Tales of the Cocktail, Day 2: Thursday
Jul. 27th, 2008 10:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xiphiasThe first panel I went to on the second day was "How to Taste Like a Professional," led by F, Paul Pacult. I admit it, one of the reasons I went was because they were giving away free copies of his book, Kindred Spirits 2. We have the first edition, and love it, and he's finally decided to update it, re-tasting some of the spirits in the first book, and tasting many of the spirits that have come out since then.
Paul is the foremost critic of spirits in the world today. His quarterly journal, "Paul Pacult's Spirit Journal" is one of the most influential, and useful, sources of reviews of liquor that there is. So I jumped at the chance to go to a tasting run by him, with him giving tips on how he does his tastings.
He started by explaining the genesis of the panel we were about to experience. Ann Tuennerman, the founder of Tales of the Cocktail was chatting with him, and asked if he'd want to do something for Tales. He said sure, and asked what. She said, "Why not just do what you always do, but do it in front of people and show them how you do it?" He thought that would be cool, and asked what we should taste. She asked what he WANTED to taste.
He thought about it. He said that he felt that the greatest depth of expression and the highest form of the distiller's art was shown in whiskey. And he felt that the most complex and deepest form of the expression whiskey was found in Scotch whisky. So he wanted to do a Scotch tasting. Ann thought that sounded like a fine idea, and asked what kind of Scotch he wanted to use. He said that he wanted to use one distillery, to show the range of expression among a single distillery's products, and listed his half-dozen favorite distillers.
Ann phoned up those distillers, and asked them if they'd want to sponsor a panel at Tales and provide product. And Macallan said that they'd love to. So, we were going to spend the first panel of the morning tasting what Paul Pacult thought was one of the greatest distillers to express the greatest form of the greatest type of expression of distilled spirits. Not a bad start to the day, eh?
Paul started by talking about what he admired about the Macallan distillery. "Macallan is crazy. I mean, they not only insist on Spanish wood for their barrels, they insist on wood from one specific forest. And then they go to that forest themselves and pick out the trees they want. That's how crazy they are -- and that shows you the care they take with everything."
He then talked a little about his own history. He started out working for the Rodney Strong vintners in California for about ten years. After a while, he figured that the field of wine tasting was pretty well covered, and moved on to use his skills in spirits tasting, instead. His sense of smell is his most developed sense, with his sense of taste not far behind. It's what he works with, it's what he uses, and it's how he thinks. He has a basically eidetic memory for smells and tastes. Some of this is because he's naturally gifted, but a lot of it is from decades and decades of hard work and practice.
He has a very careful and deliberate method of tasting that he uses. He has discovered that he's a morning person -- his sense of taste is most acute before noon. So that's when he does his tastings. He always tastes in his office, alone, from specific glasses that he personally rinses out carefully, without using soap, in distilled water. Yes, he's obsessive -- he's aware of that, and doesn't expect anyone ELSE to be that obsessive, but this is how he works.
If he has any touch of a cold or allergies, he doesn't work that day. He uses his nose -- if it's in the least impaired, he won't work. His wife HATES those days, because, well, on days that he can't work, he tends to wander into her office and look over her shoulder and watch HER work. . . "What'cha workin' on? What are you writing now?"
He tastes from six to eight liquors in a morning -- never more than eight. That's as many as he can deal with accurately before his taste buds and nose start getting worn out. He tastes within a category -- six to eight rye whiskeys, six to eight gins, six to eight orange-flavored vodkas -- whatever. When he can manage it, he has his assistant or his wife set up the bottles for him, with the labels covered, so he can taste blind -- without knowing what brand it is so he can try to avoid preconceived expectations. He spends about half an hour with each liquor.
He feels it's important to treat each liquor with respect and honor. He's worked in the business of wine-making; he is friends with distillers; he knows how emotionally connected people are to their products. He hates to give negative reviews -- but that's his job. People need honesty, and he needs to give people accurate feedback -- he owes it to his readers who depend on him for an honest and accurate description of what's going on with the spirit, and an honest and accurate assessment of how good it is. For that matter, he owes it to the distillers to let them know how they did.
He ranks on a five-star scale. * means that he's not finishing the bottle -- it's going down the drain. As much as he doesn't like writing one-star reviews, I have to admit that I enjoy reading them. (From the book -- "In the first nosing pass, my olfactory sense is assaulted by horribly gross aromas of cat's piss/cat box, burning tires, and crushed red pepper -- hey, this is great; further aeration does nothing to quell the aromatic mugging of my sniffing apparatus as the aroma runs amok with jalapeño pepper and urine-like scents; rivals the bouquets of several mescals I've reviled. . . ") Two-star reviews mean that he's probably going to finish the bottle, but it's not worth buying again. Three stars means it's worth buying. It does what it's supposed it, it tastes pretty good. A four star review means that the thing does everything right -- it's damn close to orgasmic. And a five-star review does everything right -- but somehow goes above and beyond that into definite orgasm territory. The things that get ***** reviews are things like 20-year old Scotches matured in Sauternes casks by expert distillers who rolled a critical success.
He does three passes of smell-and-taste with each liquor he critiques -- the first one is within 30 seconds of pouring the glass, when you have the biggest rush of flavors. Then he waits five or ten minutes, once things have a chance to aerate, and does another pass, and a third pass another five or ten minutes after that.
When you smell spirits, you leave your lips parted. That allows another path for air and vapors, so that you don't immediately blow out your sinuses by snarfing vast amounts of alcohol vapor into them. When you're smelling wine or beer, you don't do that; the "parting your lips" trick is something he was taught by Booker Noe when he was just starting to review spirits.
So, he smells, he takes notes of the things he notices. You look for the same sorts of things that you look for in beer and wine -- fruit notes, earth notes, spices, and so forth.
Then he tastes. And the way he does his tasting is in three sips: first sip of water to rinse out mouth. Second sip of the liquor, get some basic impressions. Third sip of the liquor, and that's the TRUE sip.
See, when you're tasting, you may have other residues from previous liquors and so forth. So he does TWO sips of the thing he's tasting, so that the residue he's got is a residue of the thing he's tasting.
Then he's looking largely to see if the taste follows through on the promises made by the nose.
Throughout the panel he made some other points, in response to audience questions. For instance, yes, there are days that he sits down and starts to taste, and he just doesn't feel he's "with it" that day. On days like that, that's one of the days that he goes and bugs his wife instead.
For the most part, spirits in unopened bottles just don't change. But he's discovered that, unlike the conventional wisdom, spirits that HAVE been opened DO change. Not a whole lot, but some. He feels that, in general, if you've got something with over 40% alcohol, you should probably try to finish the bottle within a couple months or half a year -- the volatile compounds WILL evaporate once there's air in there.
And, when he's tasking overproof spirits (things that are over 50% alcohol), he tends to dilute it slightly to diffuse the alcohol burn -- two parts spirit to one part water.
The rest of the panel was experiential. We were tasting a series of the Macallan Fine Oak whiskys, followed by two more traditional-style Macallan offerings. I'm not going to write down too much from that part of the panel, because it was about the experience of tasting and smelling, so there's not that much that can be explained through text that I haven't already said. The Fine Oak whisky is a lighter, cleaner expression of Scotch than usual -- it's something that Macallan started up a couple decades ago to appeal to a different population. Lots of people thought they were crazy and thought it was a terrible idea; Pacult thought they were crazy and that it worked. He likes their Fine Oak series, but not for the same reasons that he likes their more traditional Scotches.
And we finished with a pair of their more traditional offerings.
The things that we tasted were mostly things that he'd given four stars. But the one that we finished with was a five-star. Just so that we could experience the difference.
Paul is the foremost critic of spirits in the world today. His quarterly journal, "Paul Pacult's Spirit Journal" is one of the most influential, and useful, sources of reviews of liquor that there is. So I jumped at the chance to go to a tasting run by him, with him giving tips on how he does his tastings.
He started by explaining the genesis of the panel we were about to experience. Ann Tuennerman, the founder of Tales of the Cocktail was chatting with him, and asked if he'd want to do something for Tales. He said sure, and asked what. She said, "Why not just do what you always do, but do it in front of people and show them how you do it?" He thought that would be cool, and asked what we should taste. She asked what he WANTED to taste.
He thought about it. He said that he felt that the greatest depth of expression and the highest form of the distiller's art was shown in whiskey. And he felt that the most complex and deepest form of the expression whiskey was found in Scotch whisky. So he wanted to do a Scotch tasting. Ann thought that sounded like a fine idea, and asked what kind of Scotch he wanted to use. He said that he wanted to use one distillery, to show the range of expression among a single distillery's products, and listed his half-dozen favorite distillers.
Ann phoned up those distillers, and asked them if they'd want to sponsor a panel at Tales and provide product. And Macallan said that they'd love to. So, we were going to spend the first panel of the morning tasting what Paul Pacult thought was one of the greatest distillers to express the greatest form of the greatest type of expression of distilled spirits. Not a bad start to the day, eh?
Paul started by talking about what he admired about the Macallan distillery. "Macallan is crazy. I mean, they not only insist on Spanish wood for their barrels, they insist on wood from one specific forest. And then they go to that forest themselves and pick out the trees they want. That's how crazy they are -- and that shows you the care they take with everything."
He then talked a little about his own history. He started out working for the Rodney Strong vintners in California for about ten years. After a while, he figured that the field of wine tasting was pretty well covered, and moved on to use his skills in spirits tasting, instead. His sense of smell is his most developed sense, with his sense of taste not far behind. It's what he works with, it's what he uses, and it's how he thinks. He has a basically eidetic memory for smells and tastes. Some of this is because he's naturally gifted, but a lot of it is from decades and decades of hard work and practice.
He has a very careful and deliberate method of tasting that he uses. He has discovered that he's a morning person -- his sense of taste is most acute before noon. So that's when he does his tastings. He always tastes in his office, alone, from specific glasses that he personally rinses out carefully, without using soap, in distilled water. Yes, he's obsessive -- he's aware of that, and doesn't expect anyone ELSE to be that obsessive, but this is how he works.
If he has any touch of a cold or allergies, he doesn't work that day. He uses his nose -- if it's in the least impaired, he won't work. His wife HATES those days, because, well, on days that he can't work, he tends to wander into her office and look over her shoulder and watch HER work. . . "What'cha workin' on? What are you writing now?"
He tastes from six to eight liquors in a morning -- never more than eight. That's as many as he can deal with accurately before his taste buds and nose start getting worn out. He tastes within a category -- six to eight rye whiskeys, six to eight gins, six to eight orange-flavored vodkas -- whatever. When he can manage it, he has his assistant or his wife set up the bottles for him, with the labels covered, so he can taste blind -- without knowing what brand it is so he can try to avoid preconceived expectations. He spends about half an hour with each liquor.
He feels it's important to treat each liquor with respect and honor. He's worked in the business of wine-making; he is friends with distillers; he knows how emotionally connected people are to their products. He hates to give negative reviews -- but that's his job. People need honesty, and he needs to give people accurate feedback -- he owes it to his readers who depend on him for an honest and accurate description of what's going on with the spirit, and an honest and accurate assessment of how good it is. For that matter, he owes it to the distillers to let them know how they did.
He ranks on a five-star scale. * means that he's not finishing the bottle -- it's going down the drain. As much as he doesn't like writing one-star reviews, I have to admit that I enjoy reading them. (From the book -- "In the first nosing pass, my olfactory sense is assaulted by horribly gross aromas of cat's piss/cat box, burning tires, and crushed red pepper -- hey, this is great; further aeration does nothing to quell the aromatic mugging of my sniffing apparatus as the aroma runs amok with jalapeño pepper and urine-like scents; rivals the bouquets of several mescals I've reviled. . . ") Two-star reviews mean that he's probably going to finish the bottle, but it's not worth buying again. Three stars means it's worth buying. It does what it's supposed it, it tastes pretty good. A four star review means that the thing does everything right -- it's damn close to orgasmic. And a five-star review does everything right -- but somehow goes above and beyond that into definite orgasm territory. The things that get ***** reviews are things like 20-year old Scotches matured in Sauternes casks by expert distillers who rolled a critical success.
He does three passes of smell-and-taste with each liquor he critiques -- the first one is within 30 seconds of pouring the glass, when you have the biggest rush of flavors. Then he waits five or ten minutes, once things have a chance to aerate, and does another pass, and a third pass another five or ten minutes after that.
When you smell spirits, you leave your lips parted. That allows another path for air and vapors, so that you don't immediately blow out your sinuses by snarfing vast amounts of alcohol vapor into them. When you're smelling wine or beer, you don't do that; the "parting your lips" trick is something he was taught by Booker Noe when he was just starting to review spirits.
So, he smells, he takes notes of the things he notices. You look for the same sorts of things that you look for in beer and wine -- fruit notes, earth notes, spices, and so forth.
Then he tastes. And the way he does his tasting is in three sips: first sip of water to rinse out mouth. Second sip of the liquor, get some basic impressions. Third sip of the liquor, and that's the TRUE sip.
See, when you're tasting, you may have other residues from previous liquors and so forth. So he does TWO sips of the thing he's tasting, so that the residue he's got is a residue of the thing he's tasting.
Then he's looking largely to see if the taste follows through on the promises made by the nose.
Throughout the panel he made some other points, in response to audience questions. For instance, yes, there are days that he sits down and starts to taste, and he just doesn't feel he's "with it" that day. On days like that, that's one of the days that he goes and bugs his wife instead.
For the most part, spirits in unopened bottles just don't change. But he's discovered that, unlike the conventional wisdom, spirits that HAVE been opened DO change. Not a whole lot, but some. He feels that, in general, if you've got something with over 40% alcohol, you should probably try to finish the bottle within a couple months or half a year -- the volatile compounds WILL evaporate once there's air in there.
And, when he's tasking overproof spirits (things that are over 50% alcohol), he tends to dilute it slightly to diffuse the alcohol burn -- two parts spirit to one part water.
The rest of the panel was experiential. We were tasting a series of the Macallan Fine Oak whiskys, followed by two more traditional-style Macallan offerings. I'm not going to write down too much from that part of the panel, because it was about the experience of tasting and smelling, so there's not that much that can be explained through text that I haven't already said. The Fine Oak whisky is a lighter, cleaner expression of Scotch than usual -- it's something that Macallan started up a couple decades ago to appeal to a different population. Lots of people thought they were crazy and thought it was a terrible idea; Pacult thought they were crazy and that it worked. He likes their Fine Oak series, but not for the same reasons that he likes their more traditional Scotches.
And we finished with a pair of their more traditional offerings.
The things that we tasted were mostly things that he'd given four stars. But the one that we finished with was a five-star. Just so that we could experience the difference.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 03:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 03:10 pm (UTC)I'm a scotch fan, so now I'm awfully jealous, too!
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 10:40 pm (UTC)And wait until I get the next post up, on Molecular Mixology, run by several of the most fun, geeky guys in bartending today.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 04:35 pm (UTC)I love scotch. Scotchy, scotch, scotch. Here it goes down, down into my belly...
Does Pacult's book go over his tasting method? Will be cool getting more out my booze.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 10:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 10:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 05:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-27 10:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-30 12:31 am (UTC)