| Goodness Nose: The Passionate Revelations of A Scotch Whisky Master Blender. - Richard Paterson & Gavin D. Smith. |
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There he is. Slap bang on the front of the book jacket with the whole scenario reprinted on the cover. Immaculately suited, red pocket handkerchief, company tie, generous measure of whisky swirling within a crystal copita glass held at its base twixt thumb and forefinger at the true professional angle.
Welcome to the world of the whisky blender. To the world of Richard Paterson.
Whisky blending? Shouldn't be too hard. A bit like TV cooking, really, with a pinch of malt from this distillery, more from a few others, a goodly dollop of grain spirit - stir 'em all together and you've a recipe for a get-along scene, as the song said.
Rubbish! To become a master whisky blender takes, firstly, talent followed by years of head-down experience. Richard Paterson tells us everything - well, almost everything - about the art of blending and a great deal more about his world in this hardback he has co-written with Gavin D. Smith.
Their book, loaded with photographs plus a handy map at the start, is so informative that I have forgiven the publishers their pun. They have called it Goodness Nose: The Passionate Revelations Of A Scotch Whisky Master Blender.
And that passion stretches back three generations. Richard's grandfather was a coal merchant turned Glasgow whisky broker, his father also became a whisky broker and, after a short spell in the hotel business, Richard entered the industry, eventually joining Whyte and Mackay in 1970 and, in time, becoming their chief blender. In all, his career has spanned more than 40 years.
Such fascinating years! His book takes us on a journey through his life, and in so doing it traverses the landscape from Glasgow's Broomielaw to Campeltown and way out to the Isle of Jura. We flit from Angus to the Black Isle and Fettercairn and Invergordon. If there was a distillery around, Richard wasn't far away.
Like all good raconteurs Richard knows when to slip in the little oddities. Did you know that Mr Whyte and Mr Mackay both died of cirrhosis of the liver? What was skalk? And what did around 84 per cent of our whisky barrels used to hold? Bottom of the class if you said sherry!
Richard Paterson has been a master whisky blender for many a year now. But he has never forgotten his father's theory that 96 per cent of what you need to know about whisky is based on the colour and the nose. You taste it only if you are not sure of those two indicators.
But what is a blender? The whole answer is probably too complicated and subject to too many vagaries of storage and age and birthplace to deal with here. But this from Richard: "The principal objective of the blender has to be consistency . . . It is no use creating the finest blended whisky today if you cannot reproduce it tomorrow."
So that's why you take the taste of your favourite dram for granted. Generations of experience and sheer dedication ensure that you can.
This work, as I've said, isn't only about the blender's artistry. Indeed, Richard recounts one tale that concerns his father, who liked his dram. While recovering from an operation he began to show withdrawal symptoms.
His surgeon decided there was only one thing to do. He asked the nurse to set up a drip and soon a bottle of "Paterson's Best" was working wonders for the old man's symptoms. Richard says they called it "Nip on a Drip!" |
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