Poison of Choice

Glenfiddich distillery is releasing fifty very special bottles of 50-year old single malt. scotch regionsThat's right, I said fifty year old single malt. The whisky in question has been stored in two oak casks in Glenfiddich's distillery warehouse in Banffshire, Scotland since its original production. Glenfiddich will release just fifty bottles of the scotch each year for the next ten years. The scotch is contained in a numbered hand-made blown glass bottle, decorated with Scottish silver. The bottle arrives in a hand-stiched leather case and is accompanied by a leather-bound book about the history of the scotch, with room for the lucky owner's own comments.

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I don't know if it's related to the recession or not—results appear muddled regarding liquor sales and the economy—but conglomerate distillery Beam Global Spirits and Wine makers of not only Jim Beam but also the very popular bourbon Knob Creek, a 100 proof small batch bourbon that's aged in barrel at least nine years, took out an ad in the June 29th Wall Street Journal announcing that they have run out of Knob Creek. Yep; that's right—what's on the store shelves right now, is all there will be for some months. The current year's bourbon was put into barrels in 2000, and Jim Beam underestimated demand, rather drastically.

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Fifteen years or so ago, we saw first pepper vodka, and then citron vodka, and now, cherry, orange, vanilla, pomegranate, watermelon, chocolate—pretty much any flavor you can think of, Smirnoff or Absolut makes it. Premium Vodka distillers Three Olives and Ketel One are producing flavored vodkas, and people are buying and drinking them enthusiastically. Even Trader Joe's makes Trader Joe's Infused Vodkas. 375 ml. $19.99 in lemon and lychee, mocha (chocolate and espresso flavors) and Tahitian vanilla. Seattle distiller Black Rock Spirits even offers Bakon Vodka, with, yes, you guessed it, Bacon flavoring. I'm told it makes a great Bloody Mary.

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Cowboy movies seem to invariably have at least one scene where someone swaggers into a saloon and orders a shot of Rye. vintage rye bottle Singing cowboy Tex Ritter has a famous song devoted to the subject of Rye Whiskey. There was a time, in fact, when the word "whiskey" in America meant Rye Whiskey, almost exclusively. From the 1700s, when farmers in the foothills of the Alleghenies discovered the soil and weather were ideal for growing the rye to make this distinctively American spirit. Even after the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion, when farmer/distillers relocated to corn country, whiskey meant Rye. In terms of American mythology, any cowboy bellying up to any bar in the west asking for whiskey was actually ordering Rye. That situation lasted until sometime around the Prohibition in the 1920s. The spirit was so omnipresent in the developing frontier that our mythological cowboy didn't have to specify what kind of whiskey he wanted, because it was already understood.

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