|
Home > What's New > The Best Laid Plans
The Best Laid Plans
Posted: Monday, April 14, 2003
By Jack Bettridge I swear I was prepared.
The cigar and whiskey pairing I was waiting to make last Thursday night was going to be my best ever. I'd written out copious notes on the smokes and quaffs. I'd even put in a call to Wild Turkey master distiller Jimmy Russell to get extra insight into his Russell's Reserve Bourbon. Fellow editor Dave Savona had given me an emergency call from the golf course to do some last-minute fine tuning with the order of smoking. To ensure that wouldn't be simply dry and educational, I'd added some humorous asides with parenthetical direction to pause for laughter.
But the "How to Pair Whiskey and Cigars" seminar at the 12th annual Taste of Vail food and wine festival was not destined to be the textbook learning experience that the brochure promised.
In retrospect, my first tip-off should have come minutes before the event at the Sanctuary in Vail Village, Colorado, when Jim Lay, a local restaurateur, told me I might not need the microphone I was nervously clutching. "Why not?" I wondered. While it may sound like a religious retreat, the Sanctuary is actually a loud bar and some guy was playing, note-for-note, Jimi Hendrix's Woodstock rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" one floor down. Surely, with the ambient noise and the 8,000-foot elevation, which was taking my breath away, I'd need some amplification.
Lay proceeded to tell a cautionary tale from a similar event held at the festival a few years back. Seems they'd planned a gala night of cigars and brandy with a distinguished panel that included a representative from Cognac and football legend Dan Marino. But when the Frenchman tried to elucidate the crowd on the niceties of his spirit, he lost his audience almost immediately. No one was in the mood for learning, it turned out. They ignored his lecture in favor of his brandy and cigars and the whole thing turned into a free-for-all.
"You might want to just say a few words, let everybody light up and just go table to table and answer questions if anyone wants to learn anything," Lay said.
No, I thought that would never happen to me. Mine was no pedantic speech, delivered in a thick accent. I would engage this crowd with bon mots and trenchant facts about the whiskies and cigars. I would romance them with inside information on how we conduct pairings at Cigar Aficionado. I would have them eating out of my hand.
In my defense, I will say that I was able to get off my standard joke about the smoke bone being connected to the drink bone and describe the attributes of the Macanudo Hyde Park Café, our first cigar, before I lost their attention. But somewhere in my introduction to the first whisky, Chivas Regal 18-year-old, the whole thing spun out of control. I was in the midst of explaining that any single-malt snobs in the crowd might want to consider the joys of excellent blends like the one we had before us, when I realized that many in the crowd had advanced through the single-malt and the Irish whiskey I had left to introduce and were drinking the aforementioned Wild Turkey and were asking for more. Few were listening to me except for one gentleman who was taking loud exception to my stand on blended Scotch.
I took Lay's advice and went table to table, leaving the microphone to my colleague Don Gatterdam, who bravely would shout out at intervals of a half hour to move on to the next cigar, even while most of the crowd had already leapfrogged the order.
Lay was right. One-on-one was the right format for this event. Had I held it at 2 p.m. in a meeting room, as my colleague from Wine Spectator, Gloria Maroti, did with her own seminar, I might have gotten the earnest reaction of her wine connoisseurs. Maybe. But a cigar and whiskey tasting at cocktail hour in a bar located in a ski resort town was asking for rowdiness. And that's just what I got.
Only a few at my event ever learned that the Romeo y Julieta Bully has an Indonesian wrapper that is grown under similar conditions to the Ecuadoran wrapper on the La Gloria Cubana Serie R No. 5, which itself is basically a robusto shape but with more girth. Many enjoyed the Jameson 12-year-old whiskey without ever knowing that despite giving up six years to The Glenlivet 18-year-old it could compete in terms of finesse with the latter because of a preponderance of pot still whiskey in the blend. I never mentioned that The Glenlivet became the first legal distillery in Scotland in 1824. I was able to tell only one guy that Russell's Reserve was a 10-year-old developed by not only Jimmy Russell, but his son Eddie, with whom he has worked side by side for 22 years.
I went away a little dejected, but resigned to the understanding that at least everyone seems to come away from the event having had a good time smoking and drinking, even if they hadn't learned much.
The next day I was riding the gondola to the festival's Mountaintop Picnic, when a fellow rider looked up and said, "Aren't you that Cigar Aficionado fellow?" I allowed that I was and he said he'd been at the event and had a real good time. I said I was glad. And then just as we got off and I headed to the picnic and he to the slopes, he said, "I think I'm going to take your advice and try some more good blends."
Victory!
Also in Cigar News:
| 
Cigar Aficionado RSS Feed