BOURBON
Jack Daniel’s
Maker’s Mark
Wild Turkey
Jim Beam

Critic’s Note: It is unusual for a food and drink critic to put a Postscript at the top of a review but since this Bourbon article was first written several things have happened.

First I have to add Booker’s to the list. In a new review I would put it above all the bourbons listed above. Extra smooth, great taste, but one possible problem: I discovered it is 63% alcohol. That’s 120 proof. You couldn’t have one and drive your car.

And just when I thought I had discovered the top of the range “ sippin’ whiskey” the bartender at Bubbles Bar at the new Botanical in Melbourne served me something else. The bar was new and they didn’t stock Booker’s – yet.

Instead he recommended a bourbon from the top, top shelf. A brand I had never heard of. It’s called Woodford Reserve. It’s made by Labrot & Graham and they have been distilling premium whiskey in Kentucky since 1812.

Woodford Reserve is their latest endeavour. My bottle is from Batch Three, Bottle Number 544.

Unequivocally the best bourbon I have ever drunk in my life. Even smoother than Booker’s and safer at 45% alcohol rather than 63%.

A classic treat. About $70 a bottle in your liquor store if they have it.

So back to the original Sir Hinchalot survey on that fancy liquor from bluegrass country.

Let’s get something straight from the start. I am not an expert on liquor. Or Moonshine. Or whatever kick-ass drinks have been bubbling away in illegal Stills behind the Okeefenokee Swamp.

I actually went about thirty years without drinking so-called “ hard liquor” at all. Apart from the occasional vodka-laced Bloody Mary.

But, for a change – and because of a lifestyle change – I want Sir Hinchalot to focus on booze this week. Hard liquor, hooch, firewater, giggle juice, lunatic soup. Call it what you will.

I was going to say I have had a forty-year association with alcohol – and haven’t always been a victor. But, if I were being honest, I would admit the connection goes back more than fifty years.

My first memory of alcohol is as a youngster in short pants sitting around the Formica-topped table on a Sunday as Mum cooked, and Dad waited to carve, the Sunday roast leg of lamb.

Dad would be having a beer and we would be allowed a shandy -- a Vegemite jar containing a mixture of very little beer and heaps of lemonade.

Unlike in many European families wine was never served at the Hinch table and I was nearly twenty before I tasted it.

Sure, we had stealthily sampled other exotic concoctions by stealing liqueurs from the parents’ glass-fronted, walnut-veneered “ cocktail cabinet”.

There was the obligatory frosted glass decanter with a scene of hunters and hounds etched into the glass and thimble-sized glasses.

There was crème de menthe for Mum which, from memory, tasted like minty mouthwash, and a yellow, custardy, drink called advocaat which the grown-ups mixed with Cherry Brandy and we irreverently referred to as Blood and Pus. As yucky kids would.

As I wrote in the Sunday Herald Sun: The Hinches couldn’t afford Scotch or gin or cognac. Dads drank beer. Sometimes to excess. The deadline of the early closing six o’clock swill sent them home sometimes the worse for wear. And the walls reverberated with alcohol-fuelled parental arguments especially when times were tough and the pay envelope exceedingly slim.

In a funny way illicit booze had a strong connection with my entry into journalism. And bars and journos seem to have been inextricably linked forever.

As a teenager about to leave high school in New Plymouth, New Zealand,

I used to live next door to Clem Cave, the News Editor of the local afternoon paper. I used to mow his lawns for pocket money and steal ghastly, cloudy, home brewed beer from his basement while he was entertaining friends upstairs.

The connection got me a cadetship on the Taranaki Herald and a career was born.

The relationship between words and booze has continued almost uninterrupted for more than forty years although I have stopped drinking several times for a month for a bet and several years ago gave up alcohol from Sunday to Friday.

It is true, and I cannot fudge or deny it, that at the height of my first 3AW career, when I was being paid a million dollars a year in the 1980s, I was drinking bottles and bottles of white wine a day. A counsellor would reject my justification but I still, diligently, got up at 5.17 a.m. every morning, was in the office by six, on air at 8.30 for three and a half hours and never called in sick.

My best booze storey from that period was when I went on air and impetuously declared I was giving up red wine. En passant I said I thought the histamines were knocking me around.

An instant, irate call, from Bob Mayne with the Wine and Brandy Corporation demanded equal time because I was full of s---.

He played his trump card. Said that there were no more histamines in red wine than there was in a banana. I pointed out that I didn’t eat 47 bananas in one hit.

In February 2003 I rediscovered how couthful spirits could be. I found not only the gin martini, which was the American national anthem when I lived there 35 years ago, but the “ Dirty Martini” now served at places like the Westin’s Martini Bar, Lotus in South Yarra and the Watergrill.

It’s a very dry martini with only a hint of vermouth and a couple of olives on a toothpick. What makes it different is the splash of brine from the bottle that the olives are stored in. Dirty, deadly, and as smooth as you could dream.

The other spirit I have re-embraced – eons down the track – is another American staple: Bourbon on the rocks with a splash of water.

In America I would only drink Jack Daniels Black Label. Green Label at a pinch. I mean, Jack Daniels won a Gold Medal at the World Expo in St. Louis I 1904. I flirted with Jim Beam and in this country the bourbon on the top shelf in recent years has been Maker’s Mark with its distinctive flow of red candle wax down the bottle.

After some top shelf research, I hate to say it but: John Laws, the man with the golden tonsils, is right. The best bourbon is Wild Turkey.

As smooth and as satisfying, as a ride on a Kentucky Derby champion.

And a postscript on martinis. I think it was Dorothy Parker who once said:

One martini is not enough, two martinis is enough, three martinis is not enough….

She was right. I’ll have a Wild Turkey on ice to discuss it barkeep.

March 7, 2003