Do dheagh shlainte!
OK, enough Gaelic.
Back in 2005 I started a journey that, although it has waxed and waned over the years, continues to this day. I didn’t know that it would be this kind of journey when it began, and I have no idea if, or when it will end. It’s a tricky thing to explain, too. When meeting new people, as we work our way through some unavoidable introductory small talk, I will ofter refer to this journey as “my hobby”.
“I have an unusual hobby”, I will tell them. “I like to taste single malt scotch whisky.”. That usually gets me a raised eyebrow, or at least a moment of silence, after which I have to explain that, no, I don’t have a drinking problem. I just have very deep curiosity about this unique, golden liquid. They will often ask me a few questions about Scotch.
“How much do you want me to make your eyes glass over?”, is the way I always respond.
Interestingly, this journey didn’t start with scotch. It was Irish whiskey which, back then, had my attention. This owed largely to my love of Tom Clancy novels, as the main character, Jack Ryan, was known to pour a dram of the stuff from time to time. In 2010, my then sister and brother-in-law traveled to Scotland. As a souvenir, they brought me back a bottle of Glenkinchie 12 year old single malt scotch whisky. That is the first scotch whiskey I consciously remember trying. Honestly, It took me a little while, probably 18 months, before I cracked it open.
When I did, I knew immediately that there was something different about scotch whisky - besides the missing “e”.
Single malt Scotch whisky is an enigma to me. A distilled spirit that, by law, contains only 2 ingredients: malted barley and water. To be fair, the laws that govern the production of Scotch whisky are a little more complex than that, and they specify other standards that distillers must meet in order to call their concoction Scotch whiskey. There are also other types of Scotch whiskey, including blended malt Scotch whisky, single grain Scotch whisky and a few others.
But single malt is the king. While blended Scotch whiskies such as the iconic Johnny Walker Black, the most popular blended Scotch whisky in the world, or The Famous Grouse, the most popular blended Scotch whisky in Scotland, far outsell all single malt Scotch whiskies combined, the single Malts remain, for me and many others, the pinnacle of the whisky world.
Why single malts? Because they are hard. As JFK said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”. OK, maybe that’s a bit over the top, but to truly understand a good, single malt Scotch whisky, ya gotta work at it a little bit. You have to spend some time with it, get to know it, understand how it was made and where it comes from. It might hit you with the first sip, or you might work on a bottle for years.
I was all in. I learned about the whisky producing regions and peat. I learned all I could about casks - sherry, bourbon, and assorted others. I researched the laws that regulate the production of Scotch whisky and the five different regions in Scotland that produce whisky. But most of all, I tasted a LOT of Scotch whisky. It was glorious!
My partner in crime in all of this was my good friend, Mark. Mark and I had worked together as air medical providers - he a flight nurse and I a flight paramedic. That’s the kind of gig that almost guarantees that deep friendship bonds will form. We also bonded over whisky - the Irish version at first, and then he followed me into the world of Scotch.
Mark had moved across the country by then, but we would still talk on the phone and text about the latest whisky we had tried, or one we had heard about that we were on the lookout for. Later on we began having “virtual drams” - meeting up on FaceTime and sharing a wee nip of the golden liquid. Eventually the two of us, along with our friend Joe, traveled to Scotland and spent a week in that country, exploring, hiking, and tasting whisky of course!
That was the peak of my relationship with Scotch whisky. Over the intervening few years I felt like I lost touch with the magical, golden liquid. I would still enjoy a dram from time to time, and many people in my life, friends and family, would give me a bottle of Scotch for gift-worthy occasions. I even returned to Scotland, this time for a week long father-daughter trip with my only child before she graduated from college. In what ended up being a very strange plot twist, one of the distilleries that we visited, the Glenallachie Distillery, was a place that I was very excited about and had purchased a special, small-group tour and tasting for. But because I was the lone driver for our rented car they did not allow me to participate in the tasting. They were nice enough to give me all the samples in tiny little bottles to enjoy “at home”, but Kristen had to carry the torch for both of us at the official tasting. We discovered she wasn’t super fond of the cask-strength whisky, but she really liked both the 15 year old and 18 year old offerings, poured at slightly lower ABV. That kid has expensive taste…
I was able to find a few really nice bottles and bring them home on that trip, but after that, my interest really seemed to wane.
Part of the problem is lack of access to diverse whiskies. Living in Upstate New York, I can name with a high degree of accuracy almost every Scotch whisky that I will be able to find in almost every bottle shop within a reasonable driving distance of my pad. There just isn’t the demand here for whiskies from some of the less well-known distilleries. And independent bottlings? What are those? I have reached the point in my journey where I need to be able to continually try new whisky, and it’s just not easy to find here. Occasionally I will be surprised. I stopped a few months ago at shop I had never visited before and came across some Glenfarclas 105, which has been difficult to find recently and gifted a bottle of that to a friend. There are a couple other shops that also have a better than Upstate New York-average selection. Foster’s in Big Flats has what is probably the best selection in this area of the world. Century Liquors in Rochester has a good selection, and I was very excited when they recently began to have a good number of independent bottlings on display, but recently that seems to have reversed a bit again. All in all, it’s just really hard to find interesting single malts here.
Recently, I traveled across the country to visit Mark, and he had not long before that returned from his own trip to Scotland. He had brought back some nice bottles, and I was again excited to taste some single malts!
What I realized that first evening at my friends house is that, hard as it may be for me to find, there is a LOT of really good Scotch out there, and that, while it may be difficult to get my hands on some of it, where there is a will, there is a way. That night we tasted 4 wonderful expressions: a 12 year old Glenallachie limited edition finished in sauternes wine casks, a 10 year-old independent bottling of a single-cask Glen Garioch, a cask-strength Mac-Talla Mara from Morrison Distillers, and finally, a four-cask matured 21 year-old Benriach. It was an evening of sampling some really amazing, hard to find single malts.
During that visit we were also able to visit a relatively new bottle shop not far from Mark’s house where we spent 30 minutes or so chatting with a complete stranger about a variety of different single malts. This gentleman was knowledgable and enthusiastic and that conversation went a long way to reinforce my desire to get back to my hobby. I was also able to snag a 12 year-old Glen Glassaugh to bring home, a bottle that I doubt I would find back in NY.
As I finish this story, I should say that I visited a bottle shop on my way home from work this afternoon. I needed to pick up a few bottles of wine to replenish my stock, and after I selected a few, I found myself wandering toward the Scotch aisle. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found exactly nothing other than what I fully expected to find in this familiar shop. But thats’s not going to slow me down…