Five Things I have Learned this Week #11

1 — The words for generic spirits types are not particularly well defined. If someone offers you a glass of Gin, Rum, Vodka or Whisky (or even Whiskey), you probably have a vague idea of what you’re about to drink. But in reality, there are no global standards guarding them.

Rum is made from molasses, except when it’s made from sugar cane juice. It’s made in pot stills, although it’s more common to make it in column stills. It’s sometimes matured, sometimes not — and sometimes includes added post-distillation flavourings. And sometimes it’s called Cachaça. Vodka is made from wheat, or potatoes, or peas…or pretty much anything. And has nothing added to it, except one brand that adds bison grass. Gin is vodka flavoured with a relatively standard set of botanicals, but should taste of juniper. It even has an EU-level classification requiring it to be “predominantly flavoured with juniper”. Though considering what’s on the market at the moment — that rule is not being enforced and technically there is an awful lot of flavoured vodka out there being sold as gin.

And whilst Scotch Whisky has very specific rules about how it’s made, whisky as a global product does not. In India, whisky is made from sugar, not malted barley. And in Japan — you can make a spirit from rice fermented with Koji, a kind of mould also used to create sake and soy sauce that, as long as it’s above a 40% ABV, can be sold as Whisky in the USA.

You might think the Government’s job here is to step in and provide oversight. But which Government, and to which standard? Some progress has been made globally on electronic charging standards, but when it comes to food labelling — it’s every country for themselves.

What’s perhaps most interesting about this is it entrenches the power of large, global brands. If you can’t trust the Government to define food labelling standards, let along police them, then you instead place your trust in brands. A Government doesn’t really care about retaining you as a customer — emigration is a blunt tool as a protest against food labelling — but a company does.

The importance of the brand as the ultimate arbiter of quality is easily seen when those companies change things. For example, some Scotch Whisky brands have experimented with removing age statement editions from their line ups (a shortage of older Scotch created supply problems) only to backtrack after a (predictable) backlash from otherwise loyal consumers.

2 — Even when you have a category that is better protected, it can get confusing. Bourbon has legal protection (and rules) inside the US, but theoretically you could produce and sell something called bourbon outside of the US with no ramifications.

And of course, the widest known bourbon brand (Jack Daniels) isn’t bourbon at all, but Tennessee Whiskey, itself governed by a set of rules similar, but not identical, to Bourbon. The key difference being that Tennessee Whiskey must be filtered using the Lincoln County Process, a maple charcoal filtration. The only distillery in Tennessee to eschew this process is Prichard’s, which, for unclear historic reasons, doesn’t charcoal filter, but is allowed to use the Tennessee Whiskey marque.

Jack Daniels was originally located in Lincoln County, but boundary changes in 1871 left it residing in the newly created Moore County. Today, only one distillery is actually located in Lincoln County itself. And it is, of course, Prichard’s.

3 — This year has been absolutely appalling for the French wine industry. Early warm weather followed by a harsh cold snap is disastrous for vines. The buds form and start to enjoy the warmth, before being killed off by the frost. There are various anti-frost defences, from lighting candles up and down the vines, to hiring helicopters to move air around. But estimates of the loss of this year’s harvest range from 50% to 90%, depending on the vineyard.

4 — Listening to some funk and soul music last week, I suddenly discovered one of my favourite tracks from my youth (everyone’s music taste is indelibly imprinted with the music of their teenage years — which is why the music of the late ’90s is easily the best ever created) is based on a sample.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised to be honest, but it makes me wonder how much of my (extremely limited) musical memory is based on a lie. If the main hook from “Lady (hear my tonight)” by Modjo is actually from “Soup for one” by Chic, is nothing sacred?

5 — The office you abandoned a little over a year ago is now full of rats. The u-bends in the toilets dried out and the rats made the calculated risk to crawl up the pipes and out of the bowl into a lovely warm, dry and deserted rodent paradise. They’ve been feasting on the crumbs and general detritus left over ever since.

This story is only medium interesting, and pretty horrifying if you don’t like rats. But it does give me a great opportunity to tell you my absolute number one favourite rat story. In the very early 20th Century, an egg farmer in lower Manhattan was confused by overnight egg thefts. He couldn’t work out how someone (or something) was breaking in without breaking any locks or windows, stealing eggs from the egg trays without smashing them and then escaping without leaving so much as the tiniest splatter of yolk on the floor.

So one night, he hid himself in the warehouse to spy on what was going on. In the middle of the night, he saw two rats enter via a hole in the wall. One crawled up onto an egg tray and found an egg. It then enveloped the egg with all four paws, hugging its body tight around the shell. The other rat then took the first rat’s tail in its mouth and dragged the rat and egg combo out along the floor and back to the hole from whence they came.