Next to her, another, a non-whisky drinker, said number five tasted like rubbing alcohol. Some oak casks give a pleasant wooden flavor, while some give fruity ones. Between the confidence and the booze, soon my notes overflowed their boxes. Summary. But amid the sweet alcohol of the room, I smelled something else: a bait and switch. May 15, 2015 Each of the whiskies lined up on the tasting mat, one through five, was a light gold color. That did it: we selected cask 28121. The barrel warehouses are not temperature regulated. The example he used was a common tasting note with whiskies aged in sherry casks: Christmas cake. Each of the whiskies lined up on the tasting mat, one through five, was a light gold color. When you keep your whiskey in the same oak cask for years, then you are adding to its flavor and giving it a more smelly character. It all seems a lot like a very dusty library, or a very delectable-smelling crypt. At the same time, water acts as a vaporizer, giving you the chance to feel the aromas and flavors that otherwise wouldn’t be easy to smell. Whisky Grotto is my playground where I educate the world about whisky, bartending, and more. Get in touch with your inner scotch taster and speak words to powerful whisky. The note went down: “spicier, hotter”. I am obsessed with whiskeys, bourbons, and scotches and love to write about them. Was it a really good whisky, did he think? The smell though, that was something special. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but he seemed good at it. It is a weird combination of bitter and sweet flavor notes that finally give you the chance to spend some quality time with your friends. But it wasn’t made up. The room was pungent with whisky, but not like a cowboy bar, where sweet cheap bourbon’s breath mixes with sour beer and sawdust and piss. The number meant nothing to us. He was a hearty laugher, bantering with the bar staff. Glenfiddich is still owned by the family company William Grant & Sons and proud of it, and they make a hell of a lot of good Scotch. Maybe it’s best if you’re in Speyside country, where we were, in Dufftown, a winding three-hour drive north of Edinburgh. That felt good, and I nodded, swirled, sniffed again, and noted “orange peel”. These barrel warehouses smell like the past, moldering wood and the sweet alcohol so strong in the air that guides carry meters to measure the vapor content, lest a tourist flash a picture and turn the whole place to very good-smelling ash. And even then, it’s a strange prospect: a time capsule that you drink. We added water to dilute the alcohol’s bruising burn and kept going. I thought of my 10th-grade AP US History teacher’s advice before the big test: Study hard, and if you haven’t a clue, fake it ’til you make it, baby. “It’s very good”, he said, “but it’s not quite superlative. “People always think of when their mother was making Christmas cake, they would let their raisins soak in brandy or whisky”, McCabe said, “which gives a dried fruit and alcohol sensation.” The pairing of the two is a visceral memory, one that just so happens to match the flavors imparted in Jameson’s whisky by sherry aging. The farmland rolls easily, all earthy palette and, in the early spring, the mottled white of snowfall melting away its final days in icy form. It’s fun to imagine master blenders stealing their wives’ cakes and dumping them into barrels of whisky, but the reality of the sensation is a little different. The barrels, American oak previously used to hold bourbon as well as larger ones made of European oak that previously held sherry and port, laze atop each other on their sides, low walls in corridors, many weeping dried, sticky booze concentrate, all bearing painted ends marked by stenciled years. It’s just one of the many odd-sounding tasting notes you’ll hear around a table full of whisky drinkers, along with pencil shavings, leather, tobacco and stone fruit. “For me, 90 percent of the whole process is in the smell”, Christine Wright, a sommelier at NYC restaurants Hearth and Fifty Paces, explained to me later, when I sought to understand all that had happened at Glenfiddich. I had no idea what he meant. Number two, I wrote, smelled of “floral, orange, lemon”, number four of “caramel and honey”. WhiskyGrotto.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. But it worked. I had heard this recently from Dave McCabe, Head of the Irish Whisky Academy at Jameson, a school where enthusiasts go to learn the science and art behind their love of whisky.

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