Scotch

I'd had my heart broken and was looking for help. I called a fellow I knew and asked if I could come by. He said yes, and we talked all night, and drank two-and-a-half fifths of Bell's scotch while doing it.

The sun rose and I felt comforted and wise for about a block of the walk home, and then I didn't taste scotch for 20 years.

Fade out, fade in.

Again, it occurs to me, I was being comforted for some enormity my endocrine system had involved me in, sitting in a bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My friend said to the bartender, "Give me a shot of your best whisky."

The bartender reached down a bottle from the top shelf.

"That's the ticket," my friend said. "What is it?"

The bartender said some foreign name.

"Fine," my friend said, "how much?" Sixty-four dollars, he was told.

"Expensive bottle," he said.

"No," he was corrected, "by the shot."

"Put it back," my friend said. "He's not that unhappy. Give him something in the ten-buck range." The bartender poured me a shot of an ambrosia that I only afterward discovered to be scotch.

I drank it.

"Well, hell," I said, "this puts any cognac in the shade." The bartender nodded.

I remember riding in the car with my dad in the Fifties, him driving and smoking a Lucky. On the pack it said, Its Toasted! And that's how they smelled to me.

The cigarettes smelled like the toasted almonds on the toasted almond Good Humor bar, which is to say, perfect. My years of smoking were an addiction both to the nicotine and to the notion that the next one might taste like they smelled when my dad was driving the car.

Similarly with alcohol, much of my--and, perhaps your--drinking was a search for that (continued on page 147)Scotch (continued from page 106) magical indulgence with which the grown-ups seemed so pleased.

Cognacs were, to me, too sweet, as were even the sharpest bourbons. Scotch was, in my experience, a thin, acid poison. I drank when I was young because I was young, for all those pleasant reasons, one of which was to aid my choking down the cigarette smoke.

I held the Midwestern belief that anyone who knew too much about wine would do well to guard that knowledge closely, that cognac was just sweet rye and that opera was just fat ladies shrieking. (I recognized and relaxed in the very similar proletarian disposition or pretension of Edinburgh and Glasgow, where one could, I suppose, drive a Bentley, but would have to explain it as a "workingman's Bentley.")

Yes, Scotland, I say. And there I was, sitting at the bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that charming Athena of back waters, and I tasted the good scotch and thought, How long has this been going on?

It tasted as it might have tasted in a world where all advertisements were not only true but also brought to our attention to increase our happiness.

It was dark and rich and not at all sweet, and quite sharp without being bitter. It tasted overridingly of smoke and, curiously, of iodine. It didn't taste like any scotch I'd drunk or could imagine. (I try to think of things as perfect of their kind, and comes to mind only the IBM Selectric typewriter and the mid-Sixties Karmann-Ghia. If I can get giddy about them, I suppose I can get giddy about scotch. In for a penny, etc.)

Which brings me to Edinburgh.

It is, I think, equal to Jerusalem in beauty. The castle's up there on the black lava rock, like in an adolescent girl's fantasy. The whole city is gray stone, and it rains and is cold all the time, and that's just fine. Maugham wrote that there are climates where one writes, and climates where one sweats, and I vote with him.

I asked my wife why I saw such a lot of old people walking around Edinburgh, and she said, "It's healthy. And the people enjoy themselves."

I think that much of our American attitude toward pleasure can be seen in the coy, childlike behavior of the flight attendant offering a dessert:

"Are you sure I can't tempt you?"

"Thank you, no."

"Just a little bit?"

Well, no, you know, it's an ice-cream sundae. I haven't had one in 30 years, and if I did require one, I wouldn't need the accompanying nursery charade: "Are you sure that I can't tempt you to this naughty pleasure?"

Our undeniably puritan society can countenance chastity or pornography, but little in between. It seems we have a problem with the issue of control, and that we cycle from conservative to liberal excesses like a child with two sets of toys: joy with the new giving way to boredom, at which point the old is produced to our amnesiac delight.

It is an atmosphere productive of pleased tattletales and uneasy libertines--a puritan country, in short.

No, but I gotta say....

(I take the above from il migliore fabbro, Alan King, who, years ago, solved the problem of the segue beautifully, elegantly and categorically. He tells the joke, adjusts his tie, and says, "No, but I gotta say," and proceeds to a completely unrelated matter.)

Now this:

We were in Edinburgh visiting the inlaws. I was, as usual, being a grumpy old curmudgeon. My people don't travel well. For the past 6000 years we usually moved only because someone was trying to kill us. That is my excuse, and I am not too proud to use it, and am happy to share it with you.

So there I was, jet-lagged and grumpy in Edinburgh.

"How would you like to visit the Scotch Malt Whisky Society?" Trevor asked me.

"OK," I said.

We went down to Leith, the old port of Edinburgh, to the Vaults, which claims to be the oldest building in continual commercial use in Britain--built in the 14th century, and, for some hundreds of years, a storage and auction house for sherries and other wines from the south.

The sherry arrived and was auctioned and bottled. The casks were bought by the Scots, who aged their whisky in it. So the whisky, the true scotch single malt, gets much of its flavor and all of its color from the cask. It can be aged in casks that once held sherry or bourbon, or casks previously unfilled. Its character will, in the main, come from the wood, the previous contents, the age and the history of the cask: a second-fill cask will have a different character than a first fill, for example.

The character of the whisky will also come from the water, the position in the run (as whisky is drawn from the still), the nature of the malt, time in the cask and, I am told, even from where the cask is placed in the maturing room (a more moist corner imparts a deeper flavor.)

The basic ingredients and technique, like with acting, cooking, courting and other fine arts, are simple and straightforward. Barley is soaked and the grains are allowed to germinate. These are dried in a kiln--in the best breweries, by peat smoke. The malted barley is dressed (cleaned of sprouts and imperfections), ground and mashed with hot water. The liquid is extracted several times at increasing heats. The final liquid is called wort. Yeast is added to the wort, and the mixture is fermented, then distilled--boiled into vapor and condensed back into liquid--twice. The final distillate is scotch whisky, which is aged in oak casks for a minimum of three years, bottled, sold and drunk. (I am indebted to David Daiches, and to his most clear, charming and informative Scotch Whisky: Its Past and Present for the above rendition of the distilling process.)

So down, I say, I went to Leith, and there met Pip Hills, head of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society. Pip is a Scotsman, a lover, protector and practitioner of true Scottish culture.

Mark Twain wrote that Ivanhoe was the book that ruined the South. And there is, I think, a certain addictive similarity of wistfulness in the two conquered countries.

(After World War Two the British postal system briefly designated Scotland N.B., i.e., North Britain.)

In the late Seventies Pip and some friends would tour the small distilleries and purchase for themselves a cask or so of the native potation. This was (and is) the true single malt, straight from the still to the cask, nondiluted and unfiltered. Most scotch sold in the U.S. as single malt is approximately 50 percent of cask strength, and has been filtered to remove undissolved solids.

England discovered scotch in 1890, when it replaced brandy as the national drink. Its discovery came about as part of their apostrophization of Scottish culture. The Victorian English made a fetish of Scotland, and frolicked in kilts and tartans. Scotland changed, in their estimation, from a backwater to a wild and romantic, more "natural," spot. Well, the designation "tourist attraction" tends to adulterate and eventually to obliterate the local character. The Black Hills become Mount Rushmore, the quaint fishing village becomes Cannes--or Provincetown--and Scotland, a vassal state of England, became Scotland-land. And as scotch replaced brandy as the British national drink, a way was found to make it faster, cheaper and worse.

The patent substituted grain-neutral spirits for malted barley. Blends--mixtures of various whiskies of various distilleries mixed with grain whisky--replaced the single malt. Color was added, and scotch became synonymous in England--and then the world--with whisky.

True scotch whisky was a farm product, a cottage industry, an indigenous treasure, like maple syrup or white lightning, full of character, idiosyncrasy and taste. Now this thin, characterless blended drink was being sold under the same name and made me ill in 1967.

Pip Hills and his friends decried this "tartanry." They toured the distilleries to buy the odd cask, first for their own consumption, but one thing led to another and in 1983 they founded the Scotch Malt Whisky Society in Leith, and there you are.

On my first visit, Pip took me to the Members' Room, took down ten bottles, and poured a thimble full of each. The colors ranged from straw to lemon to red-brown. We tried the bouquet, first without and then with a bit of water--the water changed each bouquet dramatically, opening some, closing others, altering all--and then had a small sip of each. The whiskies were listed on the bottle and the brochure by age, cask number, region, and characteristics (but never by the name of the distillery): "Highland Northern: like tooth tincture in honey. Distilled April 1976. Gold with a touch of green. Bourbon cask. Nose rich and creamy, of cut grass and malt to begin, of oil and cloves with water. Taste very sweet, wild and astonishing. Medicinal but not peaty." (Sound good?)

Well, they all sounded good, and they all tasted good. The ten were extraordinarily various. I tasted each, and my easily identifiable favorite was that Lagavulin, potation of the gods, which I'd first encountered at the bar in Cambridge.

I spent a lovely afternoon at the society, resisted buying one of their ties, and went off with a cask-strength bottle and their brochure. I got a kick out of that brochure. These fellows enjoyed writing about whisky. I found whisky described as peppery, woody, tasting of vanilla, straw, leather, apricots, nutmeg, wet hay, creosote, saddle soap, rhubarb. I remembered tasting the whiskies and thinking, "Yes, it's true, it's that various." And I wondered who arrived at these distinctions. What immortal hand or eye was framing these luscious descriptions? What agency was raising the status of what could arguably be described as mere booze to that of an art?

On my next trip to Edinburgh I got to find out. We were once again visiting the old folks at home, and I, as usual, arrived jet-lagged and happily out of sorts. I announced I was going to bed, and would see everyone the following noon. Would I not like to stay up for supper? No, no, thank you, I said, much too fatigued.

The phone rang and it was Pip Hills. They were having a tasting, he said, a meeting of the new cognoscenti who chose and then described the whiskies that would be offered to the society. Would I like to come?

Yes, I would. Well, the meeting was to be in Leith in one hour.

I will now confess.

Once, on a trip to the previously mentioned Jerusalem (no, but I gotta say,) I was invited to study Torah with a worldrenowned scholar. My wife and I were both acquainted with his work, and excited at the prospect until we were reminded that his particular profession of faith did not admit women to study. So we regretfully declined.

You see where this story is going.

Yes, Pip, I said, I would love to come to the tasting, and might it, do you think, be appropriate if I were to bring my wife?

He said he did not think it was particularly the thing, and I found myself in the position of wondering if I were the sort of man who would decline the possibility of religious enlightenment that did not include my wife but would accept a similarly exclusive invitation to taste whisky.

Yes, I was that kind of guy. "Darling," I said, "I'm off to Leith. Do not wait up."

I adore Scotland. One afternoon I was haunting the Botanies--the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh, which manages to be a surpassingly lovely spot despite being filled with what can be described only as plants--I was in the checkout line of the cafè up at the top, and I was looking out of the windows at a faraway cathedral, and beyond it, the Pentland Hills. I'd been to a wedding the day before at Rosslyn Chapel out by, or perhaps in, those very hills. Many of the men wore kilts.

A fellow told me later that Rosslyn Chapel is the spot most sacred to World Freemasonry. He told me that the Holy Grail is buried at Rosslyn Chapel, that the intricate stone carvings around the doors are sacred to the devil, and that they depict intricacies of a religion that far predates Christianity.

He took me back inside the chapel and showed me the Apprentice Pillar. It is an extraordinarily intricate--and nonetheless beautiful--piece of stone carving, a column up by the altar. The other columns in the group are fairly plain, and this one stands idiosyncratically turned and worked, disbalancing, but giving a rather lovely weight to, the whole effect. An apprentice, the man told me, was assigned the work of this one column.

When the master Mason saw the beauty of the work, he ordered the apprentice killed. He may have added that the apprentice was buried in the chapel, but if he did I chose and choose to ignore it, as that would tend to take his two disparate and intriguing tales and suggest a unifying idèe fixe bordering on the unfortunate.

Rosslyn Chapel is gorgeous. It is small and cold and carved everywhere.

I shuddered at the geometry--or perhaps it is trigonometry--necessary to align those stones. I thought of the old saw that the cathedrals took centuries to build, and yet no builder's name is found on them.

Is it my imagination, I wondered, or is this story always and only repeated by those with second-class minds?

So I mused in the checkout line, and the pretty young girl at the cash register said, "Fritz Kahn."

Fritz Kahn, I thought. Yes. Architect. No. If it's an architect it's Louis Kahn. Or Robert Kahn.

"Fritz Kahn?" she said.

I nodded, playing for time. Surely, though, there must be an architect of that name. But how did she know the tend of my thoughts?

"Fritz Kahn, sir?" she asked.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Could you repeat that slowly?"

"D' you want a Fritz Kahn?" she said, and pointed at some pastries a sign proclaimed to be the day's special: fruit scone. And yet I maintain there is, or should be, an architect of that name. And I also had a marvelous morning at a cafè up by the castle. I sat at a table on the second floor, with an oblique view down the town and all the way to Fife, drinking basins of coffee and stuffing myself with breads, writing intently and watching various squads of young folks courting.

The young people seem happier in Edinburgh, too. All right, I am a sucker for things Scottish: folksinger Jean Redpath, James Bond's housekeeper, my wife.

Ah, yes. "I'm off to Leith," I said.

We met in the small boardroom of the Vaults. On one wall there was a low niche, from the floor to, perhaps, five feet in height.

On my first visit Pip had asked me to guess its purpose. Statuary came to mind, but was not interesting enough for me to employ as one of my guesses. "Don't know," I said. "Closest thing it resembles is the niche in the coffin corner of a staircase."

Pip had never heard of that and so I accomplished my objective of unseating him--for the nonce--as the master of mystery. But it seems the niche was the appointed station of the auctioneer in days gone by. (You will remember the Vaults was employed as a warehouse and auction house for sherry as early as 600 years ago.)

Back then, it seems, people were in fact quite small. That's where the auctioneer stood, and prospective buyers took the rest of the room to make their assessments and bid on the goods.

No, but I gotta say, which was just the sort of clambake to which I had been invited.

I showed up in a respectful coat and tie. The others were dressed variously--jeans and leather jackets, jeans and sports coats, two fellows in suits.

The tasters were men from mid-40s to mid-80s. The youngest was a wine merchant, the eldest was David Daiches, author of the aforementioned Scotch Whisky. There was a physics professor, a commercial man, a barrister, a fellow who I think was ex-military, Pip and myself--a total of eight.

We began with a Portuguese wine brought by the wine merchant. It was rather stunningly good, and was called Quinta de la Rosa, 1992.

We had crackers and some cheese, and then we sat down.

It was as good as a poker game.

We had eight whiskies to taste, we had eight glasses in front of us, a pitcher of water and another for spit.

Pip began. He would announce the whisky's name (this information would not appear on the society's bottled offering) and pass the bottle around. We'd each take perhaps a half ounce, and would discuss it in this order: by color, by bouquet, by bouquet after the addition of water, by taste and by general impression. We would then assign it a score from one to ten. I was told our sense of smell is vastly more perceptive than our sense of taste; that taste is, in fact, made up primarily of smell--that our perception of taste is basically limited to sweet, sour, bitter or salty, but that our descriptions of smell are virtually limitless.

In gauging the bouquet the gents held their noses over the glasses and swirled the liquor, as one would expect. They also rubbed it on the backs of their hands (this was a test for smoke, which would appear in the bouquet as the whisky evaporated) and between their palms. Before the tasting began, Doogie (whose treatment by Pip seemed to indicate his place as somewhere between factotum and brains of the outfit) brought around a cookie tin filled with what appeared to be charred black cloths and corks. Several of the men sniffed the contents.

It seems that at the last tasting, someone had suggested that a scotch tasted slightly of "bung cloth" and another, to aid in his ability to identify the same in future samples, asked for some bung cloth to be procured for examination. (Bung cloth being, of course, that cloth--burlap, or hessian--placed over the bung, or stopper, of a cask to ensure a tighter fit into the bunghole.)

This bung detritus was charred from the sediment in the cask. It smelled sharp and rather pleasant. I took a bit of the cloth and rubbed it between my palms and sniffed them, electing this as a reasonable occupation for one who had no idea of what he was doing.

So we began.

Blank Blank Distillery. Sixteen years old. Water brings out the pepper. Oaky. More Islay than Orkney.

Comments came from around the table. Yellow cast. Peat and fruit. Peachy. Peppery. David Daiches identified it as being from a fino sherry cask.

Addition of water dissipates its peatiness. Brings out a saltiness. Pear drops on top. Gotten more bland. Now peppery. Taste thins. Takes a lot of water. Rate it a four. General agreement. Send to Sheol.

Daiches' comment reminded me of a story Zino Davidoff tells in his fine Connoisseur's Book of the Cigar: Three Spaniards came into his shop. Each chose a cigar, smoked it and then identified the tobacco of which his cigar was made. Davidoff confesses himself impressed, and laments that such expertise probably exists no more.

But I saw it around the table, and was impressed and delighted to be included.

Thorstein Veblen reminds us that any endeavor using a preponderance of jargon is largely make-believe. But the talk around the table was not jargon, it was dedicated amateurs speaking lovingly of an object of their admiration, and doing so in standard and quite charming speech. We heard the designations: late run, early run, second fill. But in the main the talk ran to concrete attempts to describe the evanescent: orange peel, citrusy, marzipan sweetness, almost reminiscent of anchovies, yeasty aftertaste. Very clean, a good "breakfast" whisky, good aperitif.

There is a sign in the Members' Room that connoisseurship is the adversary of inebriation; and, indeed, one could not have encountered a more respectful attitude than one found in the room. The tasters were engaging in preserving and extending a beloved native heritage--the single malt local product. Its vagaries and quiddities, distillery, year and cask, were of as much moment to them as wine is to the chaps in Bordeaux. In the best Scots tradition, their expertise was not that of an elite, but of the simple citizen's right to enjoy the good things naturally incident to the locale.

Well, I was glad to be there.

"Linseed oil."

"Rubber? Does the water bring out rubber?"

"Hessian?"

"Verbena." (All chuckled.)

"Tight-ass." (Corrected to "reticent.")

A: "I find it muddy."

B: "You've been very fortunate in the mud you've tasted."

So it went around. Sooty. Wood shavings. Caramel, corrected to burnt toffee. Brackish. The kind of whisky a lady ought to carry in her handbag. (This the most aggressive opprobrium of the evening.) Musky. Bicycle seat (with concomitant digression). Nutmeg. Custardapple. I noticed that many of the descriptions were terms from childhood. Well, of course, the senses are sharper then. Life, for the happy child, is simpler; and the special treats, the special pleasures, are pleasures indeed. The Stoics wrote, "You will not have to endure old age. That man is being trained now, by the gods."

And, indeed, much of the delightful seemliness of the tasting was this: We were indulging in a pleasure legitimately attendant upon advancing age. (Did not Escoffier remind us that gustatory pleasure will persist when all others are gone?)

Our next-to-last whisky was aged 30 years. I suggested it would likely be quite good, and was informed yes, it would, or quite vile. It was reddish and dark. We heard "elusive, intoxicating nose." "Got to be a refill cask--no wood in the nose." The table got quiet as the men sniffed it. "Good-quality fresh root ginger," one said.

Water is added, we taste, conversation derails. "Cinnamon on top." Pause.

"Very noble," all agree. Pause. "Spices come through on the palate." It is awarded an eight, the highest mark of any of the whiskies we have tasted in two sessions.

We go reluctantly on to the last of the evening, which nobody likes. "Miles away from the bonfire," says one. "Sour plaster." Pause. "Sour plaster." It is given a wretched four, and that's it for the business of the evening, and we all return to the previous (Inchgower, 1966). I am invited back the following week.

We taste another 30-year-old, doesn't age well. "As you would expect of any old whisky, no individual odors coming off. This whisky is a perfect example of the workings of natural justice--only the wealthy and misled will pay £60 a bottle for it."

That evening we also hear, "Like the sea breeze blowing over grass," and of a Bruichladdich, 1979, "Not just balance, but coexistence," and then, "The distillery just closed down. It's a fucking disgrace."

•

I remember a wonderful inn-restaurant in South Royalton, Vermont. The cooking was French and light, and the food was hot and clean, and just right. Ten years intervened and I found myself back. The name was the same, but it had changed hands, some consortium had got it.

"How's the food?" I said. "Still good?"

"Well," the fellow said, "it's a lot more consistent."

Gene Debs said that you can vote for freedom and you'll probably lose, or you can vote for slavery and you'll certainly win. And our particular time and clime value the idea of winning above all else.

The ancient province of the proletariat, fresh, simple food and drink--the local bakery or brewery, the pot still, handpressed cider--is now enjoyed by only a few. The Bruichladdich distillery closed (1979: "Subtle, beautifully balanced whisky, a refined drink"), and the lesson of Babel we see all day every day is that when too many of us band together we must turn to mischief.

I wrote long ago (in the employ, I believe, of this same magazine) that fashion is an attempt of the comfortable to coopt tragedy. I look back at that jejune pronunciamento and wonder if, in spite of its being dramatic, it might not after all be true.

America not only expresses itself but to a large extent also defines itself through African American music and Jewish films.

Victorian England was raised on Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, but England could not have the dignity and tragedy of the Scottish defeat--they say a loser can't get enough to eat and a winner can't sleep--so the English took the tartan and Waverley, and glorified their Scots regiments, and took up drinking scotch.

Pip Hills and I were sitting in his kitchen in the New Town, Edinburgh. The kitchen was graced by a fire-engine red Aga cooker--the stove-oven-cook-top-heater that is the best of things British.

We were drinking superb coffee and feeling expansive. We spoke of things which were perfect of their kind--the Aga, of course, and I mentioned Lagavulin, the 88-inch-wheelbase Land Rover, the Selectric typewriter. He asked if I would like to see the most beautiful object he had ever seen.

He brought out what looked to be a small steam engine--the whole affair perhaps ten inches long and five high.

"Now, what is it?" he asked.

"I don't know. Looks like a patent model of a steam engine."

He shook his head.

It was a Stirling engine. Designed and patented by a Robert Stirling, a Scottish minister, in the 19th century.

The engine worked, Hills explained, on heat. Heat was applied to a cylinder and the resultant expansion inside moved a valve, thus creating a vacuum inside the cylinder, which drew a reciprocating valve.

Its efficiency, he explained, was only six percent--considerably lower than a steam engine's--and for more than 100 years engineers had searched in vain for application.

Then one day, he said, someone observed that the reverse of its inefficiency as an engine was its efficiency as a heat pump--and a variation is now in use extracting the heat given off by supercomputers. It was a beautiful machine. But I thought it excessive, calling it the most beautiful object he had ever seen.

Reflection suggested, however, that its beauty rested not just in the engine as such, but in the engine and its history--for it took almost 200 years of thought for its simplicity and worth to be recognized, and then the stone that the builders refused became the cornerstone--the fast-moving, self-important world came back to Scotland.

Edinburgh is equal to Jerusalem in beauty. The castle's on the rock, like in an adolescent girl's fantasy.