I don't drink alone.
I think maybe I used to, back when I was alone a lot. I honestly don't remember. I'm sure that when I was single I would occasionally crack open a beer on a Sunday afternoon; but I can't imagine ever opening a bottle of wine for myself or pouring myself a shot like people always seem to be doing in the movies. Actually I'm sure that if I ever poured myself a lonely shot it was an imitation of the movies, of Paul Newman as Frank Galvin in The Verdict.
In other words, I've always been a social drinker, which is a fortunate thing to be. We all begin to drink -- if we begin to drink -- for reasons that have nothing to do with maintaining ourselves as healthy beings. We drink because we see others drinking and are curious; because drinking is presented as something romantic, something that confers adulthood. We drink because we think it makes us look pretty.
This is a bad place to start from; but we all fumble toward the men and women we eventually become. Some of us like to drink, some of us don't, and there are always people who shouldn't. As someone who occasionally writes about alcoholic beverages, I sometimes think about how dangerous it can be to make the occasional intake of a little psychoactive poison sound reasonable.
Nobody should drink because they think it makes them look cool, because it doesn't. It didn't even make Paul Newman look cool. Paul Newman made drinking look cool. Paul Newman probably could make vaping or riding one of those stand-up scooters look cool. Making stuff look cool was his superpower.
And, as Stan Lee knew, with great power comes great responsibility.
Even though you won't find many examples of Newman's drunken boorish behavior in the literature, he probably had a problem with alcohol. He famously drank a lot of beer. He might have even once said, "24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not."
In the mid-1970s that was what a student at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, claimed he said. So, as college students will, he and his friends seized upon it as a pretext for "Paul Newman Day," in which they would attempt the feat that Newman's sketchy "quote" suggested. It became an unofficial tradition at Bates and spread to a few other campuses, mostly in the Northeast, but Newman didn't find out about it until 1987, after a particular rowdy Newman Day caused the university president to attempt to ban the celebration.
Newman was appalled to learn of the practice, and applauded the president's action. He sent her a letter suggesting that he'd be more honored by "a day in pursuit of athletic excellence with paid attendance" with "the proceeds to be returned to the community in ways of your own choosing."
The students ignored him, as college students will, and Newman Day continued to be observed by some to this very day.
The moral being that why you can and should think hard about the consequences of what you seem to be advocating, most people are just going to do whatever they want to do anyway.
SMELL AND REMEMBER
Anyway, there's nothing inherently wrong with drinking alone, it's just one of the rules I've made for myself to make life more interesting. One of the ways we play is by complicating simple things, by challenging ourselves to do things we don't necessarily need to do. So I don't drink alone. There are no consequences if I violate the rule; I can cheat at solitaire if I like.
I say this because it has been a few days since I've had the whiskey. We tried it, a few sips each, the evening I brought the bottle home.
Now Karen is off to Mexico for a few days, and I've been left to do the things I do when she's not here, which is mainly play guitar, watch baseball and think up ways to entertain the dogs. Once or twice during the week I'll go out and meet friends and I'll have a drink then, but while I'm doing the Macaulay Culkin thing, I abstain.
But that doesn't keep me from smelling the whiskey. Or remembering it.
And maybe that's as good as drinking it. Maybe that's better.
The whiskey I'm talking about is Rock Town's 9th Anniversary Single Malt, which was just released a month ago. I call it "scotch" in my mind, although legally it's not, since Scotch has to come from Scotland and Rock Town is distilled right here in Arkansas. But let's put aside legal fictions for a moment; in bonnie Scotland, scotch is made from 100% malted barley and is typically double distilled in copper pot stills. When that product comes from a single distillery, it's known as a single malt.
Rock Town is distilled from 100% malted barley. Last time I checked -- Rock Town employed copper pot stills. See it's as scotchy as Yamazaki 12 year auld. If ah slip 'n' ca' it scotch (and ah won't, fur copy-editing) ye don't need tae hae a fit aboot it. They age it for two years in ex-bourbon casks and finish it for a year in a cognac cask.
Whatever you call it, it's an impressive spirit -- one that lives up to its premium retail price of about $70.
It's probably not going to be a bread-and-butter product for Rock Town, I imagine they make their money on their excellent popularly priced vodka and those flavored whiskies some people love. But they've demonstrated a genuine touch with their higher-end releases, the eighth anniversary rye they released last year is excellent and I'm currently crushing on both their single barrel bourbon and their four grain sour mash (which might be my favorite bourbon right now). They've come a long way since 2010 and their original Brandon's Gin and vodka lines. Their South Main distillery has become a regular stop on our liquor store rota.
Longtime readers of this occasional column might remember my general ambivalence toward scotch (and scotch-esque) whiskys. There are many subjects upon which I feel competent to expound at length. Scotch is not one of those subjects; it is something about which I know just enough to know how little I actually know. It is an oceanic subject, and though I've tried to explore single malts -- I pursued it through the glens and onto the salt-stung beaches of Islay, from Bowmore to Laphroaig and back to the lost distillery at Port Ellen with its famously high maltings -- I finally gave up.
Single malt scotch remains as mysterious to me as an Alain Robbe-Grillet novel. Every new bottle seems dense and defamiliarizing.
I defaulted to Macallan, mostly the cask strength (though now that it has been discontinued and the remaining stock is approaching $200 a bottle I have to re-think), with Hibiki being my favorite blended (not legally) scotch. We keep a bottle of Famous Grouse for mixed drinks; Karen pours it more than I do, adding it to Drambuie for a Rusty Nail. I've decided that, unlike most spirits, price is more or less a reliable indicator of quality with scotch -- the higher end stuff is generally subtler and more pleasing to the trained palate than the run-of-the-mill bottles (and there is some cheap scotch that is genuinely horrid) but I'm no expert. I salute those who can negotiate this dark and tangled wood; I defer to folks who keep scotch rooms in their mansions and keep up with the journals.
Scotch is complicated, and probably very rewarding to those who can afford it and want to lean into its study. It is the king of spirits, and it well rewards its loyalists.
That said, I enjoyed the Arkansas single malt, which feels a little ruffian, more mineral than floral and, if you close your eyes and allow yourself to imagine it, evocative of our state's rocky terroir. Scotch is like wine in this way, it has in it a bit of the place its grains were rooted. It's a souvenir of where it has been. And you can learn to like the bite and smoke of it; like life itself it staggers rough and smooth, heat and soothe.
You can find life itself in a shot of whisky; just don't do it too often or to the exclusion of other explorations.
BREATHE, BELIEVE
I'm typing this late at night, with the Rock Town bottle open in front of me, and just a little bit of it poured out into a stemless wine glass. (Somewhere we have brandy snifters; I'm too lazy to look for them right now.)
I pick up the glass and hold it to my nose in a way I know I'd never do were there anyone around to see me do it -- I imagine it looks pretentious but I've seen other people do it in public and I've never thought about it one way or another; nobody cares about how you present so much as you do -- and I breathe in what I imagine is not just the distillation of grain and the flavors imparted by wood permeated by the ghosts of other spirits but by the industry, sweat and dreams of those wistful enough to make such a thing. The more I breathe, the more I believe.
We all believe in the ineffable, don't we? We all believe there is a realm beyond the concrete and physics-ruled; we all believe intention and intuition matter. Otherwise we disbelieve in art, and in ourselves.
I don't drink alone, because none of us is alone who seeks communion.
I don't drink alone, because I don't have to. I know I'm lucky that way.
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Style on 07/14/2019