This is my fortnightly Fortune Cookie column, which appeared in the December 5, 2013, edition of Mail Today. I have modified it slightly for the blog. Copyright: Mail Today Newspapers. Click on the link below and go to Page 21.
http://epaper.mailtoday.in/epaperhome.aspx?issue=5122013
THE Angels' Share is an expression whisky insiders have
laughed and agonised about forever, but few outside this charmed circle knew
about it till left-wing UK filmmaker Ken Loach's gritty comedy by the same name
got the coveted Jury Award at Cannes 2012.
 |
WHERE NO ANGEL FEARS TO TREAD:
Glenfiddich's vast barrel houses hold 125 million
litres of spirit at any given time, making them
contribute vast quantities to the angels' share |
What is the angels' share if it is not just the title of an
acclaimed film? In whisky brogue, it is the name given to the natural
evaporation of the distilled spirit maturing in casks at 2 per cent a year. The
subject made for a lively discussion over lunch with Ian Millar, Glenfiddich's
Brand Ambassador and Distiller, whose idea of the good life is having a dram of
his single malt with the kebabs and kormas of Dum Pukht. When seen in
percentage terms, the angels' share may not look like much, but when you account
for just Glenfiddich, a single malt that connoisseurs across the country know
very well, having 125 million litres of whisky at various stages of maturation at
any given time in its Leviathan barrel houses, the math will sink in.
Two per cent of 125 million litres is 2.5 million litres.
Now, if you consider that each drop of Glenfiddich we drink spends a minimum of
12 years in barrels (though the 18-year-old is the one that sells more), we are
talking about a loss of 30 million litres. In this day and age, when the supply
of single malts has fallen far behind the spiralling demand, this is seriously
bad news.
Millar reminded me that the duty on each 'litre of pure
alcohol' back home in Scotland is 20 pounds, so the angels' share does hurt badly.
And he belongs to the school of thought rooted in the belief that of the two ways
of making profits -- "sell your product for more or make it for less"
-- the second makes everyone happy. One of the many ways he can make Glenfiddich
for less is by cutting down the angels' share.
The stage, it seems, is set for a historic clash between
humans and the thirsty angels hovering over Scotland's distilleries. Interestingly,
in the course of my research I learnt that in hotter parts, such as India, this
loss could go up to 12 per cent a year -- angels, like politicians and babus,
are greedier on our side of the world!
It is precisely to cut these losses that the makers of Amrut,
India's first single malt whisky, have limited the maturation period to a maximum
of four years -- those are enough to cause a loss of about 50 per cent of the
whisky in its barrels. The classic story from the Amrut stable is that of the
single malt named Greedy Angels, which was released in April 2013. At the end
of the eight years that the whisky spent in two Bourbon casks, the evaporative loss
was so high that Amrut was left with less than a quarter of the 360 litres of
spirit maturing in the barrels.
Seeing my mental calculator working overtime, Millar said
that in the first two years, the spirit is volatile and eats into the wood of
the barrels -- the process gives the final product its colour and tannins. What
is lost in this period is crude spirit and Millar is "happy to lose what
we lose". After four or five years, the annual loss becomes less than 2
per cent. The Scotch whisky industry is working hard to contain it. Diageo, the
makers of Johnnie Walker, started packing casks in cling film, but it didn't
help. The only solution, says Millar, is to get coopers to play their part in
reducing the losses by tightening the casks and plugging physical holes. People
like Millar have to keep wracking their heads to make the world a headier place
both for their employers and for the growing tribe of single malt lovers.
AN OLD CHAMPAGNE HOUSE
FINDS NEW MARKET
IN A champagne market dominated by the big boys (notably, Moet
& Hennessy with Moet & Chandon and Veuve Clicquot and Pernod Ricard
with the F1 favourite, G.H. Mumm), it is heartening to find an old-worldly
French gentleman named Jean-Jacques Cattier speak excitedly about the Indian
foray of his family's champagne house. The Cattier family has been producing
grapes in its premier cru vineyards
for champagne houses since 1763, but it was Jean-Jacques's great-grandfather
who started making his own bubbly in 1918.
Since then, the champagne has been quietly going places, from
being the house pour of the Ritz London to finding a place on the first-class
menu of British Airways. To earn worldwide fame, though, it had to wait for Jay-Z,
who had just dumped Cristal after the presticgious champagne's French CEO made
racist comments on hip-hop artistes, to be seen with Cattier's Armand de
Brignac (Ace of Spades), packaged in a distinctive gold bottle with pewter, in
his video for the 2006 song, 'Show Me What You Got'.
From then on, Cattier has been the favourite of NBA hoopsters
and was most recently the official bubbly of the UEFA Cup 2012, but the gentle
and soft-spoken Jean-Jacques Cattier avoids showbiz talk and speaks instead of
Clos du Valin, a 2.2-hectare parcel of land that produces a single-vineyard
champagne, a rare occurrence in the world of bubbles, or about the Vintage 2005
champagne, now available in Delhi and Bangalore hotels, which has a third each
of the classical champagne grapes -- Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier
-- and is described as "generous and full-bodied".
I asked Jean-Jacques about the trend that defines champagne
consumption in our time. He said it was pairing champagne and cheese. A French
author has just written an entire tome on this exciting new subject. The
thought struck a responsive chord because I have maintained against odds that
wine and cheese are not the classic match (in fact, red wine and blue cheeses
are mortal enemies!). Being more acidic, champagne definitely open our taste
buds to the glories of cheese. The next time you plan a wine and cheese evening,
have champagne instead.
SUCH A FINE BALANCE BY DOM 2004
AS CHEF de cave (cellar master) of Dom Perignon, the
much-revered champagne named after the monk who's believed to have invented
bubbly by accident, medical doctor-turned-oenologist Richard Geoffroy must have a good
reason to give a vintage tag to a particular year. Especially if the rare honour
is being awarded for the third year in a row. A vintage year for a champagne signifies
a special year with perfect growing conditions -- in the case of Dom Perignon,
it has happened just 40 times since 1921. It's different for a still wine,
whose vintage merely indicates the year of harvest of the grapes that have gone
into making it.
Launched late last month in the city with a series of
exceptional champagne-paired dinners crafted by the chef with the stick-up
hairdo, Mickey Boite, at Le Cirque, Vintage 2004 stands out for the way it peels
off the champagne's austere personality, delicately balancing fruit and acid to leave a sweetish
aftertaste. It's a bubbly you'd expect from a moderate vintage marked by a
gentle August, with no unseasonal rain or hail to spoil the party, and a couple
of weeks of dry heat leading up to the September harvest. Geoffroy knows a
vintage when he sees one -- after all, he has been the cellar master since
1990.
HOW RED SHOULD BE YOUR TUNA SASHIMI?
A CHERRY RED tuna sashimi may be pleasing to the eye, but it
is most likely to have been treated with carbon monoxide to achieve the colour
people associate with superior tuna. When Sri Lankan-Japanese chef-restaurateur
Dharshan Munidasa, whose Nihonbashi restaurant is the first from his country to
make it to Asia's Top 50, pointed this out to a lively gathering of restaurateurs
and journalists at Indian Accent not long ago, he wasn't trying to repeat a
well-known fact. He was pointing instead to the challenges that chefs like him
face daily. People expect their tuna sashimi to look cherry red, so they
question the freshness of the fish served by Munidasa -- after all, it looks
just as it is supposed to, bright but not garish red. Cherry red sashimi is an
absolute no-no also because the colour, wrongly associated with freshness, is
used to mask stale fish.
