Whiskey and Philosophy
I am sure "self searching" used to mean something very different. Now, of course, it means banging one's own name into Google and hoping for plaudits. In a recent bout of "self searching", I found a nice mention of the essay I wrote for Whiskey and Philosophy, which was published by John Wiley & Sons last year.
I decided not to publicise that book at the time it hit the shelves because Wiley were so laughably miserly with their pay and because they did not inform me of this until after I had spent days writing for them.
Enough time time has passed for the pain to dull and for my ego to get the better of me. Farenheit173.com liked my essay:
That said, the best essays in the book are excellent: Andrew Jefford's, Ian Buxton's and David Wishart's essays on whisky's history, provenance and authenticity; Ian Dove and Burnham/Skilleås on whisky tasting notes and Chris Bunting on Japanese whisky.
(As did the editors, who I do not blame for the wage niggles. And these two chaps on Amazon: 1,2. One of them even elevated me to Messianic status, which seemed to be taking things a bit far.)
Almost makes me feel it was worth my while writing the damn thing!
Comments
Full review at:
http://www.maltmaniacs.org/malt-115.html#2009-34
But here's an excerpt:
“Chris Bunting, for example, explaining the skyrocketing popularity of Japanese whisky, posits that "By so tightly defining what it means to be an authentic Scotch-style whisky: specifying the ingredients it must contain, focusing the attention of consumers on specific locations (rather than on the much vaguer and more defensible blended Scotch brand names that the Japanese were vainly trying to imitate in 1918), and, most important, by allowing a priesthood of experts to be built around this complex idea of what is authentic, the Scots may have made top-quality Scotch whisky production portable. The consumer, taught to focus not on a familiar brand but on a highly codified set of criteria for authenticity (e.g., malted barley only, a single distillery, long aging, and so on) and to listen to experts extolling certain abstracted qualities in the whisky, can be forgiven for concluding that it hardly matters whether the whisky was made in Hokkaido or Speyside."”
Davin ;-)