Mash

Whiskey and Me: A Love Story

Inspired by Fredric Koeppel's story of how he first came to love wine, I thought I'd share my own introduction to scotch.

In 1994, when I was 22, I lived in Boulder, Colorado for six months or so. I worked at a liquor store there, and the boss encouraged us to take home and sample beers, wines, and those little airplane bottles of various liquors, so we could make informed recommendations.

So I started trying various things. There was a crazy array of fanciful beers—Boulder was the epicenter of the microbrew explosion at the time, plus we had an amazing variety from around the world—but there were also wines, cordials, liqueurs, liquors, and so on. At first I hated scotch, which is to be expected when a young kid tries it. Back then I was a drinker of the SEC University type: Liquor was for taking shots of, or mixing with Coke or similar so you couldn’t taste it too much while you got hammered.

We had a resident wine expert at Ace Liquors. His name was Jim; I don’t think I ever knew his last name. He was a big guy whose sense of style had frozen in that lumpy mid-1970s period, and not in the fashionably retro way; at some point he had just stopped paying attention.

Jim was awesome. Wine was his career and his passion, and sometimes on a long, slow shift he’d start telling stories. He’d been a wine rep in the ’70s and he’d talk about a wine junket to San Francisco when he stayed up all night snorting coke and drinking Dom Perignon on a boat with Robert Mondavi. You read that correctly: On a fuckin’ boat. (For what it’s worth, I fully believe everything he told me.) I begged him to write a book but I don’t know if he ever did.

One day I asked Jim about scotch. Why do people like it, when it tastes so awful? I said. Jim looked at me with a mix of contempt and sadness, and finally he said, “Listen. You’re a kid, and it’s not your fault, but you’re drinking it wrong because no one ever taught you the right way. Put a little scotch in a glass with an ice cube or two. Let it sit for a few minutes. Mix it with your finger if you want. Then take the tiniest possible sip. You only want to get one or two drops on your tongue. That way the burn won’t overwhelm your mouth, and you can pay attention as the smell gets fully up into your sinuses. Try that, and either you’ll start to get the hang of it or you won’t.”

I went home that night with an airplane bottle of some single malt, possibly Dalwhinnie. I was in the habit of coming home and reading for an hour or two before bed (I usually worked nights and my girlfriend worked days), and having a drink or two while I did. I was reading a book of Karl Kraus essays, so I sat down with my scotch and my book, feeling super sophisticated. I added ice and watched it for a few minutes; was it ready now? How about now?

Finally I did what he said, got about two drops on my tongue and swallowed them, and I swear to god it was like when Ratatouille combines strawberries and cheese.

To push this even further, it was like Rowdy Roddy Piper putting on the glasses, or Dorothy walking from Sepia World into Technicolor World. I sat there taking one sip every five minutes or so, utterly enraptured by the new sensations I was experiencing.

The next day at work I told Jim all about it. I thought he’d be impressed, maybe proud of me, like a mentor/mentee thing. He was not. He was still Jim. In retrospect this must have been a bit like when a puppy wants you to be amazed at a new chew toy.

A few months after I started working there, Jim bought some land in Wyoming and retired. I’ve often wondered what became of him.

That was my introduction to scotch. I still love it, and while I don’t drink it often these days, I generally keep some in the house because when the mood strikes, nothing else will do. I typically have a bottle of Naked Malt in the house, plus some other oddities. Right now I have a few terrific Japanese whiskies: a marvelous bottle of Hibiki that I’m making last, and a divine Ohishi rice-based whiskey.