people can’t stand the taste of the three but keep trying every now and again, wishing that they could appreciate these strange, fierce, acerbic whiskies the way other people obviously do, others are just perplexed that anybody would want to drink such bizarre-tasting stuff but leave it at that, while others seem to hate them the way you’d despise an especially loathsome politician. Their most intense regret, bewilderment or venom, respectively, is generally reserved for Laphroaig, as the most intensely different – even wilfully incongruous – example of Extreme Whisky.
The comparison I think is most apt in the wider field of drink is probably Chateau Musar. This is one of my favourite red wines in the world, but it is profoundly different from other reds, especially other reds generally considered to be worth a place on a decent wine list. It is spicy. In fact, it’s spicy in a way that is utterly different from what a wine taster will normally mean when they apply the word ‘spicy’ to any other fine wine. It’s a bit like the difference between somebody having red hair and somebody wearing a red wig the colour of a British postbox; the word ‘red’ is the same, but once you know the context, once you know what sort of red is being talked about, the image you have of the person being described alters drastically.
So with Chateau Musar; it’s so different from any other fine red wine it practically needs a separate category of drink to define it (in
Michael Broadbent’s Vintage Wine
, an authoritative and astoundingly comprehensive overview of 50 years of wine-tasting, it merits a categorisation all of its own).
Chateau Musar is made by a man called Serge Hochar – son of Gaston, who started the enterprise – in circumstances which have, over the years, certainly – and frequently – merited the description ‘difficult’. When other wine makers talk about a difficult year they mean there was a late frost or a too-damp September; when Mr Hochar says it was a difficult year you suspect he means that there were landmines to remove from between the vines or that there was an unexpectedly high number of extremely brief, sudden and entirely unannounced visits from the Israeli Air Force. Chateau Musar is from Lebanon. Specifically, it is from the Bekaa valley, notorious over the decades as the location of training camps for terrorists/freedom fighters (the reader is invited to choose as appropriate to their dogma). Wags have been known to shake bottles of the stuff by their ear, claiming to be listening for the tell-tale chinking sound of shrapnel.
Despite all this, Mr Hochar has succeeded in producing a vintage every year apart from one, and not just producing any old harshly ropy but high-novelty-value gut-rot, either; Musar is in every sense a fine wine.
But very different; again, some people, solely through taste rather than prejudice, can’t stand the stuff. Just like Laphroaig it is sometimes referred to as an acquired taste, though I’m not sure about this. I suspect more people stick with their original reaction to both drinks rather than start out hating only to end up loving.
Whatever; Laphroaig in particular is a hell of drink, especially if you don’t like it. It’s oddly peaty (oddly because there’s much less peat involved in the making of it than in most whiskies we think of as peaty) and positively bursting with smells straight out of the medicine cabinet, the quayside, a road repair depot and even an industrial plant (mouthwash, disinfectant, iodine, cough sweets … actually make that cough sours … seaweed, tar, diesel, oil …). Pungent, no-holds-barred stuff, though arguably not quite as remorselessly astringent as it used to be.
I think the truth is that, as well as having changed somewhat over the years to a
slightly
mellower formulation, Laphroaig is just a very slow-maturing whisky; it still has enormous, restless, raw energy and character at an age when most other whiskies
The comparison I think is most apt in the wider field of drink is probably Chateau Musar. This is one of my favourite red wines in the world, but it is profoundly different from other reds, especially other reds generally considered to be worth a place on a decent wine list. It is spicy. In fact, it’s spicy in a way that is utterly different from what a wine taster will normally mean when they apply the word ‘spicy’ to any other fine wine. It’s a bit like the difference between somebody having red hair and somebody wearing a red wig the colour of a British postbox; the word ‘red’ is the same, but once you know the context, once you know what sort of red is being talked about, the image you have of the person being described alters drastically.
So with Chateau Musar; it’s so different from any other fine red wine it practically needs a separate category of drink to define it (in
Michael Broadbent’s Vintage Wine
, an authoritative and astoundingly comprehensive overview of 50 years of wine-tasting, it merits a categorisation all of its own).
Chateau Musar is made by a man called Serge Hochar – son of Gaston, who started the enterprise – in circumstances which have, over the years, certainly – and frequently – merited the description ‘difficult’. When other wine makers talk about a difficult year they mean there was a late frost or a too-damp September; when Mr Hochar says it was a difficult year you suspect he means that there were landmines to remove from between the vines or that there was an unexpectedly high number of extremely brief, sudden and entirely unannounced visits from the Israeli Air Force. Chateau Musar is from Lebanon. Specifically, it is from the Bekaa valley, notorious over the decades as the location of training camps for terrorists/freedom fighters (the reader is invited to choose as appropriate to their dogma). Wags have been known to shake bottles of the stuff by their ear, claiming to be listening for the tell-tale chinking sound of shrapnel.
Despite all this, Mr Hochar has succeeded in producing a vintage every year apart from one, and not just producing any old harshly ropy but high-novelty-value gut-rot, either; Musar is in every sense a fine wine.
But very different; again, some people, solely through taste rather than prejudice, can’t stand the stuff. Just like Laphroaig it is sometimes referred to as an acquired taste, though I’m not sure about this. I suspect more people stick with their original reaction to both drinks rather than start out hating only to end up loving.
Whatever; Laphroaig in particular is a hell of drink, especially if you don’t like it. It’s oddly peaty (oddly because there’s much less peat involved in the making of it than in most whiskies we think of as peaty) and positively bursting with smells straight out of the medicine cabinet, the quayside, a road repair depot and even an industrial plant (mouthwash, disinfectant, iodine, cough sweets … actually make that cough sours … seaweed, tar, diesel, oil …). Pungent, no-holds-barred stuff, though arguably not quite as remorselessly astringent as it used to be.
I think the truth is that, as well as having changed somewhat over the years to a
slightly
mellower formulation, Laphroaig is just a very slow-maturing whisky; it still has enormous, restless, raw energy and character at an age when most other whiskies
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