Pursuits: Whiskey has made an astonishing comeback

I don’t know if you ever saw The Stud. It came out in the late Seventies and must be high up on any list of

the worst movies of that decade. It was based on a slim book by Jackie Collins and made as a vehicle for her sister, the already ageing Joan, who had yet to find success

across the Atlantic wearing the world’s most heavily-padded shoulders on Dynasty.

 

   The plot revolved around Joan (naturally) and her toy boy (the stud of the title) who was a working class restaurant manager used by the glamorous Joan for sexual purposes.

 

   The film is so bad that if you can find it on the net you should check it out: it is horrifically watchable. But the one line of dialogue that I do remember continues to come back to me again and again, so many decades later.

 

   The scene in question features our hero, the stud (played by Oliver Tobias who the unkind Joan later said off camera was short and hairy) and is meant to show up his super-confidence in his gaucheness. Asked what he will drink, the stud asks for Scotch but wants it with Coke.

 

   Cue, shock and horror all around.

 

   “It’s a waste,” somebody says reproachfully.

 

   “Yes,” says Oliver Tobias, “of Coke.”

 

   Now, I may be romanticising this slightly because its years since I (or anybody else, for that matter) saw the movie, but it seemed to me to capture the class divide in the Western world in that era. Scotch was an old man’s drink. Young people found trendier alternatives. When they did bother with Scotch, they drowned it in Coke. And they did not feel obliged to apologise for what older people saw as heresy. (At the Beatles headquarters in the Sixties, the drink of choice was Scotch and Coke – on those occasions, I guess, when Paul McCartney was not smoking dope and John Lennon wasn’t shooting up.)

 

   For many, many years, Scotch remained the fuddy-duddy drink, forever associated with old fogeys. Young people drank tequila. Hell, the Eagles even wrote a song about a popular cocktail of their era, the Tequila Sunrise. Or they drank vodka, which became so cool that a dry martini ceased to consist of gin and vermouth but became a way of drinking vodka almost neat with only the faintest hint of vermouth

 

   The younger options remain. Tequila still has a dedicated following, fed by such shows as Entourage, in which a real-life tequila found fame as a drink that the hero was expected to endorse. Vodka is still a favourite at bars everywhere and a natural mixer for cocktails. Plus, it helps that James Bond puts vodka in his martinis. When Daniel Craig ordered a Vesper Martini in the film of Casino Royale, he stuck to a recipe originated by Ian Fleming and as a consequence, sales of Lillet, a French liquer, that is one of its constituents, went through the roof.

 

   But over the last decade, something strange has been happening to the whiskey market. White spirits may retain their popularity but whiskey has made an astonishing comeback. It’s still not a teenager’s drink or one that is favoured by new drinkers (though Jack Daniels, an American whiskey, has successfully packaged itself as a rock and roll drink and Wild Turkey, another American product, seems to survive entirely on Keith Richards’ patronage.)

 

   But, among what used to be called yuppies, whiskey has suddenly become trendy again. What’s more, there’s a new kind of whiskey snobbery. If you hang around in bars, then you will have encountered the malt whiskey bore. This is the sort of fellow who takes pride in drinking only the most expensive single malts and believes that he is partaking in some ancient empire ritual.

 

   The malt whiskey bore is only partly correct. Yes, single malts have been around for yonks but commercial marketing only began around 1963 and the malt whiskey explosion is largely a 1990s phenomenon.

 

   The bulk of the whiskey market has always consisted of the blended segment: whiskies made by blending several malts and grain whiskies. Each brand develops its own blend and year after year, the master blender is charged with recreating the same taste for every bottle.

 

"It was something that the British taught us to drink. So it is only appropriate that in the 21st century the British whiskey industry should be kept afloat by the money spent by Indian drinkers."

   In India, the whiskey market has gone from being dominated by such brands as Vat 69 (rarely seen now but a great favourite of smugglers in old Hindi movies) to becoming Johnny Walker country. It used to be said, in the early 1990s that more Johnny Walker Black Label was consumed in India than was produced in Scotland. This was because local bootleggers would manufacture bogus Johnny Walker Black and sell it in the grey market. There is a story to the effect that the Taj Mahal Hotel decided, in the late 80s, to procure supplies of Johnny Walker from a variety of sources, including the city’s top smugglers and the duty-free shop at Bombay airport. The hotel sent all the bottles to Scotland and asked the manufacturers of Johnny Walker to check which one was authentic.

 

   The reply shocked the Taj. Every bottle was a fake. This even included the bottle bought at the duty-free shop. Apparently, when excise authorities seized supplies from bootleggers they sent them off to ITDC, to sell at its duty-free shops. Because the smugglers never let on that the whiskey they were selling was made in Ulhasnagar or thereabouts, this bootlegged product was sold to credulous travelers as the real thing.

 

   One consequence of India’s liberalisation is that the real Johnnie Walker is now freely available in much of the country. The company now estimates that only about 15 per cent of the Black Label drunk in India is of dubious origin. The rest of the whiskey is genuine and it continues to fly off the shelves despite its relatively high price.

 

   But the blended whiskey market has now become so complicated that I find it hard to keep up with the new brands and product extensions. Take Johnnie Walker, for instance. We all know about Red Label (best enjoyed with Coke and I didn’t even have to sleep with Joan Collins to come to that conclusion) and Black Label (long the elite’s choice of whiskey). But there’s also Gold Label, a cognac-like variety that seems to have been created with the Asian market in mind. There’s Double Black, which is a more intense version of normal Black Label. There’s Blue Label which is the premium blend, made from the finest whiskies available. And there’s George V, which is a Blue Label made in the style of the 1930s, which means that it is a more assertive spirit that fills your mouth with flavour while simultaneously emptying your wallet with alacrity. (It costs around $1000 a bottle.)

 

   Frankly, I’ve stopped keeping up with all the Johnnie Walker brand extensions. I have no clue what Green Label is. And I have still to understand the point of Platinum Label, which was only launched a few months ago.

 

   But last week, at a whiskey dinner organised by Johnnie Walker, I made three interesting discoveries. The first is that if you put a bottle of Gold Label in the freezer and then drink the whiskey very cold, it had a nice viscosity and a honeyed sweetness. The second was that Johnnie Walker has now become the Moet et Chandon of whiskies, a global product whose sales keep increasing.

 

   But it was the third discovery that really intrigued me. Guess what Johnnie Walker’s largest market is?

 

   It’s India.

 

   And this is a country where the vast majority of the population can’t even afford Scotch and drinks disgusting IMFL whiskey which is made by artificially colouring molasses spirit with caramel and then adding synthetic whiskey flavour to it.

 

   What happens when more Indians graduate to the upper middle-classes and start ordering Scotch rather than some dodgy IMFL brand? When that comes to pass – as it surely must, sooner rather than later – one new statistic may emerge: more Johnnie Walker Black Label will be consumed in India than in the rest of the world put together.

 

   I guess this is a good thing. Indians never really got into Tequila. Rum is still associated with cheap Old Monk-type spirits. Vodka is used mainly by people who want to get drunk. And gin is too old-fashioned for the new generation.

 

   That leaves whiskey, the drink of our fathers, grandfathers and their friends. It was something that the British taught us to drink. So it is only appropriate that in the 21st century the British whiskey industry should be kept afloat by the money spent by Indian drinkers.