Photo by Cynthia Larsen
Is Bourbon On the Rocks?
A Christmas Eve installment of Booze You Can Use!
By Ed Goldman
In addition to getting distilled, bourbon is getting diluted, according to business reports.
I don’t mean someone’s stealing into the country’s bourbon warehouses at night, spilling out a quarter of the contents of each bottle and replacing it with water. As you know, that practice is a specialty reserved for sports pubs and hosted cocktail receptions.
It’s noir or never
I mean that the U.S. bourbon market has been slumping as noticeably as the guy at the end of the bar who came in at 10 a.m. and plans to remain until someone tells him to move his school bus out of the handicap space.
Put another way, bourbon may well be on the rocks.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, “A sluggish Kentucky bourbon market is taking its toll on distilleries, derailing a turnaround plan for one spirits maker and driving others to bankruptcy.” As if to throw more alcohol in the fireplace, the Journal adds, “Kentucky’s bourbon market is oversaturated with inventory at a time when some consumers are moving away from spirits.”
I find this incomplete reporting. If you’re going to write that “some consumers” are turning their backs on booze, how about naming them? We probably know who they are already. They’re the longtime sots now in recovery who decline your offer of a drink by saying in a voice much louder than needed, “No thank you. I’m sober 14 weeks, four days, five hours and 32 minutes.” (Improper responses to that would include: (a) “But who’s counting?” (b) “Does that include workdays and weekends?” and (c) “I’ll drink to that!”
What concerns me about the news is that bourbon, a brown liquor I can take or leave, is affecting a clear liquor I can take and enjoy, almost nightly in fact: vodka.
Stoli vodka, whose price competes weekly with Smirnoff vodka where I shop (thus dictating my preference on that visit) also has its own bourbon, Kentucky Owl. The company tried to use its 35,000 barrels of it as collateral when applying for bankruptcy protection not long ago, but the judge rejected that, quoting a lawyer who said that to accept those as the loan payment would be akin to “being asked to catch a falling knife.”
Wow, they talk tough in the world of hard liquor, don’t they? If this were a lovely white wine, the remark might have equated accepting bottles of that as payment to “being bitch-slapped silly by particularly aromatic pink peonies.”
Bourbon’s always been a problem child for people who claim to be Hooked On Phonics, a sort of audial opioid.
For example, if you remember the street-bazaar scene in “Casablanca” in which Humphrey Bogart semi-apologizes to Ingrid Bergman for having said nasty things to her the night before, note that he blamed the bourbon he was all-but-siphoning into his neck for his bad attitude. Then note that he pronounced it BORE-bun.
Well excuse me all to hell, Bogie, but not even the French pronounce it like that. Oh, some of them may say BOOR-bun (like Boo! with an r batting cleanup), but that’s just to show they can. The French, they are a funny race.
Bourbon is sometimes the Rodney Dangerfield of firewater. When private social clubs hold “cigar evenings,” you rarely see them advertise that the stogies will be paired with bourbon: it’s almost always Scotch. Or, if the place is slightly more refined, port. But never white wine, even if it smells like aromatic pink peonies.
As I said, I’m not a big fan of Bourbon but I kind of like knowing it’s in the world. In the old black-and-white movies I watch which are set in Art Deco apartments the size of gymnasiums, or the westerns in which gnarly hombres go into a saloon, order a drink, then say, “And leave the bottle,” I’m pretty sure it’s not a bottle of Pinot Grigio. It’s bourbon—or rye or corn whiskey or some other era-appropriate rotgut. And since I’m a suggestible movie lover, I’ll want to know I can pause the film, jump in my car and head to an open-late liquor store and buy even a pint of something similar. Then, in the quiet of my TV room, I can hold up the glass, curl my lip and say, “Here’s looking at me, Kid.”
By the second glassful, I may even be willing to catch a knife.
Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).
