The Bearer Of Bad Tidings, Or Shooting Fish In A Barrel

Oh, to go back to 1976…..

As part of my bottle reviewing gig for Liquor dot com, I’m doing something I haven’t done regularly in… maybe ever. And that’s writing negative reviews. All these years, I tried to avoid doing so. There’s so much good stuff out there, I figured. Why take time out to focus on the bad? I tried to avoid lousy booze in general, and when I did encounter a dud, it was often from a smaller, well-meaning distillery that didn’t, in my judgement, warrant a beating in the press. Better, I thought, just to ignore stuff like that than to call attention to its mediocrity. Then, of course, there are times when I’m just out of step with prevailing wisdom. I gave a relative rave, for instance, to Nicole Austin’s Copper Tongue bottling for Diageo’s Orphan Barrel series of whiskeys, As far as I can tell, I’m the only soul besides perhaps Nicole herself who likes it.

Anyway, my point is that I haven’t written many negative reviews. But now that I have no say in what I write up (I’m given a list every week based on something SEO-related, I suppose), I seem to be giving the thumbs-down left and right. And I’m kind of enjoying it. It did, however, sadden me to pan Seagram’s 7 Crown Blended Whiskey (the link for which is -> HERE <-) because, historically, it’s a pretty important brand — if you want to know what kind of whiskey people were drinking in the ‘60s and ‘70s, look no further. And also, really, who expects it to be good? As far as I know, people buy it (and they do still buy it, though in smaller numbers than they did 50 years ago) because it’s cheap, it goes down easy, and it mixes well with 7-Up. So it felt a little like shooting fish in a barrel to write a lousy review. But my job is to evaluate what’s in the bottle and be honest about it, and I really can’t sugarcoat the fact that the stuff is pretty lousy. But hopefully, with any luck, reviewing duds as well as dazzlers will sharpen both my palate and my writing.

I do have some turkeys coming up that were a lot more fun to shoot, and as soon as they’re posted you’ll be able to find links to them here. In the meantime, read my latest at the Liquor dot com site (link in the previous paragraph) and enjoy. By which I mean enjoy the article. The whiskey itself is a little difficult to savor.