FRENCH ROOT JAMMO

Some comments on a tin cher

by PHILIP WHITE

Irish? Bullshit. French for thirty years, Jameson. 

Part of the Pernod-Ricard mob. 

Not above the odd Jammo's and soda, I saw this tinny on the shelf at the local  Woolworths' BWS. 

With dry and lime? Why not? I coulda used some refreshment with a tinct. Er. Cher.

Big error for little Whitey.

Why in the names of St Patrick and St Joan you'd bother to triple distill a spirit, somehow get a few lumberjack whittlins into it and then do this to it beggars belief.

Smooth. If a triple-distilled whiskey's not smooth what's the point?

Dry? Surely that insinuates dry ginger ale. No hint of ginger in this tin. None.

Dry? Surely that means NO SUGAR. This fizzy masquerade has so much sugar there's no hint of the Jameson's I know. This is the opposite of dry.

My spleen winced.

Lime? A limey was a British sailor in New York wharf slang. There's no real indication of either the sailor nor the actual citrus here for me.

Alcohol? 6.3%? Let's just say there's ethanol in it, but that's hidden in sweet syrup.

So. To summarise. To this whisky/whiskey lover, the stuff in this tin is nothing like Jameson's. It fails to remind me of whiskey or whisky. It is the opposite of dry. It has no ginger. The lime is not like any lime I've squeezed. I can hardly detect the ethanol through the deadly sweet syrup.

I mean deadly as in current Oz patois: absolutely attractive and alluring.

Looking at the stuff they put on the tin for people who can't read, at least they appear to be warning us that if you have dark skin you should never let your malnutrition distend your abdomen while you're drinking this stuff. That appears deadly in the pine overcoat sense, like properly hitting the shellgrit.

One remaining question. If this is what the owners of Jacob's Creek think of their biggest-selling whiskey, the fourth-biggest selling on the planet, and an indicator of how they should best market and package it, how should one regard whatever they claim on a Jacob's Creek label?