A Fly in Amber
By DeAnna Knippling
Copyright © 2011 by DeAnna Knippling
Published by Wonderland Press at Smashwords
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For Lee
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Table of Contents:
This is a story about a 100-year-old Scotch and why I was one of only two men to taste it.
In 1909, explorer Ernest Shackleton tried to reach the South Pole but failed. Oh, his expedition made it the furthest south of any expedition at the time, but they had to abandon the trek due to lack of food and other supplies, and Roald Amundson took the prize instead in 1912. On the reason why he gave up, Shackleton told his wife, “I thought you’d rather have a live donkey than a dead lion.”
In abandoning the expedition, Shackleton and his crew left behind Scotch (five crates) and brandy (two crates) under the floorboards in a small hut in the Antarctic. The Scotch was made by Mackinlay and Co., a distillery founded in Leith, now a borough of Edinburgh.
Shackleton, an Irishman, had asked Mackinlay to provide the Scotch necessary for the expedition, and the company kindly obliged. The crates were discovered in 2006 but couldn’t be removed due to being frozen in ice. It wasn’t until 2011 that three bottles of Rare Old Highland Malt Whiskey had been delivered back to the current owners of Mackinlay & Co., distillers Whyte & Mackay.
Whyte & Mackay decided to try to analyze the blend and try to recreate the Scotch as a publicity stunt--the original recipe had been lost. It wasn’t just a bottle of Scotch, see, it was the chance to prove that even the Irish liked the spirits of the Scotch better than their own stuff. Of course Whyte & Mackay had to do it.
Because of the bad record-keeping at the time, they had no idea what kind of whiskey it would turn out to be, light or heavy or smoky or even blended. The stuff was shipped up to Invergordon, where the company’s laboratories were.
So where did I come in?
I’m a “nose,” that is, a chemical analyst. We, as a profession, like to claim that our business is a highly scientific endeavor, but get us together at a tavern, and we’re exchanging stories of our prowess at smelling--and tasting--the world’s most deadly chemicals in order to crack a formula. Most of us have worked under the table to break one company’s formulas or another, under the table, just for the challenge of it. And the money. More than a few of us have died of “mysterious” causes.
There’s not a one of us who smokes. And there isn’t a man jack among us--even the ladies--who doesn’t worship Scotch. Oh, there’s some of us as will profess a love of Irish or bourbon, but pull down a bottle of Lagavulin, and we’ll come out of the wordwork.
There were about fifty of us who had taken over the Chadwick Inn in Invergordon, all of us there to try to find a way to get a whiff of that Scotch. We raised toasts and called down curses upon the master blender in charge of the job, Patton Richardson, for hours, and it was nearing the end of a loud, stormy, and boisterous evening. The barkeep had kindly turned a blind eye on several transgressions, but he had just about run out of patience with us when the door opened, and Richardson walked in.
We stared up at him, pissed, all of us with the hopeless hope that he’d come to pick one of us to come out to the lab and work with him on the Scotch.
He was gray-haired and mustachioed and avuncular, wearing a plain gray suit with sweat-stains that had soaked clear through the arms of his jacket. He reached into his inside pocket and pulled out a test tube capped with cork. “Here it is, boys,” he said. “Two of the bottles broke, so we can’t be sure what we got was pure. But this is a bit of what we pulled out of the third.”
Ah, I should have known from the hell on his face what was coming, but I was too busy staring at that vial to notice or care. As were we all.
Old Tim Barney got hold of it first, being closest to the door. He prized out the cork, took a bald sniff, and--you should have seen the way his face crumpled into a wrinkled, teary mess. Weeping like a mother at her son’s funeral, he passed the tube to the girl on his right, Mary Fox. She specialized in artificial flavors and was right good at it, too.
She smelled it and thrust the tube away from her, covering her face with her other hand. Her shoulders shook, and not with laughter.
And so it went, around the room.
I have to admit, I was damned near dying of curiosity by the time that vial reached me. The room was a wreck of tragedy.
Richardson was watching me as I took the vial. As everyone in the nose business knows, I have a certain reputation as a specialist in beverages. I don’t like to put myself forward, but it was me who cracked the formula on a certain, world-famous soda--then turned around and added something subtle, an error or imperfection that would only come to the full, conscious awareness of another “nose,” but would nonetheless turn the tastebuds of anyone who drank it more than once or twice, when my employers tried to sell it as a rebranding of their own. It was all for the best, believe me, and we all knew it: my employers had a perfectly good formula of their own, and they could only hurt themselves by wandering off from it. But I digress. Those in the know knew mine was the nose that could solve the problem, if it could be solved.
I pulled the cork, cupped my hand over the opening, and deposited a handful of vapor at the base of my schnoz.
It was Scotch all right.
Peaty and fruity both, blended, and dark as a dehydrated man’s piss. There was something loveable in it, and it smelled a bit of rowan, which, in local mythology, was meant to help travelers from getting lost.
And something else. A smell so foul and yet so subtle that anyone but a nose would have missed it. A round, black, rotten-meat smell. I knew it well.
With all the eyes of the room on me, I tipped half of it out of the vial and into my mouth. Oh, yes. I knew that flavor well. But I have the talent of being able to damp out flavors when I don’t want to pay attention to them, and the Scotch that was left behind by the removal of that cockroach--for that’s what it was--was about as fine as I have ever been privileged to taste.