Sweet at Seventeen Years

You have likely heard the breathless, if not nonsensical, descriptions of the taste of wine as extended by connoisseurs.  I give you, for example, this description of Rio Grande Rojo I found on the Vinter’s Cellar (Waterloo) website: “Heavy, rich and ‘Big” in every way.  Heavy toasted oak used in its design, release the earth, burnt chocolate and vanilla tones, spicy with a pronounced black cherry, distinguishes itself with elegance.  Plum and black current undertones.  A really-full-bodied wine that distinguishes itself with elegance.”

Yeah?

But does the wine taste good?  That’s all I want to know.  Why are they allowing 19^th century Russian novelists to write these descriptions?  Where is Mark Twain when you need him?

My brother-in-law and I like a sip of Scotch now and then.  Okay.  More like now and now and now and then, then, then.  We have particular and workmanlike descriptors for Scotch.  “Shit tastes good,” describes a single malt when we enjoy it.

 

I should note that we have yet to run across a single malt we did not like.

I am not a massive fan of blended whisky.  I will often tell my brother-in-law that they are “too smooth.”  I enjoy a little alcohol burn on my tongue.  Scotch whisky can also display a truly “smoky” flavor or a profound flavor of “peat.”  Both of these are honest remnants of the distilling process and aging in fired oak casks previously used for aging other spirits.

Yesterday I received—as a gift—a bottle of Balvenie, aged seventeen years. 

Shit’s incredibly good!

The barley for Balvenie is still malted (as traditionally) on a wooden malting floor.  The malted barley is then dried in smoky peat kilns.  The spirits produced for the seventeen year old Balvenie Doublewood are (as implied by the name) aged for a full seventeen years.  They are first matured in whisky oak casks.  For the last five years, the spirts are transferred to sherry oak casks.

This Scotch—as most single malts—has an earthy (smoke and peat) taste.

Here is the kicker.  This Balvenie actually has a distinctly sweet after-taste from its time aging in sherry casks.  I suspect a wine-taster could write an entire book around this stuff.  I pray they don't.

--Mitchell Hegman