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The lineup for the weekend's final seminar choice included Johnnie Walker Black (a 12-year-old) and Gold (an 18-year-old), as well as Chivas Regal 12-Year-Old and Royal Salute (a 21-year-old) paired with the Padrón 1964 Anniversary Series Exclusivo Maduro. With such exquisite choices, Bettridge wouldn't have a tough time selling the merits of what he called "the forgotten Scotch whisky." Bettridge related his own conversion to blends, which came a few years ago when he gave his 90-year old mother, an inveterate Scotch drinker, a bottle of Bowmore single malt. He asked her how she liked it, and she replied she preferred blends. This piqued his interests in the possible joys of blended Scotch, which have not been highly touted since single malts were widely introduced in America in the last few decades. Bettridge ended up writing a story on the subject, and, he said, he discovered the charms of high-quality blended Scotch, a drink that can easily hold its own with malts. When he was finished, the loving son delivered the leftover Scotch from the sampling to his mother and asked if he could have the bottle of Bowmore. "She told me she'd developed a taste for it and there wasn't any left," said Bettridge. "Well, by that time I'd developed a taste for blends." He added that there is a level of connoisseurship in drinking both styles of whisky, said Bettridge, and both should be enjoyed for their unique flavors and abilities to pair with good cigars. For Padrón, cigars and whiskey are a daily combination. Padrón, along with his father, Jose Orlando, and his brother, Orlando, enjoys a glass of blended Scotch at the end of each workday, but he insisted, "We are not experts of Scotch whisky, we are drinkers of Scotch whisky."
Blended Scotch whisky, Bettridge said, is made a combination of single malts married with aged grain alcohol. The combination is called the blend. Bettridge stressed the importance of blend consistency, along with aging the whisky, and the attention to detail necessary for a complex and elegant whisky. The same holds true for cigars. "The key is to be able to maintain consistency in blends," said Padrón. "You need to play around with the tobacco and the blends to get it right each time." Padrón also gave the audience a look into the aging and fermentation at Padrón's factories in Nicaragua, drawing similarities from the distilling process. As the whisky and cigars were enjoyed, it was easy to see that the hangovers were disappearing. The seminar soon turned into a full-out Q & A session with lively questions that ranged from pairing cigars and spirits to whether whisky gets better in the bottle. To the latter question, Bettridge noted that whisky doesn't age in the bottle, but that he has found that a high-octane spirit such as Booker's, after it is opened for a few months, may lose some of its bite towards the bottom of the bottle. This is due to the evaporation of alcohol, said Bettridge, but Padrón questioned the statement. "Jack," he said, "when was the last time you had a bottle of whiskey that lasted a few months? They're usually gone in a week." As the seminar concluded, Bettridge went back to the same question that he used to begin the presentation. This time the number of hands raised by the "snobs" was significantly lower. A few more blended Scotch drinkers had been born, and a few more hangovers had been cured. Filed by Mike Marsh |
"Are there any single malt snobs in the audience?" asked Jack Bettridge, Cigar Aficionado's senior features editor and spirits writer at the start of his Ultimate Blended Scotch Whisky Tasting at the Las Vegas Big Smoke. When hands shot up, he added, "Well, we're going to see if we can change some your minds today."
Nevertheless, as the tasting began and Bettridge explained the process of distilling blended Scotch as compared with single salts, Padrón made analogies between the cigar-making process to the distillation process, especially when it comes to blends.