Whsiky live Cape Town, day 3

 The panning for Day 3 included:  Triumphant finish to three days of restrained hedonism.  Joining with the buddies, drink lots of whisky and go to Highland Park tasting.  Most plans do not survive contact with the enemy⁽¹⁾.  Mine showed early promise. 

I had the best pizza, OK pizzas, I have ever tasted.  I was on my way to my favourite Cape Town Asian food purveyor the Sea Palace where they have Chinese and Japanese food and also quite important, Boston Beer on tap.  Boston goes very well with cat. ⁽²⁾  Last year I lunched, dinnered and snacked at the Sea Palace during the whisky festival as it kept on being geographically between the festival and my hotel.  This year it involved me sauntering ⁽³⁾ quite some distance to the restaurant.  Sting sings that “A gentleman will walk, but never run” Well, neither will I.  Walking towards my goal, I saw the sign for Colcacchio’s and remember The Blonde recommending it. 

It is a pricey joint, but value for money.  When the description says “Mushroom, onion and chorizo” you don’t need a microscope to detect the toppings.   Even a bat could find it without trouble.  The base is very thin which does detract from mechanical stability when shovelling a heavily toppinged piece towards your mouth. But they have napkins which compensate for this failure.  So you taste the topping rather than the base.  It does however; leave you feeling you can accommodate another one.  Under normal circumstances I would not attempt this for two reasons:

1: My inherent stinginess

2: Although Mr Newton’s law on gravity have it that big object attract small ones, I have little success with attracting women or money, both being normally much smaller than me, so I am trying to quit that way of life.

But these pizzas are great!!! And I walked there, so half a butter chicken and yogurt and half olive and anchovies got the nod.  Extra points to my waitress who did not even blink when I asked for another and for bringing me buffalo milk mozzarella.  For the first time I realised it not have to taste like a steadler eraser.  After grazing it was time to point the stomach in the direction of my temporary abode.  And start walking. 

I met the Bald Eagle and both the Ghananians and tried to give them a quick tour of what I thought was good.  Our pleasure was somewhat spoiled by the idiot who left a gate open so half of Cape Town’s great unwashed could also attend the festival.  I have a mild form of people-o-phobia and there were too many of them for me to enjoy the evening.  The others received free tickets to a talk with Jonathan Miles on Old Pulteney and AnCnoc.  I went to HighlandPark. 

Highland Park (HP) makes some very good whisky.  The peatyness is different to that of Islay.  Apparently the weather in Orkney (the one north of Scotland not the one with the gold mines and Ouboet) is so miserable that even millions of years ago trees refused to live there.  Temperatures are so even that the only difference between winter and summer is the sports on TV.  Wind coming off the North Sea sprays sea water across everything so only heather can grow there.  This gives the peat a different flavour to that of, say Islay.  You are what you eat so in the case of whisky you are what you peat.   And peat is what it was, only older.   So it brings a different dimension to Highland Park.  Some of the malt apparently has the same phenol quantity as Ardbeg malt, but the taste is very different. 

Coming back from the HP tasting (12, 18, 25 and 30 year old) I was confronted by a mass of drunken, sweaty Cape Clownians.  ⁽⁴⁾  Now I am not going to get all sanctimonious about getting drunk.  But it should be done walking distance from your own home with the express purpose of getting some good looking person to lower their standards enough to include you and go to bed with you.  Or so you can forget that such things don’t happen to you.  No prizes for guessing which category I fall in. 

So confronted with my own mild phobia I just bought some whisky and left.  Back temporarily home I wrote and sampled my purchases from Wellington, Pretoria and Orkney.  Some of which was made before people who can now vote (legally) were born. 

(1)    VonMoltke.  And he ought to know.  Although today beating the Austrians and French at war doesn’t seem much, it was in his day.

(2)    Obviously a joke.  The dark meat of a cat needs something sweeter, like a Belgian Dubbel.

(3)    I was going to perambulate, but it turns out that means walking without a goal.  Clearly I had a feeding goal.

(4)    Kapenarre is snaakser in Afrikaans

28 Whiskies later, Day 2

28 Whiskeys later and Day 2 is over.  We learn by repetition so I started on Makers Mark poured by Rob Samuels again.  An action I will repeat on the last day.  His bourbon remains fantastic.

I was hoping to attend a tasting conducted by Andy Watts, Master Blender at Three Ships, but it clashed with my workshop on whiskies of the world.  So I tasted it the old fashioned way, on the other side of the booth.  The 5yr old is peatier than I remembered.  Checked the half bottle at home, yup remembered correctly.  Peat in whisky I get right; the name of the good looking brunette......The new release of the 10 year old is even better than what I remembered.  Maybe because it went into different barrels.  It is once again a limited release.  The previous time I tasted it was from a bottle kept back at the distillery, because it sold out so quickly it was no longer available commercially.  This time i procured my own.

The same woman ⁽¹⁾ that took me through the Buffalo Trace range took me through Compass Box’s offerings.  Always good, always refreshingly different.  The Spiced Tree particularly filled me with joy. 

I am slightly disturbed that my favourite whisky is owned by LVMH.  A company so pretentious the name is Moet Hennesy Louis Vitton, but the acronym is the other way round.  As theirs is a luxury brands company it can only mean that Ardbeg will get more expensive.  But maybe, and I am clinging to this as tight as a tick to a puppy, they understand the brand thing better than others and they will at least leave it alone and won’t dilute the whisky to a mainstream product.  Stella Artois did not do this right and today it is indistinguishable from most other mass market lagers.

Glenmorangie is also part of MHLV ⁽²⁾ and it is at their tasting booth that I tasted Ardbeg New make.  New make is unaged whisky.  Closer to vodka, eau de vie or witblits.  Witblits is to brandy as new make is to whisky ⁽³⁾ that should explain it.  The Ardbeg smells extremely peaty, even foul.  Dave Broom in his World Atlas of Whisky describes it as: “Sweet-and-Sooty touch of dulse ⁽⁴⁾ and rock pools.  Lightly oily then peat smoke, unripe banana, garlic, violet root, tomato leaf.  With water, creosote and Chinese cough medicine, solvent.”  Essentially we agree then ⁽⁵⁾.  Nothing in the smell of the new make will let ordinary mortals think “In just ten years this will be beautiful!”  Yet, in those ten years the foul bits of the smoke and peat are leached by the wood to make the hooligan juice that is Ardbeg 10.  I said it before :It is an obvious whisky with full flavours.  Few can be ambiguous about it.  This is a love or hate dram.  And I love it! And not a lone ranger on this one.  These people are slightly obsessive. 

The only expression (like models in cars) of Ardbeg we get here is the 10 year old.  When asked where I can get other expressions in South Africa, the answer was you can’t.  Much more polite than that of course. 

So back to the Glemorangie range alluded to earlier.  With examples of the whisky finished in different wine, port, sherry casks the taste differs quite considerably.  I liked the one finished in sweet wine casks.  Not finished as sitting in a barrel emptying the bottle.  Like finishing school.  After years of just hanging about in the miserable Scottish weather in casks that have probably seen whisky before, for the last few months it is transferred to barrels that used to contain something else.  Like port or sherry.

So much is the mismatch between the sherry casks needed and sherry produced, that some whisky producers pay wineries in Spain to produce sherry simply so that casks are available that previously contained sherry.  After maturing for two years in the casks it is then put into the Mediterranean to keep the fishes happy.  The casks go to Scotland as whole units filled only with warm Spanish air in an attempt to heat up the other side of Hadrian’s Wall. ⁽⁶⁾ 

The world whisky awards workshop was somewhat spoiled by the customs official who took more than a month to let through the stuff we were supposed to taste.  A rushed, but good, presentation by Rob Allanson of Whisky Magazine ensued.  One of the reasons Johnny Gold is served frozen is the viscosity of grain whisky changes with low temperatures.  And apparently besides Clynelish there is a lot of grain in Gold Label.   So now I have a bottle of the local grain, Bains, in the freezer.  Combining with ice cream was also suggested.  I will try that as well, martyr that I am to gastronomy.

Interesting whiskies were Highland way and Glenbrynth.  The former a cheap but glugable drink, the latter a well priced vatted malt.  That being a blend of malt whiskies, without grain.

So 28 different whiskies on Day 1 and ditto day two.  Will day 3 push my liver into overdrive?

(1)    Not a booth bunny, she knows her whisky
(2)    At least I can get it right.  Don’t get me started on 11/9
(3)    If you struggled with the language part of the IQ tests, skip this part.
(4)    Edible red Seaweed, I had to look it up too.  Thanks WordWeb
(5)    Am I comparing myself to Dave Broom?  Yes, but not favourably.
(6)    This joke stolen from Gerry Tosh, Brand ambassador of Highland Park

UnSeasonal Affected Disorder

I live in what is nominally a winter rainfall area.  It is actually rather arid with only 200mm on average per year.   Here in the southern hemisphere it is November and spring has developed fully blown summer.  And today it is raining.  I am therefore forced to conclude that it is not summer, but winter.  To make it a truly winter experience, I am nearly drowning ⁽¹⁾ in my own post-nasal drip ⁽²⁾

In order to postpone any travels to the far bank of the Styx, I am self medicating.  Med lemon and whisky forms the base of my hot toddy.  I generally believe that vitamins help in the fight against colds therefore I follow the old maxim “Take two before going to bed and see me in the morning.”  On two pizzas there should be enough vitamins to combat the common cold.  If the treatment is unsuccessful, repeat.  Past history ⁽³⁾ show that it works

(1)    As a man I have only two options: healthy or dying.  Ill is not an option
(2)    It would be even more tragic if I was drowning in somebody else’s
(3)    What do you think is future history?  Today?

Whisky Live Cape Town 2010, Day 1

It started one night when everything just worked. The Bald Eagle, The He-Ghanaian and I went to the whisky festival. The Blonde was pregnant and therefore designated driver. We made several discoveries that night and one that would dominate my whisky adventures.

The thing about the whisky festival in Cape Town is how different it is from a wine festival in the same locale. The wine is made nearby and therefore the people manning ⁽¹⁾ the booths are normally from the farms itself. Already employed or may even be the winemaker self. Almost all whisky in the world is manufactured quite some distance from Cape Town so the already employed do not travel here. The whisky companies hire local talent. Booth bunnies⁽²⁾ are probably very intelligent people. Knowledgeable and attractive. Very attractive indeed. I suspect though that the latter is the primary reason for getting hired.

By the end of the evening we had sensory and liver overload. We discovered the joy that is peated whisky. Ardbeg in particular. We knew nothing when we arrived, but learned a lot about whisky tasting our way through the 23 we sampled that night. For a whisky to make an impression that late in the evening it had to be heavily peated. Ardbeg is an obvious whisky. It is love or hate it territory. You cannot be neutral about the taste or smell of Ardbeg. It is hooligan juice. But lovely!

We left the festival with a glass of Caol Ila 12 each and such was the nature of our delight that we tried to take the security guard’s golf cart for a joy ride. But did not succeed.

I’ve returned every year since then and last night was Day 1 of 2010. The products, if I can be as clinical as that, that impressed was Ledaig, a heavily peated one from Tobermore. The Kavalan from Taiwan was very different. Still not sure if I like it or not. What I did like was the 30yr Old Pulteney that Jonathan Miles offered me.

I can now also claim that the suburb of Pretoria I grew up in has a distellry and a brewery. The enigmatic Moritz Kallmeyer of Draymans Brewery now also produces a Highveld Whisky. I suggest you buy a bottle. There is not that much to go round and is good to drink.

Another new pleasure was Makers Mark. Rob Samuels, the 8th generation of distillers presented his story and his whisky. The man has a problem most distillers would like to have. He has more orders than he can fill. With good reason. The stuff is very good indeed. We tasted new make that had an awfull smell to it, but 2yrs in the barrel cured it. A few more and it tasted brilliant. He also gave us an overaged sample to show that just as with red wine, cheese and people, too much age is not a good thing.

On the same note, the disappointment of the show. An 18 yr old Clynelish finished in a sherry cask by an independent bottler. Very different form the normal 14 yr old expression that I like. This is an experiment I hope will not be repeated.

Tonight is whiskys of the world workshop. I’ll tell you how it went in the next edition.



(1) Might not be politically correct, but I’ll get more sexist in a moment
(2) Told you