On The Whiskey Trail

Shots of courage.Lightning in a bottle.Bottoms up.

- Peter Mandel

Whiskey has its own liquid poetry. Sip it and you talk, or sing. My Scottish cousins can be almost eloquent about the drink itself. It is, they say, an education. As richly cultural as wine.

This started me thinking. If wine has terroir - the special traditions, soils, sunny hillsides that end up affecting its taste on your tongue, what about alcohol that’s distilled from grain? Would it matter if it came from sacks of barley that had matured in Indiana? Or did Scotland and Ireland (supposedly the birthplace of the drink, with records dating back to 1405) have something no one else could claim?

I began to map out a trip to those distillery-dotted countries to try and find out. But since I am a whiskey amateur, not an aficionado, I’d want to get a full fledged vacation out of my route. It wouldn’t be a string of cellar tastings. I wanted plates of potatoes and meat pies in pubs, philosophical walks by the sea, and whatever local quirks I could find.

Landing in Dublin, I am met by morning, and by rain. I head directly to the first distillery on my list. This one belongs to Jameson and it’s a replica of how its Bow Street warehouse might have looked when Irish whiskey was made back in the 1780s, when the company was founded.

Unlike scotches, which are double distilled, Irish whiskies are distilled three times for smoothness and I’m especially eager to see what Jameson has to show visitors since it’s currently North America’s most requested brand. One of the things it has are mannequins like you might see in a museum. Replica workers stack up barrels. Realistic cats glare at tourists, guarding the grain.