Rob Roy

The first single malt Rob Roy I ever tasted rendered me uncomfortably quiet. In hindsight, I blame my awkward silence on the actor, writer, and director Jon Favreau.

Let me explain: Back in the mid-nineties, Favreau wrote and starred in a movie called “Swingers.” In it, he plays a down-on-his-luck-in-life-and-love aspiring actor who recently moved to Los Angeles and is struggling to achieve anything beyond a painful sense of mediocrity. What gets him through it all — no spoiler alert here! — are his friends, many of whom inexplicably wear stylized button-down shirts whose striped patterns make them look like some sort of throwback 1950s bowling team with a penchant for Rat Pack sartorial aesthetics. Plus, they often speak in a decidedly stylized patois, referring to themselves and the women they pursue as “beautiful babies.”

So how does this all play into my awkward silence in the face of a rather canonical cocktail? Back then, the movie had, among a certain set of early-collegiate guys like myself, a serious impact. And while I never wore bowling shirts, nor have I ever referred to women as anything other than their actual names, I did develop a curiosity about Scotch.

This is where Jon Favreau comes in.

During a well-known scene in a casino, Favreau’s character, in an attempt to sound sophisticated, orders a Scotch. He says, painfully: “I'll have a Scotch on the rocks, please. Any Scotch will do, as long as it's not a blend, of course. Single malt…any ‘Glen.’”

Like most of my friends at the time, this exchange got me thinking about Scotch, or more specifically, how little I knew about it. Were single malts always better? Were blends to be shunned? What exactly was a malt, anyway? So, I went down the rabbit hole, tasting any single malt that I could afford as a college student. After a while, I found myself smitten with how the Highlands tended to manifest themselves differently from Orkney, or how Speyside’s sweet elegance diverged from the more briny smoke of Islay. I spent the next ten years nosing and sipping drams of single malt, always neat, often with a drop or three of water in order to open up its aromatics. 

And then the Rob Roy found its way into my life. If memory serves, it was 2007, and I was at the house of a friend who decided to mix up a batch of the legendary cocktail. He added a massive pour of Glenfiddich to a mixing glass, and about half as much sweet vermouth. A few dashes of bitters followed. He then stirred it all up and strained it into a massive Martini glass (sadly, this was still the era of the bathtub-sized drinking vessel; more modestly sized ones were still several years away).

I sipped. I swallowed. I stopped talking.

What had just happened? This was unlike anything I'd had before. Unlike the rye and Bourbon Manhattans that had found their way into regular rotation in my cocktail life, this one was…different. More savory, and with a finish that lingered in the most detailed and subtle way. The fruit was gorgeous, and the spice was sweet. It was one of those moments that has stuck with me ever since.

Even today, whenever I have a Rob Roy, I’m brought back to that moment. The memory of the drink has become an important one for me, and I’m always reminded of Marcel Proust’s rumination about the madeleine that cracked open his memory and proved to be the kernel of his masterpiece, “In Search of Lost Time.”

“No sooner had the warm liquid…touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me,” he wrote. “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?”

For good ol’ Marcel, he wrote a million-word book in a cork-lined Parisian hideaway to try and recapture his past. For me, all it takes is a Rob Roy in my suburban Philadelphia kitchen: Two ounces of Glenfiddich, one ounce of Carpano Antica vermouth, two dashes of Angostura bitters, and a good cocktail cherry.

It is easily one of the most comforting cocktails in the canon, the drinkable equivalent of a bear-skin rug in front of a crackling fireplace as snow falls past the beams cast by the streetlights outside, Al Green, on vinyl, turning in the corner. Not that I ever drink it like that: Our rescue dog would try to eat the bear-skin rug, and our fireplace needs a bajillion dollars worth of repairs before so much as a match should be lit near it. But even on our couch, with any random movie playing on Netflix, and no snow falling at all, just that bone-rattling Philly winter giving our heating system a run for its proverbial money, a great Rob Roy just seems to make everything better. That’s pretty much all we can ask of any cocktail.