To die for

We wouldn’t last very long without food and drink. Fortunately, to keep us alive we have hunger and thirst to remind us when it’s time to top up on either. We could easily survive eating fruits, vegetables and cereals and drinking nothing but water. In fact, we would probably be much healthier and have a far less destructive environmental impact if we did. But we are not like other animals and are not content to simply satisfy our hunger and thirst. Instead we need to have an enjoyable experience doing so. We don’t view nutrition as a fundamental need, but rather as a pastime, in which we spend an obscene amount of time indulging.

I’m not criticising this, I’m just pointing out how bizarre this actually is. I, for example, invest hours of my life writing about whisky - something that I know is completely unimportant, is not beneficial to my health and uses lots of precious natural resources in its production. But I enjoy drinking it, sharing my thoughts about it and hoping people find it worthwhile reading what I have written. But it really is bizarre. I can’t imagine a couple of chimpanzees in the jungle spending an hour discussing the intricacies of how much they’d enjoyed the bananas they’d eaten that morning. But we do it, and we’re obsessed with it.

We live in a culture of reviewing and critiquing. We do nothing without first seeking the views and opinions of those who have already done it. This is perfectly understandable - before we spend our time or money on something, we want to be as confident as possible it will not be wasted. We do not want to repeat the mistakes of others. But this has also made us far less adventurous. We used to learn from our mistakes. Now we just let others make them for us so we can read about them on the internet.

And online anyone can share their unfiltered opinions about absolutely anything, with the consumer unable to know if these opinions are trustworthy. Our natural instinct is to assume people write honestly but, in fact, we have no way of knowing if this is true. Perhaps the next step in our progression will be to review the reviews. I write reviews of whisky but there is no way of you knowing if I can be trusted. Maybe somebody has paid me to write something positive or negative about a certain product. You, as the reader, will just have to believe me when I say that I do this because I enjoy it and I hope that anyone who reads it finds it either useful or entertaining.

The food and drink industry is the perfect playground for the critical mind, as it produces products that people are supposed to enjoy. The critics often use their reviews as much to show off their supreme knowledge to their audience as to provide any useful information to them. This is apparent from the way they describe themselves. They are not ‘experts’, but rather ‘aficionados’ or ‘connoisseurs’. Using such words rather than their English-based equivalent gives an impression of a higher class of intelligence and a feeling of exclusivity. And this snobbery that surrounds eating and drinking has, for some reason, always really annoyed me (as you can probably tell). I hate it when people are made to feel in some way excluded or ashamed just because they enjoy consuming something that a ‘connoisseur’ does not approve of.

But, anyway, this is a whisky website and I’ve hardly mentioned it yet so where am I going with this? During the short time I have been drinking whisky I have already encountered many examples of this snobbery, which I feel can be a real barrier to people just being able to enjoy drinking the stuff. Here are a few examples of what I’m talking about.

Firstly there is the classic snobbery surrounding what you’re drinking. Single malt whisky has somehow become the drink that the real connoisseurs enjoy, whereas blended whisky is just for turning one’s nose up at. This doesn’t really make much sense when you consider that blended whisky usually contains malt whisky and many blends are made purely of single malts. In fact, most whisky produced will end up in blends, as this is how most of the world enjoys drinking it.

Similarly there is an idea that the true drink of the whisky connoisseur is Scotch whisky. The name ‘Scotch’ has become synonymous with whisky, but production of fine examples of the drink is by no means confined to Scotland. It is very much a world-wide drink with international whiskies regularly being recognised as world-beaters. At the last whisky tasting session I attended, my favourite on the night was a Swedish whisky. However there is still a prejudice that surrounds drinking whiskies from countries other than its spiritual home.

I personally enjoy drinking whisky straight, exactly as it comes out of the bottle. Heaven forbid I would ever consider mixing it with anything. It is considered among the experts that the only acceptable thing to do is to add a little water. This water must, of course, be in its liquid form as solid water is obviously frowned upon. And if you do add water, make sure you add only a couple of drops using a pipette. Water added in any other way will surely make the whisky undrinkable. If possible, you should travel to Scotland to fill a sterilised bottle with water from the loch nearest to the distillery that produced your whisky. But if I prefer to mix my whisky with ice, cola or coffee, that is surely my decision and should be of no interest to anybody else.

Of course there is an established etiquette to drinking your whisky. You should always make sure you drink it out of the correct glass. If you are sampling it for the first time you must use a nosing glass but thereafter a tumbler is acceptable. By no means should you ever be caught drinking your whisky from a teacup. Leave it in the glass to sit for as many minutes as it is years old. This can of course be a little frustrating if I fancy a glass of whisky to congratulate myself on getting the kids to sleep but I am obliged to leave it for 15 minutes to settle. In my experience the kids could have woken up again before the 15 minutes are up and then the moment has passed. If you want to pour yourself a glass and just drink it, then do so.

Marketing within the food and drink industry relies on the gullibility of the consumer. We are very easily influenced by the use of phrases such as ‘home-made’, ‘natural ingredients’, ‘farmhouse’ and ‘artisan’, whose inclusion on labels usually result in higher prices. In recent years in the UK, and now in Germany too, we have seen the rise of ‘pop-up’ restaurants and ‘street food’. I don’t really understand why something being labeled as street food or sold from a pop-up restaurant should make it superior (and more expensive). A friend of mine was recently very excited that a pop-up taco restaurant was coming to Berlin. I couldn’t help myself and I asked, “what are pop-up tacos? Are those the ones you have to heat up in the toaster?”. An awkward silence followed.

At my local street food market there’s a Turkish pancake seller. It is commonplace for people to queue in the cold for half an hour on a Saturday morning to buy them. I overheard a father who had just paid 20€ to feed his family telling his friend that the pancakes are “to die for”. I don’t suppose he meant this literally, although they clearly were “to queue for half an hour in the cold and pay 20€ for”. Actually I have tasted these pancakes and they are perfectly ok. However I have also been to Turkey and bought some for a few Cents from a street vendor. They tasted much better. I was tempted to suggest to this man that he could save up the 20€ and half an hour he spends each week for one year, and put the 1,040€ and 26 hours towards a family holiday in Turkey, where they could gorge on delicious, authentic Turkish pancakes to their hearts’ content for a fraction of the price.

I’m trying to demonstrate the power of words in describing what we eat and drink. This has changed significantly in recent years, as we always want to know as much as possible about the food we eat. Nowadays in the pub I would probably order the pan-seared Gloucester Old Spot and wild sage sausages with crushed Jersey Royals from the menu. However, in the ‘olden days’ I was perfectly happy ordering bangers & mash. There is, of course, a link to whisky here. You won’t see many bottles with a label on that just says “Whisky”. So all of the other words, images, colours and textures are there to influence and tempt us. Much of what we see is helpful, but we must be wary of misleading and deceptive information, and be able to spot it. I’d like someone to develop a mobile app that reads the labels on bottles and highlights all of the bullshit in bright red text.

Whisky is a popular drink and distilleries want to take advantage of this by selling as much as possible. The trouble is you cannot produce and sell whisky quickly. You have to leave it in a barrel until it is ready. After three years you could sell it as whisky, and market it as a three year old version, but nobody would buy it. Therefore the marketing departments must come up with exotic names for young whiskies that they can print on the bottles instead of giving an honest age statement. We should be aware of this fact, as some of these don't always taste very good.

As we search for a whisky we enjoy drinking, we will encounter bottles of different shapes, presented to us in attractive cases, covered in exotic imagery and describing the cultural and historical significance of the whisky inside. There will be descriptions of the things we can expect to smell and taste at every stage of the drinking process. It's always worth remembering that none of those things listed are actually contained in the drink you will be drinking. When we drink whisky, our brain matches the sensation to the tastes and smells we’re already familiar with. Everybody will taste and smell different things in a whisky and this will differ each time we drink it, depending on what else we’ve been eating and drinking that day. The things listed in the tasting notes are the ones the in-house experts experienced. Sometimes I haven’t even heard of some of the things listed. There’s no way I would be able to identify a hint of sandalwood in a whisky if I don’t know what sandalwood smells like. Don’t get me wrong, the more time you spend drinking whisky, the more smells and tastes you will start to identify and the experienced drinkers can undoubtedly identify hundreds of different sensory experiences with every sniff and every mouthful. I’m just saying that this shouldn’t put you off simply enjoying a drink. After all it’s essentially just beer that’s been distilled and left sitting in a barrel for a few years, but you won’t see that written on many labels.

Once we’ve learned to see through the bullshit and snobbery and we decide to buy a bottle of whisky, it is ours to do with as we please. We must make sure the whisky’s purpose is fulfilled, and that purpose is to be enjoyed. This may involve waiting fifteen minutes to drink from a nosing glass with a carefully pipetted drop of loch water, or simply having a quick drink from a teacup with ice and cola while you wait for your nice, warm taco to pop up from the toaster.

Written by Peter on 13 May 2021