JUST over a century ago Gonzalez Byass shipped a first consignment of sherry casks from Jerez to Whyte & Mackay in Glasgow. At the time, 40% of all the UK’s wine imports were sherry whose cheap, plentiful barrels were gobbled up by a grateful Scotch whisky industry.
Beer on whisky, very risky – whisky on beer, never fear. Quite why it’s OK to drink one way, and not the other is a mystery to me, but it’s advice Paul Miller and his team have followed to the letter. In 2012 they launched Eden Mill, the first brewery in St Andrews for more than 100 years, and in 2014 they began distilling whisky as well.
THERE’S a long, proud tradition of illicit distillation in Scotland and it gave birth to pot still whisky. Once the authorities took a more enlightened approach to tax in the 1820s, the old bootleggers came in from the cold and went legit. This was the start of an industry that now sends 38 bottles a second overseas and pumps about £1 billion into the Treasury coffers every year.
I HAD been out partying after a wine tasting in London, and caught the last Tube back to my brother’s place where I was staying. Cocooned in a warm carriage I was soon fast asleep and remained so until we juddered to a final stop on the far side of the Circle Line.
Montpelier’s is one of a chain of seven, vaguely trendy bars in Edinburgh that wears its heart on its sleeve. We Love Craft Beers declares a large billboard that lists 20 of them, including such fine examples as Peroni, Guinness and Coors Light.
After 15 years as Diageo’s corporate affairs director, Ian Wright knows a thing or two about political lobbying, and if some of the heat has come off booze he’s taking some of the credit. “I went to a meeting in the summer,” he told me, “where a government minister said to the deputy chief medical officer: ‘What’s the hierarchy of evil?’ and she said: ‘Well I’d go tobacco, sugar, alcohol.’”
IT'S that time of the year when we, hopefully, surf on a foaming wave of fizz. So with perfect timing Taittinger has become the first champagne house to buy land across the channel. They will replant a 69 hectare former apple orchard near Canterbury, in Kent, with chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier and aim to one day produce 300,000 bottles of English sparkling wine.
For years Aldi and Lidl flew beneath the radar of the big supermarkets, certainly when it came to wine. Each offered a meagre, core range of around 60 wines, compared to the 900 listed by Tesco, and instead of all those crazy, cut-price deals, the pricing in the German chains never varied from one week to the next. How boring was that?
On the subject of whisky I admit that I’m biased. I have tasted some lovely drams from Japan and Ireland, but for better or worse, I’ll stick with Scotch. No such bias troubles the English whisky writer Jim Murray. “I treat Bourbon, Scotch, Irish and everything else as equals,” he told me, having anointed Canada’s Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye as the world’s best whisky this year.
“Many people may not know why they are ordering wine, but they will most likely be united in the belief that it is the right and proper thing to do,” writes Stephen Beaumont. The passage, in the introduction to his new book The Beer & Food Companion (Jacqui Small, £25) explains how we embraced the grape rather the grain when eating out.
