This Is What $25,000 Scotch Tastes Like

By: Alex Beggs

I recently attended a special tasting dinner at Le Bernardin to try a newly released single-malt 50-year-old Glenlivet Scotch ($25,000 a bottle, a stocking stuffer for aficionados). What follows are some descriptive phrases in the lexicon of lushes I heard my fellow dinner-goers use to describe the stuff:

“Absolutely marzipan.”

“Bananas foster.”

“Bacon fruits”?! (I may have misheard … but I’d like to think not.)

“Cinnamon.”

“Licorice, definitely.” (Points for certainty.)

“Black cherry”

“Cherry and apple pie.” (Fun!)

“Burnt orange.”

“Darker raisins.”

“Fruitcake in a spice shop.” (Specific.)

And don’t get me started on the mouthfeel. The more aged a Scotch is, like this over-the-hill beast, the more tingle and burn you’ll feel as it lingers in your mouth. While my mostly male, and variably mustachioed, dinner companions described their drinks with suspicious ease, all I wrote down from my seat was “drinking all this Scotch makes me feel like a 20th-century oil baron.” That was a good thing.

When it came time to file, I was having trouble describing the Scotch in words that hadn’t been used before. My notes were a list of uppity adjectives from those other writers’ mouths. So I turned to Heather Greene, the whisky sommelier at the Flatiron Room and the author of the upcoming Whiskey Distilled, who graciously helped me decode some of the absurdist vocabulary and ridiculous fanfare of Scotch tasting.

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“Marzipan. Who eats that? And treacle, Christmas cake, and sherry—[people describe Scotch this way] all the time,” she said. “I think it’s just a recurring amount of words to describe the notes, and they’re very British-based, so they lose meaning when they come to America.” And the older a whisky is, the more of the cask’s aromatics you begin to taste: leather, tannins, figs, caramel, and so on, which is why people begin to identify dense, dessert flavors.

But how much of formal Scotch tasting is, well, free-associative Mad Libbing? “There’s actually something called ‘language olfaction interference,’ it’s hard to smell and describe what you’re smelling at the same time. It’s not something you can’t learn, but it’s hard.” She added, “The other thing that’s bullshit, is most people can only identify five things at one time. All that stuff to me is [a way] to alienate the new consumer of whisky.”

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And it has to be said, Greene is a rare occurrence in the world of Scotch—a world that doesn’t need to appeal to young women (ahem), because an audience of rich old men is keeping them in business perfectly fine.

“In general, Scotch companies aren’t going to change who they are just to reach somebody,” said Greene, “I’ve talked to executives who expressed that they are who they are, and they’re not going to change their marketing to be someone they’re not.”

But as more women begin to explore American bourbons and ryes close to home, Scotch remains distant.

“It’s definitely a men’s club,” she continued, “There is a tendency to want to protect that—people like clubs, and they want to be a part of them. Being a woman has allowed me an outsider perspective to call out the absurdity of whiskey tasting—you just have to laugh at it.”

And with that, let’s raise our glass to marzipan, that pasty excuse for a dessert that, try as we might, just won’t go away.

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Images 1) Craig Barritt/Getty Images, 2) Glevlivet