Letter From America.(Brief Article)

Melissa, my lovely fiancee, is the bourbon drinker in the family. She also holds a grudge. So the other night she reached into the closet where we keep the emotional baggage and reminded me that four years ago I went to Scotland without her to visit whisky distilleries. "So... you want to go to Scotland?" I asked with my usual sense of discernment.

"Nope," she replied, opening a U.S. road atlas. A dog-eared page showed the state of Kentucky, and the nail of her index finger rested just below the city of Bardstown, heart of the Bourbon Trail. Heaven Hill and Jim Beam are there, of course, but also the so-called small-batch bourbons, aged longer and made in, well, smaller batches. We keep them hidden in the back of our liquor cabinet when company comes: Woodford Reserve, Elijah Craig, Basil Hayden's. This is booze that honors the Scotch-Irish clans of the American South, people who came to this country with the alchemical skill to turn corn into whisky. People who realized their crops were worth more as liquor than as pig feed. People who Melissa wouldn't mind having a drink with.

So off we went, as the French visit wine chateaux of the Loire or the Germans visit the Rhine. We expected a Kentucky of backcountry stills and toothless old guys turning out tiny quantities of ambrosia, aged in kegs of the finest oak and all that. But that was not to be.

Our first clue that something was wrong was the pamphlet of distillery tours I picked up at our hotel. There were only seven. Of 130 or so different bourbons marketed in the United States, it turns out, all are made in just half a dozen distilleries. Swallowing our perplexity, we drove out to the Labrot & Graham Distillery, home to our favorite Woodford Reserve. Lincoln Henderson, master distiller, walked us across lush grounds to a building with several giant cypress tanks, set deep in the plank floor and filled with bubbling yellow foam. "Taste this," he said, dipping in a finger.

It tasted like something between polenta and beer. Lincoln explained: if you distill a fermented mixture of grain, water and yeast, you get whiskey. If you do it with corn (or at least 51 percent) you get bourbon--a rougher, macho drink, not the sort of thing to be appreciated for "legs" or "bouquet." Bourbon is what you keep in your bottom desk drawer, to be offered to a walk-in client who wants you to find her missing little sister.

Of course, that after-the-pale froth we had just tasted was run through the three huge onion-shaped copper stills that squatted in a row at L&G like spaceships. ...