Whisk(e)y -- Nothing About The Bakken -- December 3, 2016

The beloved waiter Manuel of "Fawlty Towers" has passed away at the age of 86.

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Whisk(e)y

Wow, I'm in a good mood. The "Off Duty" section in today's Wall Street Journal is devoted in its entirety (well, almost) to "Presents With A Past." (What a great line. But I digress.) The subtext: "these 50 nostalgic gifts -- whose origins date back decades and beyond -- will conjure a simpler time when the holidays were lower-voltage, but just as bright."

From the "Off Duty" section: #30: A Scotch above.

They're not the smokiest, boldest, [but] some of the most elegant expressions come from the Auchentoshan distillery. Triple-distilled and aged for two-plus decades in bourbon and Sherry casks, the suave and complex Auchentoshan 21 Year Old Single Malt will please ...$205.

I immediately pulled Whiskey: The Manual, by Dave Broom, c. 2014, off the shelf. Auchentoshan is not even in the index. Wow.

So, then I pulled out the best book I have ever found on whiskey: Whisk(e)y Distilled: A Populist Guide to the Water of Life, Heather Greene, c. 2014 (also). There in the index, Auchentoshan is mentioned on five different pages:

• page 55:

Ireland is famous for triple distilled whiskey, although not all of its whiskeys are triple distilled. Only one distillery in Scotland, Auchentoshan, is triple distilled -- another whiskey tidbit that pops up with whiskey connoisseurs at my bar. I've never heard of a quadruple distilled whiskey, in case you are wondering.

• page 59:

To make things more complicated, some whiskeys age in several different types of asks before they are bottled as part of their maturation. For example, Auchentoshan Three Wood (master blender Rachel Barrie) is matured in refill bourbon, ex-Spanish oloroso sherry butts, and ex-Pedro Ximenez butts. 

• page 73:

... and "malt" describes a style of whiskey in Scotland. Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Glenmorangie, and Auchentoshan are all distilleries producing single malt Scotch.

• page 88:

Only three single male Scotches come from the Lowlands -- Glenkinchie, Bladnoch, and Auchentoshan -- and that makes it a challenge to describe some sort of overall single malt Scotch Lowland style. I hear people all the time refer to the Lowlands as "light" whiskies. But I find a rich nuttiness in the Auchentoshan Three Wood, which I don't describe as light. It is also the last distillery in Scotland to triple distill its whisky, a practice common in the Lowlands in the nineteenth century.

[Note the various spellings of whisk(e)y; she is correct, and she is consistent.

• page 89:

You may have just breezed over that smattering of letters in the word "Auchentoshan" without trying to sound it out. Let me help you. If you see ch in a Gaelic word, pronounce it as you would the ck in "clock." That's not exactly how the Scots do it, but close enough, and better than using the ch sound as in "chum." The Scots actually soften the ck sound; they breathe through it and never quite touch the back of the tongue to the roof of the palate to create a hard stop as we do. Now you know how to pronounce Glenfiddich and Loch Ness, in case you were unsure. 

By the way, I am putting a $20 bill into an envelope every month. I started that about six months ago. My plan is to take out the money in that envelope and buy a $600 bottle of Scotch when I start collecting social security in about two years.

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Boll

Boll: the rounded seed capsule of plants such as cotton or flax.

Hence: the boll weevil.

But also from ScotchWhiskeyExperience.com:

The earliest historical reference to whisky comes much later, Mr J Marshall Robb, in his book ‘Scotch Whisky’, says: ‘The oldest reference to whisky occurs in the Scottish Exchequer Rolls for 1494, where there is an entry of ‘eight bolls of malt to Friar John Cor wherewith to make aquavitae’. A boll was an old Scottish measure of not more than six bushels. (One bushel is equivalent to 25.4 kilograms)

I thought of that after listening to all the "Boll and Branch" ads on Rush.

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The Tesla Problem

In today's "Review" section in the WSJ there were a couple of articles unrelated to "Presents from the Past."

One of them was a feature article on the new SUV being built by Maserati. It is Maserati's first SUV. I did not know -- or had forgotten -- that Maserati was owned by Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. When I looked at the photograph of the new Maserati SUV, called the Levante, it did remind me of the Chrysler crossover, the Pacifica. Hmmm.

This is a Tesla problem because these are really nice high-end cars -- not just the Maserati Levante but all high-end luxury cars -- that will compete directly with Teslas. People paying $100K for a car are not buying cars to save money on gasoline, and I doubt most of them are buying cars to "save the environment."

One can get a 2017 Levante for $72,000 MSRP, or $83,000 for a 2019 Levante "S" model, base price. The one tested for the article was listed at $94,600. Unlike the new Teslas, the Levante is available now.

By the way, the writer compared this car to the Porsche Cayenne S, not the Tesla.

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The Young Ones

The Young Ones, Cliff Richards and The Shadows
The Shadows 50th