It's Memorial Day....Drink Your Booze
I'm in Modesto, spending the weekend at my parents' house, eating well and drinking my fair share in the warm, Central Valley weather. Even though I brought plenty of booze with me to sample, my parents have a large selection of wine and liquor (as do most people who have remained in contact with me since I started with K&L). After diving into some of the single malts I received in Scotland, I opened the cabinet under the sink where my mother stores most of her supply and found a treasure trove of great stuff: Camut 6 year old Calvados, High West Rendezvous, Labet Marc des Jura, No. 3 gin, Firelit Coffee liqueur, Kuchan's Walnut, even a freaking bottle of Berry Bros & Rudd Guadaloupe rum! "Wow!" I exclaimed, "You guys have some great stuff!" As if they had ordered it all on their own.
When my liquor cabinet gets too big to handle, I bring bottles to parties, pass samples off to friends, or load up a box for my parents in Modesto. I simply can't drink all of it. Between the wine, the beer, and the cocktails, it's not always easy to make it through dessert and on to the nightcap. When we visited France last January, this was a major concern of the brandy producers. People were becoming healthier, driving laws more stringent, so most were trying to drink less, and spirits were the sacrifice many French citizens were making. Looking through my parents' liquor supply, I realized that my generous donations to the Driscoll booze cabinet were presenting my mother and father with the same dilemma I had hoped to shed: when the heck are we going to drink all of this?
It's all so delicious! What should we drink right now? We only have enough room for one, so which will it be? I can't decide with all of these options! We ended up going with the Port Ellen because that's what I had planned for in advance. The 200ml bottle of the 25 year 5th Release had been a generous gift from some friends at Diageo and I had been looking forward to sharing it with my parents. No time to get sidetracked now. Stick with the original plan.
For anyone who loves to drink as much as I do, a well-stocked liquor supply can become a guilty burden from time to time – a neglected stepchild that gets overlooked. I know many of you out there drink only spirits, forging a fantastic relationship with brown water due to a lack of interest in red or white. For the equal opportunity drinkers like myself, we sometimes have to choose one or the other because work, exercise, or other responsibilities await us the following morning. That's why it helps to devise a plan for consuming your liquor. I have to decide in advance what we're going to drink and it aids my plan to eventually sap each and every bottle.
Memorial day is a fantastic excuse to drain something special. Look through your supply and use today as the special occasion you've been waiting for to open that Brora 30 you bought earlier this year. There's no point in saving this stuff because we all know we're all going to keep buying more (even though we promised ourselves we wouldn't). Every bottle we add to the collection presents another challenge to be conquered. I'm a minimalist. I don't want fifty open bottles in my house. I want ten to fifteen and I want to drain one before bringing in another. That's why we're drinking Port Ellen this weekend. I'm in Modesto, my family is here, they've been following the blog, they understand what makes it so special, so let's f-ing drink it. I might die tomorrow anyway.
Done. Happy. Satisfied. Guilt free. Phew.
-David Driscoll