Surprise!

My regular day job offers only moderate opportunity for wearing a jacket, errr…sport coat or what some might call a blazer. I have a small collection in my closet; a couple of tweeds, a navy with a light chalk line, my old crested school jacket (posterity’s sake) and a couple of shades of black for formal occasions. It’s the blacks that I like the most. Not because they look or fit better, nor are they of finer quality. Their purpose is solely a treasure trove of unexpected nostalgia. I wear these more formal jackets so infrequently I can never remember where I wore them last until I put one on and start rummaging through the pockets. Springtime weddings or funerals are usually a good time as I often end up recovering items deposited during the annual St. Patrick’s Day black tie dinner and following debauchery. Its usually best not to go snooping in the middle of a church service, oft times the items are just as likely embarrassing as they are a ten dollar bill. The bottom line is I like a surprise!

So you can imagine how happy I was when I went sorting through the bar tonight looking for a bottle of liqueur and stumbled across a bottle of whisky that I completely forgot I had, Blackadder’s Old Man of Hoy, Single Orcadian Scotch Malt Whisky. This is a whisky from the Orkney Islands, either Highland Park or Scapa. From the nose to the finish this whisky has a wonderful balance of peat with a touch of oil and citrus. The first time I had this whisky, or any of Blackadder’s bottlings for that matter was in a tiny bottle shop in Boston. After a New England Patriots football game my wife and I missed our flight home. With no more flights for 24 hours we headed back into the city. We stumbled across the small liquor store in a Flatiron style building on State Street (which we merrily stumbled out of later but I’m getting to that). Whenever we are in a foreign place we always look for new additions to our collection or a Christmas gift for my father. Federal Wine and Spirits offers everything you could ever want in a bottle shop. Furthermore, it was here that we met Joe working behind the counter.

Joe…how do I begin to describe Joe? He has jet black hair which is completely slicked back with enough grease to keep a farm tractor going for years. When he opens his mouth and speaks his voice is so low it rumbles. Imagine a chain smoker who takes the odd break to inhale a juicy Cuban cigar. He is also one of the most knowledgeable whisky aficionados I have met to this day. He is always generous with a complimentary tasting from the row of bottles lining the floor and wall. It is because he is such a hospitable shop keep that his service is often spastic. In the middle of honoring a request he will often drop everything and offer assistance to another shop patron who has just come in. In the middle of all of this he will stop, sometimes mid sentence and step outside to have two or three drags on a cigarette, coming back and picking up as he left off without missing a beat!

Ever the diligent host Joe worked hard to chisel away exactly what it was we were looking for even if we truly didn’t know ourselves! Joe took us through several of Blackadder’s offerings including the Peek Reek, the Smoking Islay and the Orcadian. We finally settled on a bottle for my father who prefers the peat of an Islay but in this instance ended up with a release from Talisker that was not available in a Canada (don’t ask me how we ended up there after an hour we left in a bit of a haze)…either way my father was pleased. Fast forward two years when a friend mentions he was heading to Boston I asked him to stop and pick me up a bottle of Blackadder. By this time I had long forgotten what they offered…I could only remember that it had a very robust peat head and the bits of char floating in the bottles (I think it was actually the Peet Reek I was looking for). Being a dedicated rum drinker Peter had no idea what to get and picked somewhat at random. So I guess everything about this whisky has been a surprise for me. Being that whisky is all about the experience and given that I like to experience a surprise...I like it even more!