As evidenced by my illustrious undergrad career, I do not need any help with drinking whisk[e]y. My sophistication, on the other hand, is always in dire need of a leg up. I’m one of those people who can tell you if wine is made from red or white grapes, or whether I like the taste of a certain brand of liquor. Much to my chagrin, I am not one of those people who can pick out chocolate or apricot or oak flavors in my whisky…yet.
As advertised, the guide was the same as the Harry Potter tour. I saluted Arran* when I arrived at the meeting point and he publicly accused me of having Stockholm Syndrome, so I guess you could call us friends. Our assembled group took a short stroll down the Royal Mile to the Waverley Bar, which was the only real “touring” part of the tour. We squirreled ourselves away in the bar’s upper floor, maybe for privacy and maybe so the regulars, who’d heckled us on the way by, wouldn’t have to rub shoulders with a bunch of whisky noobs. The room made a charming backdrop, all buttery wood and maroon furnishings and a ceiling plastered in old billings that were mirrored in the copper tabletops.
Scot-speare gravitated towards the center of this stage. He monologised for two solid hours while simultaneously herding our clowder of increasingly drunken cats through a taste tour of the Scottish countryside. A series of four bottles would teleport us to the major regions of Scotland’s distilleries (Speyside, Lowland, Highland, and Islay) while our feet remained safely on the floor. I think I prefer barstool travel over the regular armchair kind.
⇐The water and the Waverley Bar ceiling / ⇒ The four bottles
The first drams were placed before us. We were directed to swirl the glass and eyeball the whisky’s legs like freaky whiskysexuals, even though Arran pointed out that the only reason people look at the legs is to see how vicious it is, which is frankly useless because “who walks into a bar and asks for a viscous whisky?” I inhaled deep and scorched my nostrils, trying to smell anything above the burning sensation. Was I sophisticated yet? I finally took a swig, my favorite part of any tasting, and let the gold wave swish across my tongue like a tide. I begged my taste buds to identify flavours lurking in its surf. Anything smarter than Yes, Captain, that’s a whisky!
Come on. Please.
They tried. They really did. In the first dram of Glengoyne, they tasted honey. In the second of Balvenie, they inquired about caramel. In the third dram of Old Pulteney something wholly unexpected slapped me in the taste buds. My brain did a hard reset while I tried to figure out what it was. Finally someone else mentioned sea salt. Salt! So much for improving my palette if I’ve forgotten a taste most infants can probably identify. The last, Bowmore, was of the peaty ilk I’ve always associated with Scotch: it carried a strong antiseptic smell somewhat reminiscent of insulin. That’s the only one that wasn’t my jam, but I emptied the glass anyways. I may not be able to identify the taste of salt, but at least I’m sophisticated enough to finish my drinks.
All the while, the monologue wove on. As we sniffed and tasted and drank his words twisted their way through whisky culture, the world’s oldest profession of tax evasion, and William Scott, the author who more or less formed the modern public expectation of Scotland including the tartan and the bagpipes. For some reason his jokes got funnier as time wore on and by the third dram, a loose grin had crawled across my face and decided to stay awhile. The probably-at-least-semi-factual soliloquy was punctuated with one-man dramatizations of historical figures being drunken idiots. I may have had some rough nights, but at least I hadn’t yet burned down my own freshly conquered city like a certain Alexander the Great.
We also finally learned one bit of sophistication that I could memorize rather than acquire: the Unofficial Scottish Rules for drinking whisky. It turns out that adding water is universally encouraged since water opens up the flavors. Ice in whisky is okay but not ideal, since it adds water but cools the liquor, which in turn deadens the flavor (I guess our college habit of storing bottles of JD in snowbanks is right out). Those trendy whisky stones are the worst of both worlds, since there’s no added water AND it chills the liquor. Finally, under no circumstances should whisky ever be mixed with Coke. I failed to mention that I once upon a time I mixed my bourbon with cranberry juice.
When the tour ended I thought about lingering until I was the last tourist standing again, but for one, my ability to stand was rapidly degrading, and for another, I was running out of money so I couldn’t have tipped him again anyways. Instead I employed another dubious skill that I perfected during my undergrad career: the Irish exit. I turned and fled down the stairs without so much as a word. No gracious “Hey, thanks for the collective 4 hours of storytelling.” No complimentary “That was truly phenomenal!” No propositional “Will you marry me, you gorgeous Scot, and make me Scottish too?”
Nah, I ran away, like a cheapskate coward.
To drown my guilt I decided to continue my tour with a self-guided leg. I’m not usually one to wander into strange bars alone, but there was already a certain level of protectedness I felt in Edinburgh that had been enhanced by the warm layer of whisky coating my brain. Also I know I said I was broke, but when in Scotland, the whisky budget is the “dessert stomach” of the travel budget. So I pointed my feet in the direction of Sandy Bells, where they have an open mic every night and local musicians show up to play whatever’s in their hearts. During the walk I realized I was tailing an American couple who had been at the tasting too and I’m sure we would have gotten on famously, but I had not (and this may come as a shock) gone to Scotland to hang out with Americans. So I hung back while they ordered at the bar and pretended to study the menu like I knew what I was looking for. Clearly I didn’t do a very good job, since within thirty seconds the ginger sitting next to me had turned and said “the malt of the month is only £3,50 and it’s a 35 centiliter pour.” Sold!
For the next three hours, neither the whisky nor the conversation stopped flowing. The ginger was a local but also somehow an Irish Republican who’d been blessed with the gift of gab. He quickly roped another nearby regular into the conversation, a shitfaced septuagenarian who turned out to be one of my soulmates (I meet, on average, four soulmates per year). It was clear from the fondness in their verbal spats that they’d known each other for decades, but that night they were kind enough to pull me into their fold, even if I missed about half their jokes due to the crowd noise or their accents or cultural barriers. Somewhere along the way I learned that Scottish culture had influenced the Appalachian hills where I’d spent some of my formative childhood years. In return I harangued them about their local forests, a conversational hazard that I always have to navigate now whenever people ask about my day job. I’d long ago fixated on the lack of trees in the British Isles, so one of my go-to jokes was that there are only four trees in Scotland. The septuagenarian’s ecstatic rebuttal to this was easily my favorite: “We have four trees?! I thought we only had three!”
Finally I’d found a city where it was easy to make local friends without having to pay anyone; how ironic that it happened in the place where I’d already chosen to pay everyone. I tried the trick again the following night when I returned solo to the Waverley bar and found an entire group of off-duty tour guides hanging out for after-work pints. Even without the lure of potential tips, I befriended them for free, too. How soon could I move to Edinburgh?
Anyways, the practical upshot of my whisky tour experience was that, while I still couldn’t pick flavors out of my whisky, I’d developed a taste for the expensive stuff. Goodbye money.
* Name changed to protect the guilty
Window Seat Odyssey 
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