Bring Me Your Finest Single Malts and Cheeses

This essay originally appeared in The Inner Swine Volume 12, Issue 1, 2006.

The Inner Swine Goes to Whiskyfest 2005

OPERATION: WHISKYFEST. Generally speaking, I’m not one for overly formalizing everything; there are people in this world who just don’t feel right unless every single activity has been choreographed and arranged according to in-depth bylaws. These are people to whom ‘expertise’ is darling, who love to be able to explain why something is better than some other thing, in great detail. Many of these people are baseball fans, who will bore you to death with long-winded diatribes about the infield fly rule or how to throw a breaking ball. Many others are wine enthusiasts for whom simply enjoying a glass of wine is not good enough, you must be able to feign an appreciation of 655 subtle characteristics, many of which were made up a century ago and still amuse the French to this day.

Despite my appreciation for a good breaking ball, I am not one of those people. I like wine, but my palate does not advance much past knowing what I like, which tends to be just about every single bottle of wine I’ve ever imbibed, with the sole exception of a bottle given to me by TIS Staff Artist Jeof Vita a few years ago, a nondescript green bottle with a plain label that read, in toto, CHEAP WHITE WINE. That wine was. . .not good, and I wish someone had told me it was a joke before I drank the entire bottle and spent a week shivering. I like baseball, too, but I grow weary of endless discussion of minutiae—I just like to have the games on about a hundred times a year and get out to a few games. I am, in other words, a pretty simple person. I like what I like, and I distrust unnecessary complexity.

Despite this lack of sophistication, I’ve come to love whisky in general and Scotch in specific. It’s amazing how you can be a kid and love cheap beer and peppermint schnapps and wonder why anyone pays more than a dollar and change for their liquor, and just two decades later you’re willingly shelling out lots of money for specific types of booze because you actually believe they taste better: Maturity is obviously just a code word for crazy. But I digress; although I’ve always had a taste for bourbon, I’d never really investigated Scotch or any other type of whisky. Partly it’s the cost—you can’t just shell out for bottles of booze on the off chance you’ll like it—and partly it’s just my general lack of focus and energy. I’m a lazy, lazy man and discovering new booze usually falls under the heading of more shit I gotta do. Eventually, however, good sense prevailed and over the past few years I’ve gotten into Scotch and appreciate its subtleties. This translates to: Jeff has been drinking an awful lot of Scotch.

So when my wife, The Duchess, presented me with a ticket to Whiskeyfest for my birthday and informed me that founding member of TISIC Jeof Vita was also planning to attend, I was immediately excited. It’s not often you are handed a ticket to drink—by your wife, no less—and I immediately went into training and plotting, determined to make the most of my sudden opportunity.

TRAINING

“So let me get this straight,” I said to Jeof Vita one night in the bunker’s kitchen, where we sat, as on most nights, facing the front door with shotguns across our knees. “We walk around, and there are representatives from all these distilleries, and they’ll just give us whisky?”

Vita nodded, once. “Yep.”

“As in, I hold out my little gift glass you get with the ticket, and they just reach out with a bottle and pour in whisky?”

“Yep.”

We sat in stunned silence for a bit. At least, my silence was stunned. Vita seemed more or less sleepy.

“I need to get into shape. Drinking-shape,” I said slowly. “I’ve grown sober over the past few years.”

“It’s the marriage,” Jeof said. He knew. He was married himself.

“Plus that time my liver swelled to the size of a volleyball,” I conceded. “That might have slowed me some. But it only pains me three nights or so a week; after that, I’m fine. So I think I can afford one night of boozing.”

“I’ll train you,” Jeof said. “But you won’t like it.”

“I’m in your hands.”

Jeof’s motto was Always be Drinking, which proved to be harder than it sounds. For weeks, it was bourbon for breakfast, beer for lunch, and an evening spent drinking Scotch at a steady and regular pace, and by the time Whiskyfest loomed on the calendar I was a shaking, yellowed shell of my former self, but I was able to imbibe a truly heroic amount of alcohol. I was ready. I summoned TIS Security Chief Ken West into the bunker’s bedroom, where I lay panting.

“My god,” he said, entering, “what is that smell?”

I ignored him. “I need this made, immediately,” I said, handing him a detailed schematic:

He looked at the plans and scratched his head. I could hear him breathing carefully through his mouth. “Uh, what is this for?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I’m taking Whiskyfest for all it’s got!”

“Uh,” Jeof Vita said suddenly, “we’re not going together, right? I mean, we’ll get there separately and maybe we can pretend not to know each other, like a game—”

“Pick me up at six.”

He hung his head. “Damn.”

THE EVENT

Whiskyfest is a really cool event if you’re into whisky of any type. Held at a nice hotel in Manhattan, it’s like a huge wedding reception where, instead of glasses of cheap champagne and a weak second-shelf open bar where you have to get a Whisky Sour just to mask the task of the no-name whisky being served, you have top-shelf whisky. In other words, this is my cartoon-version of the afterlife, except in my version the Scotch is being poured by smiling old men with flowing white beards, dressed in togas. Why is this? No one knows. I have always assumed dreams like that are a sign of genius.

I digress: Whiskyfest was held in one of the meeting halls of this hotel, and it was basically set up with distilleries lined up around the walls, with a few food stations here and there. You got a little gift glass as part of the admission price and were warned that you would only be served in the gift glass, the result being several hundred grown people clutching their glasses and eying everyone else suspiciously. Once you’d attained your gift glass, all you had to do was wander around and sample whatever liquors you wanted to sample. Paradise! It was here at Whiskyfest that I sampled The Worst Whisky Ever Made and where Jeof Vita Met his Whisky Master. We were, in short, both defeated by Whiskyfest, but in a glorious way.

The Worst Whisky Ever. For the most part the evening went swimmingly. I was familiar with a number of the distilleries, so it was like Halloween, except instead of year-old Mary Janes being stuffed into a plastic pumpkin, it was shots of whisky poured into my glass. I discovered two bottles I particularly liked, and was cruising along on the sublime fumes of good liquor. And then I decided to take a flyer on a Scotch I’d never heard of, and which didn’t have too many people crowding around it, jockeying for access to the pourer. What the hell, I thought. I was cocky, and a little drunk, and it was the worst Scotch I’d ever had in my life.

It went like this: I held out my glass, the smiling man tipped the bottle, I turned away and sipped from the glass, and my face collapsed into a mask of horror as that terrible, terrible liquid clawed its way down my throat. Jeof Vita, watching from a few feet away, doubled over in laughter. I attempted to grasp a bottle of just about anything in order to wash the terrible taste from my mouth, but apparently there is an obscure rule against drinking straight from the bottle at one of these events.

“My eyes,” I gasped, grabbing Vita by the lapels. “I can’t see.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he said soothingly. “You can still drink.”

“Don’t let anyone touch me,” I instructed.

Jeof Vita’s Whisky Master. Jeof’s mirth at my discomfort was short-lived, however, as we were lured into tasting the Scotch that was destined to kick his ass.

It was the 1964 Glenlivet, there along with a bunch of other whiskies to raise money for the Red Cross. These whiskies were all old and/or rare, and tastings from them were being sold off to raise money. Giddy from all the booze fumes floating about, and half in the bag, Jeof and I decided to split the cost of the Glenlivet, which was $40 for a taste. Normally I wouldn’t pay that much for a drink of whisky—I believe in paying for quality, but at a certain vanishing point I don’t think I can tell the difference between great whisky and really Super Awesome Amazing whisky, you know? I just don’t have the palate for it. But fuck, it was for charity. We paid our money and I sipped first. It was good. Not good enough to make me go home and flush all my Glenlivet 18 year old down the toilet (at least without drinking and processing some of it first), but it was damned good. I passed the glass to Jeof and he took a swig, and experienced what appeared to be total body freeze for a moment.

“That was a mistake,” he said slowly. “I think. . .I think I’m done.”

He followed me to a few more booths, like a sad, defeated puppy, but that was it for Vita: No more Scotch for him.

Overall, it was a fantastic evening, and I’ve matured to the point where you can actually put me in a room filled with booze and I don’t go running in there like some sort of hillbilly, screaming “Liquor me up, boys!” and drinking a gallon of booze in five minutes, passing out in the middle of the room, and remaining there for the rest of the evening, twitching as my fellow guests step over me delicately, wrinkling their noses. Oh, that’s what I’m doing inside, but outwardly I’m urbane and restrained. Though still equally drunk.