Drink - Victoria Moore joins an exclusive and spirited club
When Boris Yeltsin was in hospital undergoing heart surgery four years ago, Russian officials, beavering away to put his papers in order in case he did not survive, found something that puzzled and worried them. Why did the Russian president hold the deeds to land in deepest Tennessee? The Jack Daniel's distillery received a stern phone call from the Russian embassy demanding an explanation. It was simply given. Yeltsin is a member of a very exclusive club, the Tennessee Squires, whose members have one thing in common: a passion for the amber whiskey famously beloved of hard-living rock stars, from the Gallagher brothers to Janis Joplin. To be a member of this rarefied fan club, one must be nominated by another member - hence its exclusivity. In return for loyalty to Jack Daniel's, the Lynchburg distillery endows each of its Tennessee Squires with one precious square inch of the land that it owns (though this is not registered with the county). And this is what caused all the fuss.
Jimmy Bedford, the sixth in a line of head distillers that began in 1866 with Mr Jack Daniel himself, tells me this story in a soft voice with a Southern twang so pronounced, his words seem to bend acrobatically back on themselves, the first letter virtually touching the last. Bedford holds the future of Jack Daniel's in his olfactory glands. It is his responsibility to ensure that the drink never changes from one month or one year to the next, to ensure that it carries the same flavours and aromas through his reign into the future, to preserve a perpetuity of Jack Daniel's. The finished article should smell of caramel, toasted oak and bananas. "There's no deep, dark secret to making Jack Daniel's," says Jimmy, "only that our charcoal mellowing process sets it apart from other bourbons and that the flavour never changes." Then he adds, gently earnest, "I'm prowd to be part owf it."
And no wonder. Jack Daniel's drinkers have pedigree. Yeltsin is not the only world leader to be partial to a snifter: Jimmy explains that he once spotted the former president of the US George Bush at the World Trade Centre in Beijing. He approached him with the words, "I've been a friend of yours for many years." Bush leant across, saw the Jack Daniel's logo embroidered on to Jimmy's shirt and rejoined, "And I've been a friend of yours, too."
Only last week, on a trip to England, Jimmy met Roger Moore's son at his London restaurant, Hush, and was told that the James Bond star's favourite drink is a tot of Jack Daniel's. "Aam going to send him a shirt," confides Jimmy. And Harrison Ford is a Tennessee Squire, as was Frank Sinatra, who used to claim he wanted to be buried on his square inch of distillery land.
The Squires probably drink more whiskey than Jimmy himself, who does all his testing with his nose. "I never swallow and I very seldom put it in my mouth." But when he does order it (on the rocks, before or after a meal, and he makes it last) barman beware if you don't give him the Jack Daniel's he asks for, because Jimmy can spot an interloper at ten paces. "We went to Boston six months back and ordered drinks," he says. "When they came we knew straight away they weren't Jack Daniel's. My colleague sniffed it and said, 'Why, this is Johnnie Walker Black.' And it was."
They've been making Jack Daniel's for 134 years now, and no one can say it hasn't earned its place in the pantheon of world history. But one thing troubles me. I put it to Jimmy that, given his reverence for the drink, and given that his existence is dedicated to its flavour, it must really chew him up that 60 per cent of Jack Daniel's is drunk adulterated, as Jack and coke. He smiles. "Well, when I first heard that, I really kinda bristled up," he admits slowly. "But since then I've decided there's more ways to skin a cat."
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