Day Eight: Whisky School

I find myself procrastinating a bit on writing these last posts, because I have this feeling that when I do, the whole thing will be over and done with and that's not a nice feeling. I was almost as sad when the time came to stop writing about Islay as I was when we actually left Islay. But, there's really no way out but through it. So, I'll begin discussing our last real day.

We had twenty four hours left in Edinburgh. The cold, which E had mostly conquered, had properly taken hold of my senses. It actually seems fitting in retrospect that I spent most of my last day viewing and enjoying things through a bit of a fog, because the prospect that our vacation was actually ending seemed unreal to me.

When we were first planning this trip, E knew he wanted to  book the Whisky Masterclass Experience when we were in Edinburgh. I remember that he asked me, with some concern, whether I thought I'd be up for drinking whisky at 10am. I reminded him of this before we left, and we both laughed, remembering the girl that was solidly intoxicated at Lagavulin before noon. With that, we cheerily set off for an early morning lesson on whisky, so maybe I could sort of start understanding all the stuff I'd been drinking for the past week.

Whisky School takes place at the Scotch Whisky Experience, which is a very nice sort of stone building on the Royal Mile. I wasn't one hundred percent sure what to except, but our tour guide / professor was a young guy who seemed friendly enough and led us upstairs into a room and, in proper fashion, offered us tea and cookies.

I sort of brushed over an important aspect here: the room that we were in contained the world's largest collection of whisky. It had been put together by a Brazilian man and donated to the Scotch Whisky Experience (owned by Diageo) with the stipulation that it all stay together. E could hardly focus on tea and cookies, and can you really blame him when the surrounding walls looked like this?

I think this is E's personal heaven

There are also a coupe of other walls compromising this collection. It's quite fascinating: whiskies from around the world, ancient whiskies, rare expressions and all sorts of good stuff. We just sort of stared around the room blankly for a while in awe. The backlighting was even adjustable, so different varieties of whisky could be highlighted at different times.

We wandered around this room in that sort of daze for a bit, while our helpful professor explained some of the more interesting parts of the collection to us. We then moved on to another room, where, as we were informed, there would be a quiz.

The quiz was meant to help us isolate smells of certain flavors that ought to be present in whiskies. This was terribly fun for me, mostly because I was awesome at it. I got 13 points, our Italian friend got 16 and E got 3. According to our guide (who said this before our scores) the average score was between 2-5. Which means that I am a smelling things GENIUS. The samples included things like vanilla, honey, linseed oil (which smells like a furniture store, fyi), almonds, peat, sulfur, acetone and a few others that I don't remember right now. We then went through tasting a few whiskies and discussing how water impacted them and all sorts of fun things. It wasn't quite what I expected, but it was a lot more fun.

After whisky school, we decided to head to the Edinburgh Castle. There was a brief debate as to whether to go to the pharmacy first, but we were right there, so we made the (possibly poor) decision to go right to the castle.

Farewell, giant room of whisky