Jimmy--you are a thread-beast!
I could write forever about this one. Luckily for all of you, I don't have forever. So I will have to take one memory at a time. Actually, I will bust a couple right here.
My Great-aunt Grace, who never married and was a schoolteacher in Memphis liked scotch. The rest of the family found this curious, but served her scotch when she came to visit. In the kitchen when we were serving it up, my parents said that Scotch tasted like "burnt tires." This was a very vivid image for a 10-year-old. Especially thewhole mystique about her unique preference--compared to my Grandfather only drank bourbon Old Fashioneds.
About 1970 I was a high school sophomore spending a summer as a hanger-on with the Marquette University summer program in Germany. The first day we arrived (flying Icelandair into Luxemburg) we got to Trier, and though I was
15 I took a few of the college students to a kneipe, and we all enjoyed a round of beer. They were blown away that they could actually go into a bar and order beer--and blown away by how good it tasted. Later in the tour one student got his hands on his favorite scotch: VAT 69. He was so incredibly enthusiastic about VAT 69, and how much flavor it had. I tried it. It was o.k.
When I went to college there was a dorm-mate who was a touch on the sophisticated side, who loved Cutty Sark. So I tried some. It was very nice.
When I moved to Scotland in 1979, we would go to the Red Beastie in Forres. People there drank their scotch neat. I started doing that too. But one day at the Culbin Sands near Findhorn village, they had a couple of single malts. The Macallan tasted so incredibly rich. The Talisker tasted too strange. After that, though, it was single malts whenever I could afford it. When I couldn't, it was the Famous Grouse.
A couple of times we would head over to the "big city" of Elgin, where there was the Gordon & McPhail retail shop, with shelf after shelf of malt. Totally droolworthy, totally beyond my price range. But a pub down the street had a bottle of Linkwood open. That was a pretty little dram!
Before taking an overnight train to London, I stopped at a local shop to buy a miniature. They had a Macallan 43%, and a Macallan 56%. I asked the shopkeeper which one to get. He said that both were good, but with a wink suggested that I should get the 56% if I wanted just a bit more moxie.
I'll never forget my first Springbank, either. I had it in Oban, just as we were leaving Scotland for good in 1981, after two years there. This was a pretty, almost birch-woody dram--truly enchanting.
I would say that 99.99946% of the single malt I have had in my life, I have had since that time.