Whisky is a lonely and bitter spirit, trashy in youth and crusty with age. It brings to mind smoky games of billiards, 1930s private eyes, gruff Scots with long whiskers and my own dormitory roof at night, when I drowned my melancholy about graduation in the discarded leftovers of a cheap bottle of Kentucky’s finest Jim Beam.
Whisky is not, in my narrow mind, a drink to be sipped from a petite flute, critiqued like flowers or sniffed at such and such an angle. This is to say, whisky is the antithesis of wine.
Leave it then to a swanky press event last week to introduce me to the world of modern whisky connoisseurs. And leave it to this newspaper to send the American intern with the palate of a goat.
The event was a preview for the 2008 FNB Whisky Live Festival to be held next month, on highlands and lowlands far away from whisky’s traditional home. Although most liquor on display will come from the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan, there will be a home-grown brand as well as a recent award-winning bourbon called Three Ships.
South Africa, say the experts, is an ”emerging whisky market” and the Cape Town-Jo’burg expo is now the world’s largest.
If the festival has a social message, it is that whisky is no longer a drink for Scottish barons or Kentucky mountain men. A quarter of 2007 festival attendees were women and this year’s event will include female-targeted tours and liqueurs.
The organisers, both women, inform us that visitors this year can explore exhibits on whisky distillation, taste gourmet food-whisky pairings and blend favourite varieties into a takeaway bottle.
Cash not spent on hooch may be put towards a whisky-tasting workshop. And big spenders can arrange chauffeured transport to the festival, an ”exclusive” meeting with a distiller and a private lounge in which to savour, for instance, a few drops of R9 500-a-bottle 40-year-old Whyte & Mackay.
Middle-class whisky sales are booming in South Africa, so it’s fitting that my introduction to whisky tasting comes from a man who makes his living by dumbing down high-culture booze talk for the masses. Fasie Malherbe is a contagiously enthusiastic twenty-something entrepreneur, who co-directs a company called Let’s Sell Lobster.
Malherbe and friends train rural villagers in the expertise needed to impress rich Americans at five-star bush lodges and hotels across the continent by using wild animals as mnemonic devices.
Savannah wildlife is paired with bottles on the liquor shelf, and a server must only learn to recite certain traits of the animals, in wine-mag jargon, to make an astute recommendation.
If the approach seems condescending, says Malherbe, consider that it’s efficient and effective and that trainees learn a skill with the potential to boost self-confidence, improve English fluency and earn R4 000 to R10 000 a month towards the needs of an extended family.
Let’s Sell Lobster is booked up until the end of 2009.
A good waiter should be able to suggest a whisky to match everyone’s taste, Malherbe tells us, and a good whisky hits all the flavour sensors on the tongue.
Fully informed, we began the testing. Our first was a Glenkinchie. This, our guide told us, is an impala, It comes from the lowlands and doesn’t get very old. It is light in colour and body (flavour), has thin legs (viscosity) and for the leopard, the impala is an aperitif. It eats grass (therefore, not woody) and its mannerisms are skittish. This translates to ”skittishness on the tongue”, whatever that means.
Malherbe continued the lesson and we lapped it up.
As we were hand-warming our next batch, I recognised something: whisky, once the humourless beverage of broke drunkards and political brokers, has gone the way of wine. It’s a sophisticated luxury for the expert and an affordable status symbol for the casual lush, but anyone can learn to talk about it like a snob.
To my tongue, my old friend Jim Beam is just as good as that Glenrothes in our press kit. But the Scotch, take note, is a kudu.
The 2008 FNB Whisky Live Festival takes place at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from November 5 to 7 and at the Sandton Convention Centre from November 12 to 14. Fasie Malherbe will present a tasting workshop at the Cape Town event