More Than Just Peat & Smoke: The Best Islay Single Malts

Photo by Vicky Wasik for Serious Eats

If you want to ignore my rambling and cut to the chase, here’s the link to the article. Enjoy!)

I wrote several articles for Serious Eats over a period of a couple of years. I recently went back to them (the articles, that is) and I’d forgotten how well most of them turned out and especially how nice they looked, thanks in large part to ace photographer Vicky Wasik. As I scanned my work, I wondered, why the hell did I stop writing for these guys? And then I remembered.

Serious Eats had (and may still have, for all I know) a policy that all bottles mentioned in their articles had to be photographed by their in-house photographer (the aforementioned Vicky). Which I understand — a lot of booze brands, for whatever reason, don’t have nice photos of their bottles. (And hey, booze brands in question, I take a mean bottle pic if you’re looking for someone). But it made my work that much more complicated, especially because I tended to write about the more expensive stuff. I’d have to pester publicists for unopened, full-size bottles worth several hundred dollars, when they normally sent writers small sample vials. In a few cases I had to borrow the bottles and then bring them back to the PR firms. And being a lean and mean operation, Serious Eats didn’t use messenger services, which meant that I had to schlep the bottles from my apartment on the Upper West Side to their office in Chinatown. Not a big deal… until you remember that I generally wrote round-ups involving 6-10 bottles per article. That is a lot to lug on the B train.

I dealt with it for a while, because it was a nice outlet for stuff I wanted to write, the editors were both friendly and talented, and after I dropped the bottles off at their office (or before I picked them up), I got to have lunch in Chinatown. But then the office closed, and I had to figure out how to get bottles to and from Vicky’s home out in the depths of Brooklyn. We settled, if I remember correctly, on Uber’s then-new messenger service, which involved people hauling stuff back and forth on bikes. I had to pay for it out of pocket and then get reimbursed, which annoyed me back then, but I get it now — the vast majority of journalistic outlets are not exactly swimming in cash. But after a messenger handed me a bag containing a shattered $350 bottle of whisky, which I didn’t discover until after he’d pedaled off, and Uber wouldn’t compensate me because I didn’t have a receipt for said whisky, I decided that enough was enough. I stopped reaching out to SE, and we both soon moved on.

I wonder now if I was being petty. And for all the annoyance, I did get my hands on a few really pricey bottles that I was told to keep after they were photographed. And check out this article here. It looks great, doesn’t it? There was a method to their madness. I don’t know if I’d want to do the whole bottle-lugging thing again, but I’m glad I did it the first time.