I could hardly wait to savour the stuff. As soon as there was a guest I wanted to impress, I broke the seal with a flourish, noting with satisfaction that he had not missed out on the label. We both agreed that it was as good as such stuff goes and paid our obeisance by downing a bit more than old-age quota permits.
As was to be expected, there was no hangover the next morning - but something more serious lurked like a dark cloud on my mind. A big question hung over me that sought to challenge one of the cornerstones of good living. Was this superior scotch as good as it was cracked up to be? Even more serious, was this scotch business a bit overdone?
On such a serious issue, a single-judge bench would not do and so we were, soon thereafter, three of us, set to sample the scotch and a competing distinctive desi brand that had the temerity to adopt a generic single malt name and pronounce a momentous judgement.
When the verdict came, it was couched in every kind of ifs and buts. Special care was taken to clarify that we were not sitting in judgement over actual single malt stuff from the Scottish shores but blended stuff from the mother country versus the locally blended upstart stuff. (Yes, yes, the locals claim it is single malt, but the Scotch people are derisive.) But the tilt of opinion was clear. When it came to blending, the Indian blenders today do pretty well and the most distinctive of blended desi whisky does none too badly against self-proclaimed superior blended scotch.
Shaken by this discovery, I looked back and found that some of my best friends and I, who drank as much for flavour as for inebriation and were not automatically swept off our feet by marketing hype, periodically found the odd Indian whisky to be worth far more than what its label led you to believe. In those days when scotch was not so readily available, I remember downing Solan No 1 copiously in our Gurgaon home with friends and unanimously affirming that it could hold its own against most of the blended stuff from wherever.
In fact, the quality journey in consumables that the country has marched in the last 20 years can easily be depicted in terms of the improvement in the quality of spirits available. From the bleak old days when there was only a harsh Black Knight in whisky - take it or leave it - today there is a huge range, from aam aadmi stuff to premium - popularised by surrogate advertisements.
Before we go any further, it is necessary to underline spirits and make clear that beer has been a great disappointment. Yes, plenty of good brands are launched, light and with flavour. But soon they have had to subscribe to the strange general preference for strong beer (to hell with flavour, where's the kick?), so that eventually one strong beer has tasted as bad as another.
In spirits, perhaps the most striking journey has been traversed by rum. The old faithful, Old Monk, still lives to serve but there is a newcomer whose authentic cane flavour makes you as jolly as, well, Jolly Roger can. And in gins the distinctive tastes of a Forbes or Booths are seldom available, but another old faithful, Blue Riband, does quite well.
You have to be careful about philistines, though. For no good reason not so long ago, plain old Blue Riband disappeared from Kolkata shops and was replaced by all kinds of abominable spiked (that is, flavoured) gins. They were a travesty of the light elegance of the unadulterated juniper flavour, which is now, thankfully, available again.
Which is why in the present all-encompassing saffron mood, from which I feel quite left out, I can still probably make a late entry. I can join at the tail end of the procession by carrying a placard saying: "Be Indian, drink Indian", or something to that effect. If you could be patriotic over khadi at one time and the terrible hulking Ambassador at another and then decide to feel proud about the innovative breakthrough that is the Nano, then why not over sharab?