Drink
The most wonderful thing about J & B Rare is the way it looks in the glass. Like liquid amber, with its pale, honey-like translucence, it seems all innocence. Which is why it has been the favoured whisky of persecuted husbands since its creation in the early 1930s. Only the barest amount of caramel colour is added to slightly darken the blend. No scolding wife would guess that the light-coloured Scotch nestling amongst the ice cubes was undiluted.
So much the better for pretending not to drink with, as Graham Greene's Maurice Castle realised in The Human Factor. "He always bought J&B because of its colour - a large whisky and soda looked no stronger than a weak one of another brand."
In real life Greene, as my uncle points out, probably couldn't have cared a sod. A depressive who drank heavily to overcome the bleakness that so often descended on him, he was a true man of alcohol. On ship on the way to his Sierra Leone posting during the second world war, he would drink a bottle of champagne in the mornings to help him recover from the libations of the night before. Once settled in Freetown, where he was working for the secret service, he complained in letters to his family that there was nowhere to drink and nothing to drink, only "bad bottled export beer of uncertain kinds, Scotch if you are lucky, gin, which is a depressant, and South African wines that make you feel like hell the next morning". He had to work really hard to preserve his high drinking standards.
I feel quite cheated. It is terribly dull being young these days. There are no rules to break and hence no cause for secret manoeuvres, clever ruses or cunning plots. Why, I can drink just what I like in whatever quantity I choose. The limits of my alcohol intake are defined by the limits of my hangover pain-threshold, nothing more.
But even without the enticement of this literary lineage J&B must be worth a few shots. Blended from 42 individual whiskies (36 malts and six grains), it is soft, smooth and strangely compelling. No wonder Maurice Castle drank it by the quadruple measure. It tastes good - a little smoky, which I like. My cousin, a veritable whisky connoisseur, is less impressed, perhaps because she is wedded to single malts.
I feel a creeping sense of guilt. Whisky should be drunk deep into the night, poured from bottles smuggled from a secret store in the cellar. It is a drinker's drink. We are doing it an injustice keeping it quite flagrantly in the kitchen, opening it for nothing more than a quick tipple and a frivolous gossip (to be proper, we should sit silently over a long game of chess until disturbed by the breaking of dawn) after our respective nights out.
Worse, the wine merchant that makes it has a magnificent history. Giacomo Justerini was a romantic Italian who came to England in the 18th century in hot pursuit of a pretty opera singer to whom he had lost his heart. She spurned him but he stayed on and set up a drink company with a man called George Johnson. George died in 1785 (his sedan chair was overturned by a rampaging horse), leaving his share of the company to his grandson, who eventually retired and sold it to one Alfred Brooks. Justerini & Brooks was born and the worst glitch in its 250-year history occurred during Prohibition, when export sales to America fell sharply.
The Americans can't have been trying hard enough to drink. Perhaps they lacked the sense of adventure so dear to the hearts of the British, or the sly spy tactics of Greene and his ilk. But my cousin and I have them aplenty. As we pour ourselves a second tumblerful apiece and restore the J&B to its more rightful place on the bookshelf between a Russian language manual and a Greene thriller, we know we are breaking the rules, just as we ought. Whisky is a man's drink, ours only in the stronghold of our own home as the hands of the clock move slowly past midnight and snow falls outside the window.
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