Whiskey Week began soberly enough last Monday evening at Delilah’s, as a great bearded bear of a man poured wee samples of scotch around the pool table for the dozen or so people attending “Scotch School.” Martin Duffy is a spokesman for Johnnie Walker and the Classic Malts, a series of single-malt whiskeys representing the various scotch-producing regions of Scotland. He was in town for Whiskey Week, which climaxes with WhiskyFest–spelled the Scottish way, without the e–a three-and-half-hour free-for-all tasting of some 200 spirits in the Hyatt Regency Grand Ballroom.
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The following evening the Twisted Spoke hosted “The Legends of Bourbon,” during which a handful of bourbon makers poured tastes of their special spirits, some not available on the market. If the Scots are vaguely cartoonish in their tartans, quipping endlessly in heavy brogues, the Kentuckians are exemplars of the genial good ol’ boy. Fred Noe, great-grandson of Jim Beam and the public face of premium bourbons like Knob Creek, Booker’s, and Basil Hayden, spent the evening leaning against a window, languidly pouring samples of a deep amber 127-proof from an unlabeled bottle he’d filled at the rackhouse that morning in Bardstown, Kentucky. “That’s something my daddy and I made,” he said, referring to the late Booker Noe, who ran Jim Beam’s distillery and was the company’s spokesman for decades before his death last year. According to Noe, about 98 percent of the world’s bourbon comes from a 60-mile radius around Bardstown. “I don’t know where the other two percent comes from,” he says. “But I wouldn’t drink it.”
Many scotches and bourbons are marketed with old-world or down-home images, but most are owned by huge multinational corporations. “All these really massive global liquor companies–it’s a combination of people who are really passionate and people who are counting nickels,” says Mike Miller, who owns Delilah’s. Fred Noe has a big hand in the quality control and selection of his bourbons, but he spends a good deal of his time away from Bardstown, taking his show on the road.
At 5:30 on Wednesday afternoon press dogs and industry VIPs began circulating among the tasting tables at the Hyatt, lapping up free booze in the relatively uncrowded ballroom, while those who had paid for $95 tickets lined up outside. At 6:30 the doors were opened and the rabble stormed the room. The sort of person who pays that kind of money to drink unlimited sips of whiskey for three and a half hours is usually male. There are industry types in suits and sport coats, potbellied guys in golf shirts, the ubiquitous kilt wearers, and a handful of punks. They bunch in front of the tables clamoring for sips of Suntory and Glenlivet, ignoring fruity oddballs like Black Star Farms pear eau de vie. Most of the few women in attendance work for the whiskey companies as marketing reps or models hired to do the pouring.
Fred Noe sat to the left of the podium, bulky and half-bald, in a rumpled sport coat. His deep, marble-mouthed drawl can fill a room. “Before we start I just want to say I got nothin’ against scotch whiskey,” he bellowed. “It’s Richard I don’t like.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Elizabeth Gomez.
