There’s no way of writing a drinks column for the day before Burns Night without mentioning whisky, but what if you can’t stand the stuff? It’s not at all uncommon. Most people don’t like whisky to start with, much as they rarely take to coffee or beer at first taste.
That’s why whisky distillers focus on making new converts, the most obvious example being the new David Beckham-backed Haig Club Grain Whisky (40% abv), which comes in a huge, square, blue bottle that looks a bit like an outsized bottle of aftershave. Bling presentation and expense apart (it comes in at a pricey £45 at Tesco and Waitrose), when I tasted it a couple of months ago, it struck me as the ideal dram for a whisky newbie: slightly sweet and super-smooth – a bit like Beckham, really.
But what other options are there for the whisky-resistant? I asked Eddie Ludlow, of events organiser The Whisky Lounge, whose tastings attracted 13,000 visitors last year. To my surprise, he didn’t recommend Jack Daniels but an Irish whiskey such as Jameson or Redbreast, though that’s obviously enough to get you thrown out of any self-respecting Burns Night party. Good starting points for scotch, Ludlow suggests, are Glenmorangie’s 10-Year-Old (widely available at around £35; 40% abv), or Auchentoshan American Oak (£32.99, Waitrose; 40% abv). The slightly bourbon-like Monkey Shoulder (on offer at Booths for £22.50, £27 Waitrose; 40% abv) is another good bet.
You can also make whisky more congenial by the way you drink it. The old rule that you shouldn’t ever add water to a malt seems to have been relaxed – most distillers now say to dilute it to taste. Similarly, many modern Scotch whiskies also lend themselves to cocktails. I made a reverse Manhattan the other day, using a double shot of Jack Adair Bevan’s The Collector Vermouth (around £38; 18% abv) with a dash of Lidl’s perfectly decent Five-Year-Old Glen Orchy Blended Malt (a bargain £13.29; 40% abv) and a few drops of Angostura bitters. Delicious.
By far the best way into whisky, however, is to visit a distillery. I first got the bug when I visited The Macallan back in the early 1990s, and I still have a soft spot for the stuff, while a trip to Islay two years ago is responsible for my weakness for peated malts. Make a resolution to visit one this year, or maybe go along to The Whisky Lounge’s outdoor Whisky Solstice in Edinburgh on 20 June. There’s a fair chance I’ll be there myself.
