Stags At Bay

[f4f3]

My friend Mark had a stag day on Saturday. Mark is around my age, and three weeks from now he will be getting married for the second time. That makes him kind of unique in my peer group. Most of us have at some point broken up with long term partners and then later got together with someone else. Some of us (like me) have been divorced. He's the only one I know to have divorced then remarried.

His stag do was in two parts - a quad bike expedition in the afternoon, and then a meal and whisky tasting in the evening. Since it was in Edinburgh, on the east coast, instead of Glasgow, I booked a hotel room for the night, which was a good call. The afternoon had been intended to be dirt track racing, but the weather was too wet for that and we ended up on the quads instead. This didn't work out particularly well for me. I'm tall, and reasonably top heavy. I never felt comfortable going across slopes on the bikes, and was constantly feeling on the edge of toppling over. We were being led through woodland, and most of the time we were dodging between trees and up and down steep inclines. And it was wet. I survived though, which was the main thing. My legs and wrists are still aching today, though not to the same extent they were yesterday.

When we got back to Edinburgh we had a couple of hours before the whisky tasting, and I spent them resting at the hotel. It seemed a bit of a waste of time, but I actually needed it (I forgot to mention that I was out till around 1 the night before).

The whisky tasting was at the Scotch Malt Whisky Society's Queen Street members' room. I've been an SMWS member since about 1986 or 87 (with a couple of years off in the 90's when I was in Newcastle). Over the years I've done a few tastings with them, and this was one of the more enjoyable. We had a Glenmorangie, an Aultmore and an Ardbeg. The Glenmorangie had the same problem I get with most independent bottlings from Tain - powerful on the nose and the palate, but fading away to nothing very quickly - no finish at all, like candy-floss. I can't remember having an Aultmore before. This was an oldie - 23 years old, deep sherry colour, but still lots of vanilla. Chewy toffee, rather than fudge. The Ardbeg was a bit of a smoke monster - I liked it a lot, but it wasn't an Islay for beginners, that's for sure.

It was a fairly boozy meal, and I probably had a half bottle of wine to go together with my malts, but I had a lot less than Mark, who was encouraged to hoover up the extra drams. From there we wondered off to Thistle Street, and then to a (very noisy and stuffy) place called Tiger Lillies.

We called it a night after the witching hour, and I was back in the hotel by one. I'd stopped drinking after we left the SMWS, switching to water, and I had a can of Irn Bru (the no sugar variety) before I went to bed, but even so I was surprised to be up and about by 8, and on the train home before 10 after a hearty breakfast.

Maybe this is the new model for me, even in the booziest of company, and if it is I've no complaints. I enjoyed pottering around yesterday, and had an early night. Apart from my occasionally twingeing thighs, I'm fine today. In fact, I'm off to the new gym in 15 minutes to get my personal training programme, and I expect to go back after work tonight.

Comments

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

These were all SMWS single cask bottlings so the Glenmorangie(125.65) was a seven year old sherry cask. About as lively as you'd expect for something that young. I think a Glenmorangie port wood was the first special finishing I ever tried, back in the 20th Century, and I still have a soft spot for their own bottlings. It's all gone a bit made, though, with everyone finishing in every sort of cask they can get their hands on (though the most bizarre attempt was by the SMWS, who put some Speyside into a chilli sauce barrel - the outrun, predictably, was undrinkable, but they sold it as a sauce, and some folk even bought it). My two favourite places for special finishes are both Island distilleries - Bruichladdich, who have a cask for all occasions (I missed out on a chance to buy their Black Arts bottling last month) and Arran, who go for wine cask finishes, and I've not tried a bad one yet.

[mhaithaca.livejournal.com]

Aha. My first experience with third-party bottling (at least that I was aware of) was the Murray McDavid Mission 1979 bottling of Lagavulin. I bought one of three bottles at my local liquor shop to celebrate closing on my house, and when I realized how remarkable it was (and how much of it I'd shared) I went back for a second bottle. Someone else bought the third.



More recently, I've been to a couple of tastings featuring Chieftain's and Gordon & MacPhail's bottlings. Happily, they seem to have managed to restrain themselves from putting whisky in a Tabasco barrel.