t seems a little off-brand, but the French are a scotch-drinking nation. And now they’re making the stuff themselves. When you look at national trends, this is no real surprise: The British could float a navy on the amount of French brandy they drink. Further south, despite Italian wines being very fashionable in this country, the Italians themselves are shifting dramatically from wine to beer for the simplest reason of them all — their parents drank wine. While the French can be a pretty pedantic lot, that cuts both ways. You may not want to talk existentialism with them, but when it comes to food and drink they rarely go in halfway.
Over the holidays, my father-in-law gave me a bottle of Michel Couvreur Overaged Malt Whisky. He gives both his sons-in-law a bottle of scotch every year, and since I’m the weird one, I usually get a bottle of something slightly off-kilter — like French scotch. To be clear, if it’s not made in Scotland, it’s not scotch, but malt whiskies have been cropping up all over the planet in what we’re now calling “World Whiskies,” with some impressive results.
The Michel Couvreur bottle is a thing of beauty on its own, and what’s inside looks more like cognac or bourbon. What surprises you, if you are a fan of French wines, is how “big” the flavor is. Their wines, like the food, are often the result of a mastery that makes the complex seem subtle. There is nothing subtle here. It is in the same sandbox with what we know as scotch, but don’t go thinking you are diving into a bottle of Highland malt. Michel Couvreur resides on the other side of the spectrum from those impressive and very light Japanese whiskies.
This is an exercise in just how much the cask imparts to the flavor profile of what is sitting in it. The product is actually distilled in Scotland and then shipped to France as what we might call Scottish moonshine (if not white lightning, at least plaid lightning) and “ennobled” in sherry casks in France. Traditionally, scotch is aged in recycled American white oak bourbon barrels. With plenty of producers using sherry casks these days, what makes the Michel Couvreur different is that they forgo the traditional rack-houses and lay the casks up in the Burgundian caves of Bouze les Beaune. They swear that this makes a difference.
I’m not sure what, exactly, those Burgundian caves are adding to the party, but something made this whisky what it is — a strange, cozy marriage of scotch and brandy. Sticking your nose in the snifter, there is a faintly musty, medicinal vapor that is actually not terribly inviting. On the palate, however, things improve dramatically. There is little-to-no smoke or that peatiness of the Islay or Highland malts, but with a few drops of water, the taste of malt whisky comes through. Like the child of immigrants still using the phrases his parents brought over from the old country in a local accent.
Again, the palate here is very big — at the time I think I used the word “intense.” Which is not something that the French generally go in for, unless they are talking politics or sex. But it doesn’t stay that way. On the back end, you get some solid notes I can describe only as “very old brandy.”
How to drink it? I can’t imagine using it as a mixer in a cocktail, but on the other hand, a little water or an ice cube or two will open up the hidden gems in this beautifully peculiar malt whisky. And it is peculiar because, in my experience “intense” and “interesting” aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do tend to travel in opposite directions. This bottle is the exception to that rule.
