Mixing it
We have invited four of the best drinks writers to take it in turn to write for us. First up, award-winning journalist Andrew Jefford argues that whisky is a matter of tastes
Itâs never comfortable to be a heretic. Agreed, Iâm not going to be burned at the stake, disembowelled or thrown into Laphroaigâs lauter tun for my apostasy, but even self-exclusion is a lonely business. To ease the burden, Iâm going to tell all. For the best Socratic reasons: if we donât ask questions about what we are doing, then we will fail to understand what we are doing.
What (my question runs) is the point of tasting notes? More specifically, what is the point of the modern whisky tasting note? The most exhaustive book ever written on Scotch whisky, Alfred Barnardâs 1887 guide to The Whisky Distilleries of the United Kingdom, more or less does without them altogether. Occasionally a malt is ârich and highly flavouredâ (Balmenach), âclean and mellowâ (Inchgower) or âthick and pungentâ (Laphroaig), but many are merely âpureâ, including those sold at that time as single malts (which Barnard called âself whiskiesâ). Tasting was the readerâs business, Barnard implied; the author was there to provide history, detail and colour.
Detailed tasting notes began to appear in whisky books as recently as the mid-1980s with Wallace Milroyâs Malt Whisky Almanac and Michael Jacksonâs World Guide to Whisky. The notes in those guides now seem cursory, even terse. Atorrent of baroque detail, each dram weighed down with dozens of specific descriptors of sometimes alarming disparity, has become the norm.
I half-suspect these billowing descriptions we.....
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By Andrew Jefford
Section : The Last Word
Page number : 74
