Scotch tasting

Early on last week, I was increasingly craving a series of scotches as the financial markets continued to hemorrhage...day after day after day. Alas, I was unable to indulge due to work demands that kept me at my office 12-14 hours each day.

HOWEVER, I read the following article, pasted below, in the Wall Street Journal over the weekend and thought to myself, the subject matter might warrant further investigation.

I enjoy scotch. I have some favorites but usually if I'm drinking out, I order Johnnie Walker Black Label. The Village Tavern's house scotch is Famous Grouse, which is perfectly acceptable to me and, at $6.25 vs. $12 or $14, I'm glad to order it. Otherwise, I stay away from the well liquors, which in many cases are simply the cheapest liquors available.

Which brings us to the point of this article....good cheap liquor. The column says:

GOOD/VERY GOOD

Teacher's Highland Cream $16.99
Robust, chewy malt taste gives this whisky ballast. Above deck, the Scotch gets dressed in the elegantly restrained smokiness of the lightly peated Ardmore single malt.

Ballantine's Finest $13.99
A rich, rounded, malty sweetness balanced by dry herbal notes.

So, I go by the liquor store tonight and buy a 750ml bottle of the Ballantine's for $13.95 and a 1.75 liter bottle of the Teacher's for $23.95. I bought the big bottle of Teachers because that's all they had. There were lots of 750ml bottles of single malts and what not, but not of the this stuff. I asked the clerk about 750 size bottles and he opined that people who buy Teacher's like to buy in quantity. Hmmm.

My thoughts: Not bad, so far. I can drink the stuff, but really prefer, for a lower end blend, Famous Grouse which retails for about $20 for a 750. Johnnie Walker Black goes for about $32 for a 750 and is quite satisfying. When I want a treat, I'll go for the Laphroig 10 year which is about $50 for a 750.

While trying the two bargain blends tonight, I also poured a taste of Macallan 12 year as a reference point. The Macallan was, predictably, more intense with a cleaner finish.

I'm going to try these two blends some more over the next week or two. Sometimes it takes me a bit to settle in on an opinion for wine and scotch, so maybe I'll decide I like one or the other more than on my initial impression.




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• HOW'S YOUR DRINK
• OCTOBER 11, 2008

What to Down in a Down Market

By ERIC FELTEN

Next week, a new offering of 40-year-old Highland Park single-malt Scotch is slated to roll out in Manhattan -- perhaps not the most auspicious time to bring a $2,000-a-bottle whisky to the market. My guess is that there will soon be a premium on spirits without premium prices. Which makes now a good time to sample the standard brands of blended Scotch whisky to see which are good bets for the austere days to come.

Dylan Cross for The Wall Street Journal

I picked up bottles from among the most famous of Scotch brands, including such blends as Johnnie Walker Red Label (the most popular Scotch in the world), Dewar's White Label, and J&B Rare. I also picked up such venerable -- but no longer fashionable -- brands as Black & White, Ballantine's Finest and White Horse. Prices ranged from $12.99 to just over the $20 mark.

These whiskies are a deal, not only compared with single malts, but in relation to the historical cost of blended whisky: Back in 1938 a liquor price war broke out, with retailers slashing what they charged for Scotch. In New York, the price of Black & White fell to $2.29 from $3.29. In today's dollars that discount price would work out to about $35. But I was able to buy a bottle of Black & White for $14.99. Maybe times aren't so bad after all.

But are the whiskies worth drinking? Yes and not really. Let's start with the not-reallys. I've never been much of a fan of Johnnie Walker's Red Label (as opposed to the much tastier Black Label variety), and in my blind tasting I found no reason to change my opinion. In the movie "Mister Roberts," William Powell concocts an imitation of Red Label for Jack Lemmon to use a-wooing. Powell makes the ersatz Scotch out of plain alcohol, cola for color and iodine and hair tonic for taste. You could do worse in describing a sip of Red Label (in fact I did -- writing "burned rubber shoe" on my tasting sheet).

I wasn't too enamored of Dewar's either, a whisky that, in striving for complexity, ends up an inharmonious muddle of flavors. Cutty Sark was watery; The Famous Grouse was blandish; plain sweetness and alcohol burn contested for primacy in Grant's; Black & White was just blah.

Sampling Whiskies

GOOD/VERY GOOD

Teacher's Highland Cream $16.99
Robust, chewy malt taste gives this whisky ballast. Above deck, the Scotch gets dressed in the elegantly restrained smokiness of the lightly peated Ardmore single malt.

Ballantine's Finest $13.99
A rich, rounded, malty sweetness balanced by dry herbal notes.

GOOD

J&B Rare $18.99
A grassy-green young whisky in which you can taste the light and flowery Knockando single malt, one of its constituent parts.

White Horse $12.99
A soft whisky with hints of vanilla, cinnamon, and caramel.

Better was White Horse, a soft whisky with hints of vanilla and cinnamon. I also liked J&B, a green and grassy whisky in which you can taste the light and flowery Knockando single malt that is one of its constituent parts. But my two favorites were Ballantine's and Teacher's. Ballantine's has a rich, rounded, malty sweetness balanced by dry herbal notes. Teacher's has a robust, chewy malt taste as ballast and, above deck, the restrained smokiness of the peaty Ardmore single malt.

Teacher's is a brand that has always been around, but which I had never bothered to try. It has become incredibly popular in some big Scotch-drinking markets, such as India and Brazil, but the brand has been allowed to atrophy in the U.S.

It was once heavily advertised, with slogans worthy of Mr. Blandings. By the 1970s, Jerry Della Femina had the account, and the ads were decidedly more quirky. He hired a slew of comedians to pen comic testimonials to the whisky, among them Mel Brooks and Redd Foxx. Groucho Marx shilled for Teacher's in a rollicking advertorial that ran in Playboy and Esquire in 1973: "Whenever I think of Scotch, I recall the Immortal Words of My Brother Harpo."

Groucho's story went that he woke up one morning to find that his liquor cabinet had been robbed. Someone had taken a sample of every Scotch on the shelf, "Except in the case of Teacher's Scotch where the case was taken." Groucho suspected Harpo, at whose house, "there, big as life, were my bottles of Teacher's." Harpo honked that "Teacher's tasted better to him than any of the other scotches I had."

The funny thing is that, in real life, not only did Harpo dislike Scotch, but he hated spirits of every sort. The mere prospect of having to take a gulp of liquor was enough to make him throw up. "There was something wrong with my chemistry," he wrote in his autobiography "Harpo Speaks!" A friend had joked that Harpo couldn't even serve alcohol -- if he opened a fresh bottle of rare old Scotch and started to pour, "by the time the liquor got in the glass the drink would be ruined."

Harpo and liquor may have been a bad mix, but not nearly as disastrous a combination as alcohol and Jack Kerouac. The Beat poet and novelist drank himself to death less than a year after making a boozy fool of himself on an infamous episode of William F. Buckley Jr.'s "Firing Line." A month after the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Buckley assembled a panel to discuss "The Hippies." Among the guests was a spectacularly drunk Kerouac, who drifted off when not blurting non sequiturs -- at one point Kerouac shouted, apropos of nothing, "Flat-faced floogee with the floy, floy!" Buckley was kind enough not to point out that the actual lyric to the swing-era tune begins "Flat foot," but he did turn to the audience and crack, "Give that man a drink."

But of course, Kerouac had a drink. He had been slurping whisky all the while from a coffee mug at his side, and according to biographer Dennis McNally that mug had been filled with what was left of a bottle of Teacher's Highland Cream that Kerouac had started in the green room.

You can't blame the Teacher's folks for leaving Kerouac out of their ad campaigns. Though they did enlist the help of another drinker of some renown, Fats Domino. His "Domino Theory of Drinking" went: "Once you down a Teacher's Scotch, a second one will soon follow in its place. And maybe a third. Sometimes even a Fifth."

Best not to so over-consume, notwithstanding the anxieties of the moment. And best not to get overstretched buying expensive liquor. That is, unless I can get the Highland Park 40 with an I.O.U. and persuade Henry Paulson to pay off the scrap of lousy paper for me.

Mr. Felten is the author of "How's Your Drink?: Cocktails, Culture and the Art of Drinking Well" (Agate Surrey)