I'm not a Scotch whisky drinker: I've had perhaps 10 such drinks in my entire life.
Nevertheless, the subject has always interested me, and so when I happened on "Scotch: A Golden Dream" on Apple TV, I watched it.
Fascinating.
The documentary ambles along interviewing master distillers, "noses," writers, and workers in various areas of Scotch production, along with Scottish farmers who grow the barley, wheat, and rye that form the basis of Scotch.
Here are the most useful and interesting — sometimes surprising — things I learned from the film:
• Most experts prefer younger whisky — 6-10 years old, perhaps up to 18 — to much older vintages. They find the sweetness of the young oak barrels preferable to the dominating power of older wood.
• Nosing whisky in a glass will tell you far more about it than tasting it.
• If you're nosing a flight or series of Scotch whiskies, you will find that without added water, the nose and sense of smell become slightly anesthetized by the 40% alcohol in bottled Scotch.
• In Scotland water is always added to single malt whisky: it dilutes the alcohol, reducing the burn and allowing other properties to reveal themselves.
• On a molecular level, aroma molecules share more chemical likenesses with alcohol than they do with water. As such, they tend to bind with alcohol. Adding water frees up more of the aroma molecules to evaporate into the taster's nose. Appreciation of flavors happens at least as much in the nose as on the tongue.
• Two teaspoons of water in 1.5 oz. of Scotch are the sweet spot for most.
• Older Scotch is rarer because most of it is bottled young. Then more is lost by evaporation, the so-called "angels' share." Thus, you're paying more for its scarcity.
• Older Scotch, aged 20/30/40 or more years, may have taken up too much flavor from the aging barrels; thus it might be dry, bitter, or woody as a result of being overaged.
FunFact: the director of "Scotch: The Golden Dream" is... wait for it... Andrew Peat.
You could look it up.
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