I GENERALLY don’t advocate drinking whisky for breakfast. But on occasion, when necessity dictates, it does have a way of setting the world right. I was on the fifth day of a Scotches of Scotland distilleries tour, stewing in my Highlands hotel perched on a bluff overlooking Moray Firth. My cell phone was busted. My liver wasn’t far behind. I was suffering guilt spasms over my self-imposed news blackout.
To learn how the world was passing me by, I checked the Drudge Report. The headlines screamed that President Bush had taken a spill on his mountain bike. John Kerry wondered whether he’d lost his training wheels, and journalists were fretting whether it was on the record. Such epochal matters of state drove me straight back to the Glenmorangie, newly mindful of philosopher-king Tom Waits’s maxim, “I’d rather have a free bottle in front of me, than a pre-frontal lobotomy.”
The free bottles came courtesy of the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States and its member distillers. Some call them the liquor lobby. I call them angels. They call me “junket whore,” but I’ll live with it, in order to trek off with them every few years on one of their liquors-of-the-world tours, a scheme they devised to sell writers on the glories of spirits-consumption. It would seem unnecessary. Most writers I know regard “drinking responsibly” as not putting ice in their 15-year-old Laphroaig.
It’s hard not to behave like a tourist when you see glorious Scotland in May–to not take snaps of the shimmering lochs or yellow fields of rapeseed, or of signs like “Glenlivet Primary School” (they start them young over here). It was enough to make us go native, in a fake touristy sort of way: to eat haggis straight out of the intestinal bag, to spew bad Highlander dialogue (“I’m a MacLeod from the clan MacLeod and I cannot die!“), and to inflict CDs like my “Pipin’ Hot” bagpipes collection on our Scottish bus driver. (“If I see another fow’kin’ bagpiper, I’ll shoot ‘im in the neck,” threatened Jimmy.)
But it was whisky we came for, and whisky we were given, from the Scotches known as the Lowland Ladies to the smokier, peatier “barbecues in a bottle” of the western isles. Mostly traveling in Speyside, in the central Highlands, we were taught by the Scotch masters how to nose it and taste it and hold it on your tongue, or, as Dalmore’s Richard Paterson puts it, to “give every tooth a say in it.” He does not so much drink it as have a conversation with it: “Hello, how are you? Quite well, thank you very much.” When he’s pouring us a wee dram of a $46,000-per-bottle 62-year-old Scotch, he makes clear that knocking it back fast with ice is a sin akin to throwing your snoozing grandpa out in the cold, naked.
At first, our group went in for all the descriptors lavished on these single malts–words like “fruit-forward” and “pork crackling” and “new cowhide”–till the absurdity overtook us and we fashioned new absurdities of our own (“nutty and slutty,” “third-world clinic,” and “smoldering rope that’s been extinguished in a glass of Diet Pepsi”). It all seemed a bit fruit-forward to waste time discussing these whiskies, rather than drinking them.
Instead, they fueled us for our nightly No-Talent Show in which colleagues would pull back the furniture to play “air-clarinet” or Morris-dance or–as one demure correspondent from Today’s Black Woman did almost nightly–belt out a glass-rattling rendition of “The Impossible Dream.” They were soirées of the kind one would expect in the company of people who appreciate good whisky and who can drink copious amounts of it without wearing the lampshade home. Each night, sober formality dissolved into convivial intimacy, as at the Kenmore Hotel, where Crooked Jack, an ornery, tartan-wearing, guitar-playing folkie, took requests and then refused to play them.
There, I conversed with an old friend, Gary Regan, author of The Joy of Mixology. A 52-year-old Brit, he’s an ideal drinking companion and a bartender’s bartender. If you need to know how much gin goes in a Monkey Gland, Gary’s your man. Since I’d last seen him on a bourbon junket, he’d lost half his tongue to cancer. He has a new tongue now, fashioned from his forearm skin, and a new lease as well. A lifelong atheist, he’d found God. “And you know what?” he said, looking to cut the earnestness, “She’s got a great set.”
I should’ve decked him for sacrilege, but there was no time. Not with Crooked Jack finally relenting and playing “American Pie.” Around about the time the levee went dry, I threw my arm around Gary and offered to buy him something meaty and peaty and 12 years old. Or I would’ve, if the whisky hadn’t already been the best kind of all: gratis.
–Matt Labash
