Old Lad

I never used to like whisky. My only experience of it when a child was as a relief for toothache. Hold a piece of cotton wool soaked in whisky against the offending tooth to deaden the pain. But the taste – ugh! This of course was one of my Gran’s remedies. Growing up in the 1950s alcohol was a rare thing to have in the house and usually only at Christmas. My Gran would buy a bottle of sherry, a bottle of port and a bottle of whisky, and it was not unusual for these to last virtually until next Christmas. And wine had not yet been invented!

So now in my seventies I like whisky particularly single malts. The whole whisky experience is surrounded by hype and marketing but there is still something mystical about the whole process of making whisky and obtaining the subtle differences in flavours. As the years have gone by I have learnt to distinguish tastes by the variety of casks the spirit has been matured in, the effect of peat smoke in the roasting of he barley. I have a bottle in front of me (Aberlour 12 year old as it happens) and on the bottle it says that it has been matured in American Oak and sherry casks and is rich and citrusy. Other bottles describe flavours of vanilla or baked fruit and the taste of the sea. But I struggle to experience some of these. Which is a good lead into one of the features of becoming an Old Lad – the fact that the sense of taste changes with age.

Like many people I experienced Covid but didn’t have the loss of sense of smell or taste. But I do find that many things I once enjoyed now appear bland and uninteresting. I liked avocados but now the trendy snack of “Smashed avocado on Sourdough toast” (Why smashed and not mashed by the way) is pretty tasteless. I need stronger tasting cheeses and have climbed up the ladder of cheddars from farmhouse to extra mature. I was out for dinner recently and decided to go for the Sunday Roast as an option. On the plate when it came was roast beef, roast and mash potatoes, roasted carrots and roasted parsnips together with a Yorkshire Pudding. Not only was it a beige meal, tome it tasted like a beige meal.

There is a reason for this. According to the Medline Plus encyclopaedia we have about 10,000 taste buds. These are programmed to sense sweet, salty, sour, bitter and a flavour called Unami – a taste linked with foods containing glutamate as in MSG used in Chinese cuisine. The number of tastebuds decreases as we age but from the age of 60 each individual taste bud shrinks. So sensitivity to the five tastes begins to decline. Ageing is also accompanied by decreased saliva production which also affects taste, as does a decline in the sense of smell. And we know that the ability to enjoy the taste of a food or drink is influenced by its smell as well.

So when I was younger I suppose my palate could not take the relatively strong flavour of whisky but now like the spirit in the barrel my palate has matured and can tolerate and even enjoy the flavour of a good malt. So that’s all good then. The future looks like a life of Venison, strong cheeses, robust wines and beers and favourite whiskeys. This getting older could be worse!