an evening of single malts

[ellen_datlow]

Yesterday evening, Mary Robinette Kowal -master puppet maker, artist, and writer--came over to sample my single malts. Until I took them all out, I had no idea how many I actually had on-hand...TWELVE different ones (two of the same brand, aged 12 years and 18 years respectively).

Two were only little bottles left over from the road trip Eileen Gunn and I had made post-Glasgow Worldcon when we bought every sample bottle that looked pretty and/or we'd never heard of--there were many. Eileen and I only sampled about four because she was driving. So we split the rest of them and each took some home.

Mary brought some lovely blue cheese and a fantastic fig bread and two delicious lavender shortbread cookies from Silver Moon on the upper west side and I had some cheddar, mimolette, and mozzarella.

We tried all (I think) the Islays except for Lagavulin (my personal favorite). We rated them...Now although Mary is knowledgable about wine and how to judge it, neither of us knew the correct descriptions for single malt scotch, so we improvised.

We only got through six (we started by finishing off a little sample bottle that we didn't realize till after we drank it was NOT a scotch--horrors--it was an Irish whiskey with the name Te Bheag--don't know where that one came from). We decided we liked the Bowmore Enigma the best (Mary, take note--I just checked that that's what it's called).

By the time Mary left (around 10pm, I think) even though we had very little of each scotch, we were both a bit sloshed --at least I know I was.

Comments

[benburgis.livejournal.com]

He does go into quite a bit of detail in some parts of the book about the tastes of different ones, despite claiming in the beginning that he didn't think his palette was sophisticated enough to do much of that sort of thing. I think one of the advantages of single malt as opposed to wine is that however complicated the combination of tastes is, the individual taste descriptions tend to be fairly straightforward and literal, as opposed to the wine situation where they tend to be much murkier and more metaphorical, to the extent that you have to be trained in what amounts to an elaborate code (e.g. 'taste of chocolate' in wine has almost nothing to do with what actual chocolate tastes like) just to describe tastes.

Anyway, taste descriptions aside, it's a fun book, if you can take (or even enjoy) a lot of the free-associational rambling about different subjects that he does in there.

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

I just checked and it's not available in the US. the UK amazon site has a LOT of negative reviews but they just make it sound more interesting to me...not that I have time to read anything not current --and not horror :-)

[benburgis.livejournal.com]

Ah. That makes sense. My copy was a gift from my sister (who actually doesn't like whiskey, but knows that I do and likes Banks' writing), and she probably bought it in the UK.