Boozehound - Jason Wilson [1]
When I’m working, I often think of that poor woman, Jig, in Hemingway’s classic story “Hills Like White Elephants.” Sitting at a bar in a Spanish railway station on a hot afternoon, trying to avoid another pointed quarrel with her boyfriend, she orders a glass of anís at the railway station bar. “I wanted to try this new drink,” she says to her companion, in one of the most cynical lines in American literature. “That’s all we do, isn’t it—look at things and try new drinks?” Looking at things and trying new drinks. That’s a pretty fair description of my job. Any given day I might be tasting a rhum agricole made with pure Martinique sugarcane, or sipping an eau-de-vie distilled from some rare alpine berry, or quaffing an herbal digestivo concocted from an obscure Milanese recipe, or contemplating the renaissance of American rye whiskey, or comparing sherry-casked Norwegian aquavit to unoaked Danish aquavit. Some friends suggest I should have lived in another century, wandering about town with a cape, a monocle, and a stick. Which may be true, but not for the reasons they would likely suggest.
Along the journey, I’ve learned that booze—like it or not—plays a central role in the history of humanity. There’s a reason the word spirits came to be used for alcoholic beverages: the ancient idea that liquor was magical and transcendent, and that when one uncorked and imbibed such liquids, a supernatural force would be unleashed. Spirits are cultural touchstones. They mark geography. They mark time. I am struck by how often I open a bottle and am transported to the particular moment when I first tasted this or that flavor or style. I’m also inevitably reminded of the people with whom I’d shared that time, place, and bottle. Thus the booze becomes a part of life, its tastes and aromas becoming intertwined with memory. Drinking, I believe, can be an aesthetic experience similar to enjoying books or art or music. Learning how to taste spirits, then, becomes no different from study in any of the other humanities: learning how to read works of Russian literature or how to look at German Expressionist paintings or how to listen to Rigoletto. At least, that’s one way of looking at it.
Here’s another way to look at it: Critics and scholars poke around inquiring into every aspect of popular culture, from creepy Japanese comic books to successful professional poker strategies to the filmography of the 1980s rap trio the Fat Boys. Entire forests have been pulped so that we can read social histories on the toothpick, the color mauve, and the candy bar. So why not endeavor to study spirits? Let’s be honest: As cultural activities go, there are few more popular than drinking. No matter what the moralists, the scolds, or the self-appointed health advocates tell you, drinking can be one of the most fun things in the world to do. Billions of human beings share this opinion. I am covering a fifty-four billion dollar industry that has seen nothing but astronomical growth in the past decade—a 66 percent rise in U.S. sales since 2000.
The reality, however, is that I am a spirits writer from a country and an age in which many citizens remain extremely skeptical of what they call (clinically) alcohol. Or (pejoratively) hard liquor. Or worse, hooch or firewater—even poison. We’re a people still living with the failed legacy of Prohibition. Even today, nearly eight decades after its repeal, fifteen states continue to ban liquor sales on Sunday. I, perhaps ironically, live in a town where alcohol sales are still banned every day of the week. I have to actually leave town limits to buy booze. The Prohibition experiment sealed off access to