Consuming Interest
Great Scotch
By LESLIE ADRIAN The single malts are a distinctive taste, per- haps not suitable for sedentary Sassenachs, except as a rare treat. The experts, who seem to get almost as much excitement 'nosing' as drinking, say that the noble malts should be taken like brandy, in a button. (Of course, the brandy-lovers deny this charge altogether, and opt for small glasses.) But they can be costly. A seventeen-year-old Macallan-Glenlivet goes for 60s., a Laphroaig from Islay (they say that the Islays are heaviest of all, and drunk by few south of the Border) can cost 55s., and Smith's Glenlivet (the only true Glenlivet, says Saints- bury), ten years old, 55s. 6d.
Be warned about great age, however. People in the blending business assert that after twelve to fifteen years the spirit turns 'woody' in the cask, and can have a tarry taste. Saintsbury says that he found fifteen-year-old whiskies slimy to the palate. So it is not necessarily great age that makes a great Scotch. The so-called de luxe blends are said to gain their fineness almost en- tirely from the number and quality of the malts and grains used to compound them. As many as forty different diStilleries can contribute to one blend, and the balancing of the 'lights' with the 'heavies' and maintaining uniformity in vat after vat has become a mystique. Even in the best blends (all of which cost 45s. 6d., against 41s. 6d.
for the ordinary blends) caramel has to be used to get an even colour. The use of old sherry casks continues, but the number is far from sufficient to colour the millions of gallons turned out every year.
The majority of well-known blends—Haig, Johnny Walker, White Horse, Vat 69, Black and White, George IV, Dewar's, etc.—belong to the Distillers' Company group. And the independents, like Grant's, Bell's, Ballantine's (now American- owned) and Teacher's, maintain the same price brackets, right down to the miniatures at 4s. 3d. This is undoubtedly a trade on which RPM has an iron grip, through the Scotch Whisky Asso- ciation. This fact makes the single malts more interesting because of their variability, but they are nearly all expensive, unlike the single grains, which are usually the standard blend price. They are seldom seen in England (Haig's Old Cameron Brig is perhaps the best known) and are fiery and harsh to the palates of those accustomed to mellower spirits. It is their pungent edge that lightens the flavour of the blended whiskies, and indeed most grain whisky is made for blending and not for direct sale.
Some fun can be had with miniatures (unless you're richer than I) detecting which of the blends belong to which end of the whisky spec- trum. Of Distillers' blends that I did my best to 'nose' in the expert fashion and range in order, I placed Haig at the heavy end, rising through White Label, Johnny Walker and Vat 69, to the more 'grainy' George IV, but the nuances are slight on the whole, though I dare say the pundits would not agree. The loyalties formed by whisky-lovers are seemingly far stronger than those of wine-drinkers. But on New Year's Eve most Sassenachs who can afford it seem to think they are bound to drink cham- pagne anyway.
'You know what you've got?' said the man from the London Electricity Board. 'You've got a creep on your meter.' A friend of mine who had complained that she thought her electricity bill was too high didn't quite know what to make of this, but it turned out in the end that the creep was making her meter register lower than it should, not higher, so that she was actually paying less than she should have been paying.
A lot of people have complained in this way recently, with the encouragement of the London Electricity Consultative Council, and figures which were issued recently show that we con- sumers nearly always underestimate how much electricity we use and that the Electricity Board is very rarely wrong in its figures.
The Consultative Council tested 230 meters during the past four years. Only two meters were found to be working to the users' disadvantage. District consultative committees have investi- gated 644 complaints during the past eight months. Of these, 579 were settled to the satis- faction of the consumer and the Electricity Board was seldom found to be in the wrong.
It is obvious that many of us forget, when we get what seems to us to be a heavy bill in the spring, how cold it was in January and how much electricity we used for heating when, for example, we were at home with 'flu.
The Consultative Council is going further than encouraging us to make complaints. It is con- sidering giving us more information--figures to show how much electricity is consumed, for example, by various electrical appliances—in order to help remove any remaining doubts we may have.
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