Matt Bailey

We often like to say that the flavour in whisky can teleport you to another place in time from the flavours. It might be a certain lolly you had as a child that you suddenly recall from nosing a Sweet, Fruity & Mellow bottling, or a day on the beach with your family as a kid with an ice cream from tasting a Spicy & Dry cask. There’s another flavour element that a whisky can take you on a journey with: people.

Now before you go out and start licking strangers looking for that elusive panel tasting note, let me make it clear: I mean the people you once perhaps enjoyed a dram with. For me, one of my earliest memories in whisky was with my grandfather. Well, ‘adopted’ family grandfather named Richard Meale. He was a prominent Australian classical composer who shaped operatic and chamber music in the 1960’s and 70’s into a lot of what we see today, alongside his contemporaries like Nigel Butterly and Peter Sculthorpe.

The year was around 1999 and I wasn’t quite 18 yet (but for the purposes of responsible storytelling, let’s just assume I was). It was New Year’s Eve and I was out being a teenager in some local park with some friends. Likely a night of some cheap rum and getting up to no good while trying to find a nice vantage point for some fireworks. Maybe even getting a bit excited about the impending Y2K in a few hours to bring the world to a collapse, digitally at least. Had we known it would be one cash machine in Ireland that briefly malfunctioned instead of Amazon and Google collapsing, we’d be in a different mood.

Later that night I returned home to see Richard’s light still on around 2am. He was a night owl after all. I knocked on his door, and he passed me a glass of Johnnie Walker Black Label. He was feeling particularly festive, it seemed, as he gave me about 200mls of it. We chatted and laughed, and I drank that Black Label like it was either beer or water - straight down the hatch. Big mistake. The heartburn I had that night was immense. I felt like I was about to die. But to spend the spooky hours of the night right at the start of 2000 with my grandfather and talk a bit of nonsense was more than worth it.

To this day, I still associate Black Label with Richard, but also think how far I’ve come, how far we’ve all come since Y2K, and how we celebrate even small moments. I’m not usually one for looking back and prefer to look ahead, but sometimes a bit of nostalgia and associating people with a whisky is a nice feeling.

I hope you find a moment this Winter to sit down, relax, take a moment out of your hectic lifestyle just to open a special single cask, share it with someone special, and let the memories collect of not just where you shared it, but with the people you had the chance to.

Richard Meale

Matt Bailey ~ SMWS National Ambassador