is like a car going around,” said Reed. When a horse hits a turn at 35 mph, he said, “they have a hard time getting around.”

Joanne Friedman, a New Jersey horse-farm owner and equine appraiser, pointed to another problem: Given the generally nervous nature of horses, she said, it would be “quite a feat” to get them to start a race without incident. Another potential problem: stopping. Without a jockey, Lopez said, racehorses act more or less like hungry, lost children. If left alone, he said, all they want is to find someone to lead them back to the barn.

Some observers said quarter horses, which are faster than thoroughbreds but run shorter distances, might be ideal for a jockeyless race—and could probably be trained to finish.

The idea that seems to have the most potential is the notion of replacing jockeys with robots. In fact, it is already happening: After years of controversy surrounding child riders, camel racing switched to lightweight remote-controlled machines. The guidance that a jockey provides to a horse comes through shifts of weight and control of the reins and whip.

John Cisneros, a former jockey and assistant to trainer Mike Harrington, said horses wouldn’t pay attention to a nonhuman. “Horses are much more agile than camels,” he said.

Even if the jockey makes a mistake in judgment, Reed said, that is part of the race. “Sometimes they’re the hero, sometimes the goat.”

However, it isn’t unthinkable that these functions could be performed by a machine, even though there is no telling whether robots will ever replace jockeys. But if they do, there might be one group that is silently pleased by the idea: the trainers.

“I’m a proponent of remote-control robots—where the trainers could work the joystick from the grandstand,” joked Contessa.

Write to Pia Catton at pia.catton@wsj.com and Chris Herring at chris.herring@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 4, 2012, on page D12 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Do Horse Races Really Need Jockeys?.

By TOM L. FREUDENHEIM

Spies in the House of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art, through August 26

Playing House

Brooklyn Museum, through August 26

***

New York

‘Artists are the secret constituency of museums.” That’s the opening textual salvo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s incoherent photography exhibition “Spies in the House of Art.” It also has little to do with the show’s other claim—that the exhibition demonstrates how “artists explore the secret life of museums and their collections.” Museums are filled with secrets, among them attribution disputes, art deaccessions and exchanges, unsavory provenance issues, and power struggles within and between trustees and staffs.

At best, the argument that this show “surveys various ways museums inspire the making of works of art” is evident in a few of the photographs on view—most notably the large Cindy Sherman portrait that conjures up an Old Master painting (and wonderfully confuses you as to precisely which one it might be). But, by their very celebrity, Ms. Sherman and other oft-seen artists in this show have long disposed of the notion that they constitute a secret museum constituency.

That art galleries provide grist for artists’ comment mills is no special revelation. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, in the 18th century, may have been among the most prolific of those who showed us paintings on collectors’ walls, while Samuel F.B. Morse’s iconic painting “Gallery of the Louvre” (1833) was an important attempt to bring the glories of European culture to our shores. The noted caricaturists Thomas Rowlandson and Augustus Pugin depicted both the art and the raucous crowd of viewers at a Royal Academy exhibition in their satirical work “The Exhibition Room at Somerset House” (1800). So it’s difficult to be overwhelmed by the contrasting gallery views by Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth in this exhibition.

The high-definition pictures of both of these accomplished photographers regularly provide us with insights into scale and space: Ms. Höfer is interested in the mysterious nature of space itself, while Mr. Struth suggests the tension between people and the places they inhabit. But their work appears incidental and trivialized in the context of this show. Francesca Woodman’s majestic photo-collage “Blueprint for a Temple” (1980) may or may not reference museums, which are only one of many “temple” types; the intriguing scale combined with the elusive medium and subject matter of Woodman’s image remind us of the artist’s precocious power, and her tragic early death in 1981 at age 22.

In my experience, artists are often a museum’s most enthusiastic and sophisticated audience, rather than “spies.” And as consistent visitors, they may infuse their own work with visions expanded by regular encounters with art. So it does artists an injustice to suggest, as this exhibition does, that they are simply cynical critics looking down their noses at the masses crowding today’s museums. Andrea Fraser does this in a sarcastic and pretentious performance video of the artist as museum guide, “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk” (1989), while Lorna Simpson, in a text/photo combination, “Parts” (1998), makes no secret of her negative view of museum visitors and how they really don’t understand what they are viewing; the photo of a vitrine containing “Bronze period” bones, presumably in a natural-history museum, is accompanied by a snooty text that includes the comment, “their [i.e., the visitors'] gaze and pace was guided by the [audio] tapes.”

***

Brooklyn, N.Y.

In what is probably coincidental scheduling, the Brooklyn Museum recently invited several artists to create “activations” (the museum’s language) in some of their wonderful American period rooms. This may be a far more interesting place to get a sense of how artists can creatively interact with museums, although the results of these interventions are not always successful. The star of this exhibition is Betty Woodman (the mother of Francesca), also the lead artist here, who invited the others to participate. Ms. Woodman has collaborated with Anne Chu to add an array of decorative objects to the late-18th-century Cane Acres Plantation room—one of the earliest examples of a separate dining room in such a house, with a long dining table and sideboard. Among the works included are ceramic takeoffs on traditional objects that might have graced such an interior. Most of them are characteristic of Ms. Woodman’s visual puns on traditional art—strategically positioned on the center table, sideboard and mantle. The total effect, along with Ms. Chu’s elaborately cut-out floor coverings (referencing early American floorcloths, while suggesting bits of Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray) combine to make an opulent abstract composition enriching both the old and the new.

Ann Agee is far more in-your-face when her work takes over the mid-19th-century Milligan Parlor and Den, filling the already dense American Victorian neo-gothic aesthetic with a cacophony of handmade and found objects and kitschy wallpaper. It doesn’t quite work. Far more subtle and refined interaction with the art of the past is evident in the six videos that Mary Lucier has strategically placed in the rooms of the two Schenck Houses, which span almost a century of construction beginning in the early 18th century, presenting among the most austere interiors of those at the museum. Using carefully edited and spare re-enactments (such as cooking and dining), the artist reimagines what might have taken place in these rooms at an earlier time. There’s a reminder here of Shimon Attie, whose projections on European buildings conjure up their pasts. But these are Brooklyn ghosts summoned up by an artist personally connected to her intervention as a descendent of early Dutch settlers in New York.

Watching artists interact with art and its institutions and contexts can be illuminating. Artists are occasionally invited to roam a museum’s storeroom and select an exhibition, which can provide an insightful understanding of both the art and the artist. The timely juxtaposition of the Met and Brooklyn exhibitions may tell us more about the curatorial decisions within these two institutions. While the Met show includes some accomplished artists whose interesting ideas about museums never actually develop, the Brooklyn room interventions are much more respectful of both the museum’s holdings and the ability of artists to add value to our understanding of what we see.

Mr. Freudenheim, a former art-museum director, served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian Institution.

A version of this article appeared March 13, 2012, on page D6 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: When Artists Take On Museums.

F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal

CROP’S TOPS | Karlsson’s limited-edition Batch 2008 potato vodka has an earthy, black pepper flavor.

TERROIR, VARIETALS and vintages: three fancy words most commonly associated with grapes and wine. But with potatoes and vodka? Not so much. Liquor brand Karlsson’s hopes to change that with the U.S. debut this week of its first vintage vodka. Its conception began as a taste experiment by Börje Karlsson. While the master blender was aware that different potato varietals yielded unique flavor profiles (the standard Karlsson’s is made from seven potato types), he wondered if the characteristics of a single kind of spud would change from year to year. Mr. Karlsson produced a vodka made from 2004 Solist potatoes, then made a batch from a 2006 harvest. The difference was dramatic (I tasted it—it is). While a handful of different single-batch, single-varietal Karlsson’s vodkas were released in Sweden, the 2008 Old Swedish Red potato bottling will be the first to go international, with 1,542 of 1,980 bottles designated for the States. It’s interesting stuff—Karlsson’s Gold has always been one of the more flavorful vodkas, but Batch 2008 is even more earthy, peppery and closer to an Aquavit than anything you’d use in a martini. Save the 2008, however, for sipping neat or with ice, accompanied by, say, an oyster plateau. New York’s PDT and Los Angeles’s Comme Ça have it behind the bar or get it online at astorwines.com. 40% ABV, $80

—Kevin Sintumuang

A version of this article appeared March 31, 2012, on page D5 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Vodka Goes Vintage.