Do whisky writers dream of electric soup?

He was nervous when the cork came out. Nervous in fact that the cork wouldn’t come out or would crumble. After all this was one of the last bottles. Doubly nervous because who can really tell what the contents of an old bottle will be like? Will it be clean or smell like boiled cabbage on a compost heap? Tasting the remnants of a past time will always be educational, but it’s not always necessarily pleasant.

The bottle in question was ‘Trade Mark X’, brewer James Eadie’s house whisky.

It was first blended in 1854, trademarked in 1877 and sold in Eadie’s 300-strong estate in the Midlands until 1944. This would have been the whisky quaffed by generations of workers on their way home with their wage packets. Who knows what tales were told over glasses in those pubs, or what trouble its ingestion might have caused when the men eventually got back to their houses. But I digress. This was a working man’s tipple now being uncorked in the offices of a whisky investment fund. How strange life is.

Revisiting the past: A bottle of James Eadie’s Trade Mark X tastes not how Broom would expect

The man with the slightly shaky hand was Rupert Patrick, the great-great-grandson of James Eadie. The bottle came from one of the last batches and probably was blended at the start of the Second World War.

Alongside Rupert was Norman Mathison, former master blender at Mackinlays, Tom Bruce-Gardyne of this and many other parishes, and myself. I think we were all nervous.

It was poured. It was dark. It was smoky, really smoky. It was richly Sherried, filled with fruitcake notes. It was balanced and generous and complex. It was mature and seemed malt heavy. It was everything we didn’t expect it to be. The images of the smoke filled pubs of the Midlands, and men belting back whisky for effect suddenly faded.

We think we know what the old days were like, but do we really? As I mentioned in the last rant, we can learn from the past but can never repeat it. It’s not that we just cannot go back, but that we don’t really know what ‘then’ was. Memory is fickle. Summers were always sunny, it always snowed at Christmas, and Partick Thistle won more games than they lost. How devastating it is to find out all of that might not have been true.

Our scent memory is remarkable. We all have a remarkable ability to retain every aroma we have encountered and file it away for future reference, pulling it out when stimulated by the same scent decades later. Smell, we know, is linked to memory, but is memory accurate?

I was thinking about this when we went on a family outing to see Blade Runner 2049. Like the first film, the plot hinges on the nature of memory and consciousness. Replicants have memories implanted, providing them with a backstory, but they are false. It’s this existential crisis which sits at the heart of the film.

Blade Runner: Replicants’ memories are false, but how reliable are our own?

In some ways it’s replicated (pardon the pun) when we smell a whisky. Is that aroma really the same one as in our granny’s house when we were a child? Does it matter if it isn’t? After all, we cannot ever go back to our granny’s house on the day when we encountered that aroma. What we are seeing in our minds is a composite of the aromas in the glass, a hallucination, a dream of place and people, and faces and experiences.

It’s not our granny’s house but a memory of what it might have been like with other details thrown in. We are creating a memory out of everything within the aromas rising from the glass. The complex picture is created by our minds out of a multiplicity of memories which are rearranged in a new context. When tasting we have to decode them.

That is what was happening with Rupert’s whisky. In addition, I was having to deal with a different sort of implanted memory, that one gleaned from books, conversations, and theories about what a pub whisky from the early 20th century would have tasted like.

It had to be light, even though Sherry casks would have been more prevalent, it would have had a young age profile to hit a price point, and used lots of grain; it would be smokier than the blends of today but not heavily peaty because it wasn’t what the ‘English’ palate demanded. The truth about the whisky confounded everything which had been implanted in our minds.

A reality check is always good, but what is real? I think I need a sit down.