I admit to the occasional early escape from work, a brief respite from the tyranny of schedules and deadlines capped off by a drink or two. But on a recent Monday afternoon, as a couple of buddies and I made our way to the St. Andrews, a Scottish bar and restaurant on West Forty-fourth Street in New York City, I knew that few such getaways had ever been imbued with as much purpose and promise.
After all, it's not every day that one gets to sample a $1,000 bottle of scotch.
We set up at a large round table—neatly arrayed with tasting glasses and decanters of spring water—toward the back of the sparsely occupied bar, awaiting Ronnie Cox, self-described "ambassador and man of a thousand jobs" for Glenrothes.
No longer the family-owned distillery it was in his great-grandfather and grandfather's day, Glenrothes (founded in 1879), located close to Scotland's famed River Spey, is now owned by Berry Bros. and Rudd. And on behalf of B. B. R., Ronnie was generously offering us a taste of the Glenrothes Single Cask 1979, a single malt limited to 519 signed and numbered bottles to be sold exclusively in the U.S.
Before Cox arrived, the 1979 was set on the table. A simple, juglike affair colored a deep mahogany by its contents, the bottle rested in a somewhat elaborate wooden armature, complete with a drawer containing a booklet on the whisky's provenance. Its label, written by Glenrothes Malt Master John Ramsay, was numbered 43, its place in the sequence of 519.
Ronnie arrived several minutes later after a brisk walk from his hotel, and markedly upped the energy in the room. He was dressed in full Highland regalia, including a kilt in muted birch-leaf greens, faded reds, black, and blue, and a bright yellow tie and red woolen knee-highs. Manicured and polished, Cox wore his garb with a kind of refined elegance, more like a dignitary or diplomat than a distiller.
At the outset, Ronnie proudly acknowledged that he likely has "more alcohol than blood" in his system—an inherited condition, since he comes from at least six generations of whiskey producers. Indeed, his great-great-great-grandfather was nabbed twice by the British—first for illegal malting, then illegal distilling—and fined the equivalent, in today's dollars, of roughly $150,000.
For centuries the English tried all sorts of measures to prevent the Scots from producing quick (i.e., un-aged) vats of malt whiskey. According to some historians, even the introduction of tea in the eighteenth century was an attempt to dilute the concentrated flow of whiskey. But the Scots kept finding clever ways to produce "the creature," as Ronnie calls it, sometimes hiding their pot stills in caves or shuttling them from location to location in an elaborate game of hide and seek. And they kept drinking their beloved usquebaugh, or "water of life," often starting in the morning as part of a well-balanced breakfast.
