I recently bought Kevin Erksine's book The Instant Expert's Guide to Single Malt Scotch. Erskine, you may recall, is the proprietor of The Scotch Blog, which is just about the best source of information that I have found for Scotch industry news and analysis of trends in the Scotch business. Erskine not only combs online sources for his posts: he also knows many people in the Scotch industry and not infrequently will break news before actual professional journalists write about it. It's highly informative and entertaining, and I recommend it highly to anyone who has even a passing interest in Scotch. Anyway, on principal he eschews (mostly) tasting notes both on his blog and in his book:[A]lthough I certainly have opinions, I tend to stay away from making judgements [sic] on the various whiskies produced, as this is a completely subjective endeavor. I encourage you to make your own judgements. Everyone's tastes are different, and what I believe to be a fantastic whisky may taste like pond water to you. (p. 53).
To emphasize this point, he cites a number of different expert reviews of Dalwhinnie 15 year old. He has five of them, but I'm only going to quote the ones from Michael Jackson and Jim Murray because I'm lazy:
Michael Jackson
Complete Guide to Single Malt Scotch, 5th Edition
Running Press Book Publishers, 2004
Color: Bright gold
Nose: Very aromatic, dry, faintly phenolic, lightly peaty
Body: Firm, slightly oily
Palate: Remarkably smooth, long lasting flavour development. Aromatic, heather-honey notes give way to cut-grass, malty sweetness which intensifies to a sudden burst of peat.
Finish: A long crescendo
Rating: 76 out of 100
...
Jim Murray
Jim Murray's Whiskey Bible 2005
Carlton Books, 2004
Nose: Sublime stuff. A curious mixture of coke smoke and peat-reek wafts teasingly over the gently-honeyed malt. A hint of melon offers some fruit but the caressing malt stars.
Taste: That rarest of combinations: at once silky and malt intense, yet at the same time peppery and tin-hat time for the taste buds , but the silk wins out and a sheen of barley sugar coats everything, soft peat included.
Finish: Some cocoa and coffee notes, yet the pervading honied sweetness means that there is no bitterness that cannot be controlled.
Balance: One of the most complete mainland malts of them all. Know anyone who reckons that they don't like whisky? Give them a glass of this. Oh, if only the average masterpiece could be this good.
Rating: 94 out of 100
(pp. 59-60)
Tasting notes written by others have value if they allow me to predict on the basis of reading them how I will like the whisky (or wine or beer or whatever) that they are written about. When I first got into wine just after graduating from college, I would read Wine Spectator and various wine books to see what they thought of various wines. I soon learned that there was no correlation, either positive or negative, between what the reviewers in these publications liked and what I liked (leaving aside that finding the wines reviewed was often an impossible challenge). The same is true of publications about whiskey. I have no doubt that Michael Jackson and Jim Murray have palates much more sophisticated than my own. Who cares? I'm the one drinking the whiskey, not them, and I'm not about to continue to buy and drink whiskey that they review well and I hate just because they're better tasters than I am.
More than that, I wonder if all of us who write tasting notes are on a fool's errand. The most accurate taste description that I can come up with for Dalwhinnie (BTW, I continue to be impressed by the quality of this whisky; it was fantastic again last night) is that it tastes like Scotch. But that's not sufficiently descriptive, so we force ourselves to make flavor associations that might be weak at best. Sure, I taste the honey in Dalwhinnie, and I think that most tasters would, as well. The same thing is true for the vanilla and caramel aromas and flavors that are so common in Bourbons. But cut grass? Coke smoke? Cocoa? Coffee? Pepper? I didn't get any of that. That's not to say that Murray and Jackson didn't smell or taste those elements or that they weren't correct to have done so, just that I did not and that the fact that I did not is another example of why their reviews lack much value to me.
The reason that I started posting tasting notes about the drinks that I consumed was mostly so that I would have a crutch to help me remember how I liked something. From Ben's experience with what I have posted, it's evident that I have the same problem that Murray and Jackson do, albeit on a smaller scale: there is little correlation between what I like and what Ben likes. Or maybe it's a bit better than that. Maybe it's a negative correlation: if I like it, Ben won't; and vice versa.
3 comments:
I've had pretty similar experiences with wine, but I've still found tasting notes somewhat helpful. On your own, there's no way of knowing what parts of your experience are objective, what parts purely subjective, and (perhaps most importantly) what parts are so heavily conditioned by your environment that the objective pattern is difficult to discern.
With wine, characteristics described as "grapey" tend to come through for me -- either they're objective, or my subjective taste matches everyone else's, in which case there's no difference. The opposite is true of "tobacco" aromas -- I have no idea what tobacco these people are talking about, but the only tobacco comparison I could ever see is maybe between some Rhone or Cab flavors and Latakia.
I've found your notes on scotch very helpful -- in fact last night I spent half an hour copying stuff from your blog to a shopping list to take on an outing. The fact you like Isle of Jura serves as a warning that any star-rating of yours would be useless to me. But peatiness is objective, so I've found that part of your notes to be invaluable.
I wonder if much of our tastes depend on the mechanism and environment we consume in. I drink my whiskey on the rocks -- lots of rocks, in fact -- and perhaps I like peaty scotch because the aroma arises despite the low temperature.
Ben, the only Isle of Jura bottling that I have tried is Superstition, which is their rendition of a peated malt; and I didn't like it much. There was something missing from it that I just couldn't put my finger on. By all means, give it a try, though. I'd be interested to hear what you think.
I didn't mean my Jura comment as a slight: the things I can't stand about it are exactly the things I always associated with Scotch until Islays. Either this is a result of a unlucky youthful experience (akin to my teenage experience with beer always being Schlitz), or my "luck" comes from discovering the Islays.
Incidentally, how's this for over-the-top marketing:
The strength at bottling is reduced to 46% with ultra-pure Islay spring water, filtered through the 1800 million year old rocks that the distillery stands on, the oldest in the entire industry.
Seems to me like some Minnesotan scotchmakers could put those guys to shame, if that's the kind of age you care about!
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