Is Costco’s Store-Brand Vodka Actually Grey Goose? Learning the Answer Reshaped How I Think About Vodka Entirely.

Tony Abou-Ganim is drinking vodka during our call, even though it’s 10 a.m. in Las Vegas, where he lives. The “modern mixologist,” as he calls himself, alternates sips from two custom-designed tasting glasses, one vodka, then the other vodka, swishing the liquors around in his mouth to really get a feel for them.

The two vodkas on the menu were of the same brand name but had different countries of origin, different makers, different base ingredients—and Abou-Ganim could tell. I hadn’t outright asked him to taste-test them, but I had been hoping he would. He much preferred the French-made vodka to the American-made one, and that’s not just snootiness. He’s a big fan of other American vodkas, like the now-ubiquitous Tito’s. (He knows Tito.)

The French vodka has notes of vanilla and caramel—dare he say, a crème brûlée taste? A nice acidity with notes of lemon, citrus, and white pepper on the back, he told me, evoking an instant “saliva drip.” Although the American didn’t cut it for him, the experts at the New York Times’ Wirecutter full-throatedly endorsed it. According to those taste-testers, it has subtle hints of citrus and rose and the texture is silky.

These careful, artful descriptions surprised me: Discussions of tasting notes, mouthfeel, and terroir are often deserved for fine wines and expensive whiskeys. Certainly not vodka, which, as many a college student has determined, is best when nearly invisible.

Also surprising? The humble point of purchase of these vodkas. To try them yourself, you’ll need to journey past the window selling $1.50 jumbo hot dogs, past the 83-inch 4K-resolution TVs, past the brilliant-cut diamond engagement rings, and past the 36-roll family packs of Scott toilet paper. These are Kirkland Signature vodkas, house spirits of the big-box superstore Costco.

What makes Kirkland’s vodkas so tantalizing is not merely that they’re a grocery store steal—priced between $10 and $25 for a cartoonish 1.75 liters of spirit, with no other size options. It’s that these spirits come with a mixed-in spice of intrigue, mystique, and lore. Connoisseurs (and anyone who puts them to a taste test, really) consider them legitimately good. Kirkland Signature American Vodka was not merely in the Wirecutter review for the best vodka, which was written by Haley Perry, a former bartender. It earned the top spot, a “unanimous favorite.”

Rumors have long abounded that Kirkland vodka is simply a dressed-down version of the most gussied-up mass-market vodka: Grey Goose. This isn’t the case, but the rumor itself, which has been swirling for nearly two decades—at least—leads us to a better understanding of a world in which the two could plausibly be confused. Because we live in that world. As the Kirkland saga exemplifies, vodka is both firmly lodged in American consumption and woefully misunderstood.

Vodka has been popular in Europe—namely, Poland and Russia and Sweden—for generations and generations. But in the past century, it has had a transcendent rise here in the U.S. and, since 1976, has been the bestselling spirit in the country. In 2023 Americans bought $7.2 billion worth of vodka, according to the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. That’s more than whiskey, cognac, gin, and rum. Tequila and mezcal are on the rise, but they still sit in second place, with $6 billion in sales.

But vodka, for its long history as a commercial juggernaut, has also become something of a punchline in the drinking and bartending communities. Abou-Ganim, who wrote the 2013 book Vodka Distilled, recounted a trip to an Oakland cocktail bar where he was surprised to find its menu completely lacking in vodka-based options. He asked the mustachioed twentysomething bartender whether the establishment carried vodka at all.

“Yes, we carry two,” the bartender said to him. “And in my opinion, that’s two too many.”

There’s an underlying paradox in vodka that might explain its status among the nation’s snootiest imbibers: No one seems quite sure whether it’s supposed to taste like nothing or whether it’s supposed to taste like something.

Until very recently, the U.S. government defined vodka as a neutral spirit “without distinctive character, aroma, taste, or color.” The Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau changed the definition in 2020 to strike these requirements entirely.

But this course correction hasn’t sparked an immediate mass rethinking of the spirit—at least not yet. There’s still the lingering idea that vodka should maybe, possibly, probably, definitely taste like nothing. Its sensibilities and imperfections should be deliciously absent from your palate, enabling the drinker to slurp down a low-cal vodka soda, a fruity cocktail, or even a Bond-esque martini. (Please stir. Don’t shake.)

No one perpetuates this idea more than the vodka companies themselves. On their respective websites, Smirnoff boasts “remarkable smoothness,” Stolichnaya offers “unparalleled smoothness,” Pinnacle touts its “clean taste,” Tito’s deems itself “one of the cleanest spirits available,” Svedka highlights a “clear taste and a crisp finish,” and Ciroc calls its vodka “fresh.” So many ways to say: This vodka tastes like nothing!

This marketing allows vodka brands to base the price on more abstract factors. I asked Jake Emen, a journalist who has judged vodkas in competition, how much marketing determines pricing in vodka. “When I say that it’s 100 percent,” Emen said, “I want you to know that I’m not exaggerating.”

Taylor Foxman, CEO of the beverage industry advisory firm the Industry Collective, put it another way: “I’ve launched $300 bottles of vodka and, honestly, blindfolded without the flashy bottling or market efforts behind said products, [it’s] very hard to tell the difference.”

Brad Japhe, a journalist and spirits expert, argues that price is often correlated with quality when it comes to the cheaper vodkas, with a little bump in price representing better-quality ingredients. “Let’s just say it’s easier to tell the difference between a $15 bottle of vodka and a $40 bottle of vodka than it is between a $40 bottle of vodka and a $4,000 bottle of vodka,” Japhe said. (The $4,000 bottles tend to be covered in crystals.)

The experts I spoke to for this piece agreed that vodka shouldn’t taste like nothing; there is much more to a bottle than the decorations on the outside and the promise that it can deliver a good—maybe even glamorous—night of fun without bothering you too much on the way down. But the central discrepancy between what vodka can be, if you consider it carefully, and what much of the drinking public expects from it is part of what allows sticker price and actual value to become so unhitched from each other in vodka land. (Yes, a fancy label can always stand to confer outsize status—but no adult would ever mistake a Natural Light for a craft brew, or vice versa.) And it is in this vodka environment that some slice of people enjoying Kirkland insists that it simply cannot, truly, be made by Costco. They’re sort of right, actually. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Vodka is a difficult spirit even for an expert to judge, but there are a few things the experts can tell you to help you quickly refine your palate. Like many American vodkas, Kirkland’s is made with corn. Although the French vodka merely says it’s made from grain, Abou-Ganim’s taste buds tell him that it’s a wheat-based vodka, just like Grey Goose. (Kirkland did not respond to my request for confirmation).

Veronika Karlova, a vodka expert and consultant now working for Noblewood Group, which makes Beluga Vodka, said the average vodka drinker might not be able to differentiate between a random set of vodkas, but present them with a corn vodka, a wheat vodka, and a potato or rice or even milk vodka and they’ll be able to taste the difference.

In some spirits competitions, vodkas are separated by base ingredients for more accurate judging. Karlova said she feels that vodka is the hardest spirit to judge in part because everyone has a different understanding of what makes a good vodka. “Some judges tend to prefer neutral; some judges prefer varietal or character-forward vodka,” she said.

At Wirecutter, Perry and her team set out to taste mass-market vodkas—ones most Americans can find in a nearby liquor store or supermarket. While her colleagues in New York have a test kitchen where taste-test samples are prepared by a third party, Perry, based in L.A., set up a classic preparation of the spirit herself, pouring samples of each vodka into empty water bottles. She labeled each one with a letter, doing this far in advance of testing so that she’d forget what was what. What Perry and her colleagues found was that throughout the blind taste-test process, one spirit kept coming up as a favorite. When they finally learned which vodka was which, and that the winner was the Kirkland American, no one was surprised. Though you might feel shy about showing up at a dinner party with a hulking bottle of Costco liquor under your arm, Perry points out that Costco makes a lot of great-quality products and Wirecutter often endorses them, recommending Kirkland-brand nuts, pure vanilla extract, and tuna, among others.

The Wirecutter team also came out in favor of Pinnacle, Stolichnaya, Tito’s, Smirnoff No. 21, and of course Kirkland Signature American. If anything surprised Perry, it was how different each of these picks was from one another. “The fact that the Pinnacle is so briny and just tastes like a dirty martini right out of the bottle is weird, but it’s really cool. I was surprised how obvious the honey sweetness from the Tito’s felt—very different from the vanilla sweetness in the Kirkland.”

The most important thing about appreciating a vodka, then, is to simply pay attention—because it’s not as if Kirkland is bragging about that vanilla sweetness. The brand plays into the promise of nothingness too. On their respective bottles, Kirkland American boasts of being “distilled six times,” while the French claims that it’s “five times distilled.” This is marketing-speak, intended to convey the absence of impurities—and maybe taste. Japhe says that that’s a gimmick. “Vodka is being made in these big, huge column stills that have tons and tons of plates in them,” he said. “Technically speaking, you could say that each one of those plates that the liquid passes through is a different time it’s been distilled.” Perry, who interviewed distillers for her Wirecutter guide, writes: “A higher or lower number of distillations does not correlate to a higher or lower quality.”

Instead, Perry emerged from her experiment appreciating the subtleties and differences in the taste of spirit where once she had assumed there were few: “I definitely came out with more respect for it. I was kind of a hater in the category before. I was like, ‘This is a waste of alcohol—just drink anything else!’ ”

It might come as no surprise to spirit and product review experts that Costco can provide a mean and inexpensive martini, but the idea is so unbelievable to others that Grey Goose has for many years had to quash the rumors of association. “You’re not going to the Aviary bar and ordering a Kirkland and soda,” says Victorino Matus, the author of the book Vodka: How a Colorless, Odorless, Flavorless Spirit Conquered America. “Grey Goose and soda sounds so much cooler.”

The earliest mention of the claim that I can find appears in November 2006, on the web forum of the computer hardware magazine AnandTech. It’s the subject of countless Reddit threads, Quora inquiries, and internet comparison videos.

“As with all spirits, vodkas vary widely depending on their ingredients and distillation process, and therefore their taste,” Joe McCanta, Grey Goose’s global head of education and mixology, told me. “Grey Goose is distilled and lightly filtered just once, preserving the natural integrity of its ingredients—including the finest soft winter wheat in France with the highest classification and protection by French law.” (Finally, a vodka that brags about its ingredients!)

He continued: “Furthermore, neither the Grey Goose blending and bottling facility in Gensac-la-Pallue, nor the Grey Goose distillery in Picardie, produce or privately label any other vodka.”

(Private labeling is when a company makes a product and gives it to a second company to sell with that second company’s own logo slapped on it. If you’ve ever bought Target’s Favorite Day ice cream or Walmart’s Great Value cream cheese or Whole Foods’ 365 sandwich cookies, you know that there are good—even great—private-label products out there at steep discounts and with less-than-stellar branding.)

OK, so Grey Goose makes only Grey Goose. Then where does Costco get its vodka? Under U.S. law, Costco needs to get its vodka from somewhere—the company can’t make the liquor itself. “A producer of alcoholic beverages cannot be a retailer of alcoholic beverages,” said Brad Berkman, a beverage lawyer at the Florida-based firm Greenspoon Marder. Federal and state tied-house laws require this spirits-industry separation. “Kirkland, if they wanted to open up their own distillery and make their own product, they could not do that in virtually every jurisdiction—it’s prohibited by law.”

Thus, it’s conceivable that Costco would hire an outside company like Bacardi, which has owned Grey Goose since 2004, to make vodka under its name. But according to the label for Kirkland Signature American Vodka, the liquor is produced and bottled by a company called Fairmont Ltd. In Mira Loma, California. In actuality, it’s made by LeVecke Corporation—Fairmont is just a trade name. Public records from a federal government database indicate that LeVecke has held the registration for Kirkland American since at least 2018. LeVecke makes the Hawaiian-inspired Pau Maui vodka, as well as other spirits, wine, beer, and ready-to-drink cocktails. (LeVecke, which has hundreds of entries on the federal database that tracks private-label agreements, would not comment on its relationship with Costco: “Costco is extremely proprietary about sharing their supplier information, so we are unable to confirm,” a LeVecke spokesperson said in an email.)

Meanwhile, the label for Kirkland Signature French Vodka indicates that it was bottled by Distillerie de Gayant in Douai, France, and imported by Misa Imports in Dallas. While Distillerie de Gayant is a subsidiary of a subsidiary—it’s owned by Terroirs Distillers, which is in turn owned by Picard Vins & Spiritueux, none of these French companies appears to be connected to Grey Goose—or any other major mass-market vodka sold in the U.S. Kirkland is, in other words, uniquely Kirkland. None of the French companies responded to requests for comment.

But the answer is: Costco does get its vodka from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is not Grey Goose.

I wanted to taste this incredible and inexpensive vodka for myself. I applied online for a Costco membership, after which my wife and I journeyed to the large store, stood in line for 40 minutes to get photo IDs at Costco’s best impersonation of a motor vehicles department, grabbed a jumbo hot dog and a slice of pizza, and began shopping. Only then did I realize there was no vodka. There were no spirits at all—just beer and wine. The nearest liquor-selling Costco, an employee told me, was many hours away, in Kentucky. At least we got some cheap gas on the way out.

I recounted my futile excursion to Abou-Ganim, who sent me a package with two small glass bottles of vodka. One was marked 1 and the other marked 2. I know a taste test when I see one.

Drinking vodka might evoke memory, or trauma, of poor decisions past: of college parties at which the cheapest one-and-a-half-ounce units of already-cheap spirit were recklessly thrown down the hatch in a moment of glee. I confess I had snobbishly come to associate vodka drinkers with people who, frankly, don’t like the taste of any liquor. To divine what makes a good vodka, however, we might need to willfully suspend our disbelief about the spirit, dispensing with our preconceptions, biases, and slander against it. I know I had to.

I conducted two taste tests weeks apart. During the first, I tasted Sample 1 and Sample 2, impressing myself by correctly identifying the French and the American. I disliked the American vodka and enjoyed the French. The American was reminiscent, in smell and taste, of nail-polish remover, while the French was buttery in flavor and smooth on the palate.

On my second taste test, I added in two more vodkas: Tito’s, and a local craft vodka that I had quite liked previously. I guessed only the Tito’s correctly. And on my second evaluation, I found that the American had no harsh burn on the nose and was quite nice and peppery when sipped; the French I found bright and sweet. This time, I liked the American and French equally, and for different reasons than I had originally identified. On the first taste test, I disliked the American for the same reasons Abou-Ganim did; on the second, I saw what Perry loved about it.

What I’ve gathered is that vodka tasting is a game for the skilled craftsman, for the seasoned taster. Even in my second attempt, I began picking up a more sophisticated understanding of the spirit and the small nuances that differentiated them. I started really tasting the vodka. Vodka isn’t just a clear liquid to put in a water bottle, or a flashy bottle at a club. It’s not even a fine wine. It’s more like, I learned when I really sipped it, taking in abstract impressionist art. It’s meditation that makes a Rothko a Rothko, and not just a block of color. How delicious that you can find that experience in suburbia.