Don't call it a comeback

It's been here for years. I was getting ready to poke fun at the NY Times for running the exact same "rye is back" story the LAT ran a year ago,* but in looking for my post about the LAT rye comeback article, I saw that I'd also used the same LL Cool J reset the last time a newspaper called the Times ran a story on the "comeback" of  this spirit, which is a pantry staple in my household. So glass internet houses, so forth. Discovering that my reaction was almost exactly the same a year ago does make me me sympathetic to one of the challenges of writing about food for a newspaper -- they come out every day, year after year, and people will continue to want the same kinds of information, which may explain the high attrition rate in such jobs. (On a related note, I was recently able to confirm my hunch that it is impossible to write one of those obligatory Thanksgiving meal stories without having a serious Plath moment.)
So, instead of grumbling that East Coast Times is jacking stories from West Coast Times, and risk setting off some sort of Biggie/Tupac redux with food section editors, or grousing that so many of the ryes in the NYT article were stratospherically priced, I'll share a question the article raised. One of the more celebrated ryes in the NYT article is:

"Old Potrero Straight Single Malt, intense and grassy enough to be reminiscent of Irish whiskey, but with an overlay of peppermint, spice and fruit. Old Potrero comes from Anchor Distilling in San Francisco, an offshoot of the Anchor Brewing Company, which lovingly recreates historic whiskey styles, like this, aged in what Old Potrero calls the 19th-century style, using charred oak barrels."

Now, while Karl Malden certainly could have been running shine the way he drove around those Streets of San Francisco, it is not generally an area one associates with whiskey production.** On further reflection, however, so what? I could be wrong about this, and I am eager to be set straight by the any spirits geeks lurking out there. Whiskey is more industrial, or at least artisanal, than agricultural -- no one, to my knowledge, talks about specific crus of grains that produce special whiskeys. By analogy with wine, the art in whiskey seems to lie more in the vinting, than in the grape, or the terroir. If this is the case, is there any special reason why such a fetish is made of the location of the distillery? Evidently, the legal requirements governing what can be called "Bourbon" concern grain proportions, rather than any kind of region, but in the public imagination, there seems to be a strong connection between place and brand for American whiskeys. I'd welcome any explanation available for this seeming paradox.

*Lede here -- or you can buy it from the archive -- I'm not gonna.

**If the laws of conservation of mass applied to culture, a still in SF would mean that Alice Waters would have to become a character in Snuffy Smith.

Comments

[max]

Thank you. The guy next to me on the bus was reading the Times, and I was afraid I would have to read it in order to make fun of it.

Nexis only has 73 articles on "rye whisky" in the past 2 years.

(I suspect that in this case the location fetish has more to do with consumption than production.)

[Rose's Lime]

In terms of proof miles, economics have always favored local distribution of beer and global distribution of spirits. Turn your grain into beer and it's going to make it from Lancaster to Philly, tops. Turn it into Whiskey and you can send it round to world pretty cheap. This why up until recently, every major city had its own lunchbucket brewery and you never saw Stroh's east of the Rockies.

What American Whiskeys are there beyond Bourbon and Rye? Does McGillicutty's count? I think all the geographic connections are manufactured by marketing-savvy micro-breweries.

A lot of it is economics too... there's a lot of incentive to gain the monopoly on Sugar Cane purchasing on any given island. Running the still is capital intensive too and so there's typically one rum distillery per island of the Carribean.

[Addison]

Well what producer of beverage alcohol would knowingly deny that terroir or some form of it exists in their product? Of course liquor people do go to great great lengths (lots of genetic work for example; proprietary relationships with farmers) to get good raw grain, so source and growing and handling are crucial. As for rye crus--I can't imagine anyone really says "I only use the rye grown on the south facing slope between 100 and 200 meters." Anyway, I've never heard of it. But in the Old World, where titles are still honored and every regent has a designated herb-strewer, it is considered right and proper to use, for example, barley grown along the stream that also serves as water source (water being believed by many to be as important as the barrel). So there is a reason that there were ryes called Monongahela, and the materials (as with the above mentioned lunchpail beers) came from those places. PA and Maryland were the bottom of the rye belt; corn dominated futher south. Today we use these traditional hooks to locate the thing geographically and in our porous consumer processing brain stems. If Alice Waters makes poi in Berkeley, would Jermeiah Tower eat it? Bad example. Does Yuengling ship water etc to their Florida plant to ensure that the product tastes right? Would the Sumerian beer made at the U Penn Museum EVERY DAMN YEAR taste good to Gudea? God I hope not.

Hey wait. Jean-Marc Dabadie is incredibly persnickety about his grains. Will look it up.

[Addison]

DAMMIT. Jean-Marc DAUCOURT