Anatomy of a PR Greasing

The unnecessary launch of an unnecessary Scotch whiskey

When I was a weekly newspaper columnist, back in ’90s San Francisco, I was bombarded daily by PR and marketing folks, begging for press. You knew that it was just their job, nothing personal. But some days it would wear on you. Why am I doing this? Is this how people see me? Is this all I’ve become? Do they high-five behind my back whenever I participate in the ruse? Am I just “a tool” to be summoned upon command? Is it too late to change careers? Because, hey, George Bernard Shaw didn’t start writing plays until he was in his ’40s.

Those thoughts often went through my mind in those days. And I’m sure it still happens to journalists around the world. One week, I finally snapped. I decided to accept a particularly dumb PR invitation, and then wrote up the reality of what happened. This first appeared in SF Weekly in 1997.

The voicemail message from L.A. arrives two days before the event—a luncheon/tasting of the newest Scotch to hit America’s shore. The Voice doing the inviting is full of flattery, insisting that only “select people” will be invited, and that I have been personally referred as one of the select. This new product, created by Chivas Regal, is called the “Century of Malts.” It is an unnecessary blend of 100 single-malt scotches that supposedly will arrive in stores this week. In an ensuing conversation with the Voice, unspoken expectations simmer: help us out, we'll help you out. Everybody knows the game here. To her credit, the Voice on the phone admits, “At least you'll get a free lunch and some little airline-size bottles to take home.”

It’s showtime. The maitre d’ at Rose Pistola in North Beach knows exactly which table will accommodate the Scotch tasting, and gestures to a small window booth. Three people there suddenly come alive—someone else showed up! A man wearing a kilt pours carefully measured cups of Evian water into wine glasses of Scotch, to dilute the flavors and supposedly allow them to blossom. Tote bags for the writers—containing propaganda and a free bottle of the new Scotch concoction—are clumped together to one side of the booth. There will be four of us, making this an intimate PR grease that won’t cost the company much at all. Let's meet the cast of characters:

• Jennifer Billings, the PR person from L.A., in a tasteful yet noncommittal white suit that suggests an evening news broadcast, smiles frequently and has perfect teeth. She drops subtle questions like “So, do you like it? Is it—do you like it, then?” Obviously a professional.

• Jim Cryle, the ringer Chivas has flown over from Scotland for this product launch, the factor of authenticity, the man who has worked in the Scotch business for 30 years, and whose face—a robust jungle of tiny capillaries that flare and roll over the creases of skin like ivy crawling up a building—is testament to such experience. He is meant to represent the intriguing nature of a rich and varied Scottish culture, to be informative and pleasant. The antithesis of Trainspotting heroin scuzz.

• Richard Sterling is a food-and-beverage writer with a shaved head and an internal CD-ROM of memorized witty expressions. Sterling’s bon mots range from an assessment of the Scotch’s bouquet (“It’s my cologne!”) to the timing and effects of the tasting (“I only drink professionally during the day, never recreationally”). He is currently working on another book, a guide to 52 places to wear a tuxedo in San Francisco.

Everyone is friendly, tentative, and dull. The tasting commences, the Scot lecturing on the many properties of single malt, the regions of origin, the distilleries. We nod appropriately at the correct moments, and taste the two single-malt samples provided for contrast with the Century of Malts: Longmorn and Glenkinchie. By God, that’s Scotch all right. Exactly why we’re here.

The Scot then turns to the bottle of Century before him, the inexplicable yet apparently masterful culmination of the blending of 100 single-malt Scotches, the flagship of the Chivas fleet that is expected to single-handedly sail Scotch into the millennium. He compares the complexities of its blends to the pleasing result when a conductor tames an orchestra. It’s true that at the end of a symphony one feels pleasingly exhausted from the emotional journey. But the comparison doesn't really hold up; at the end of a bottle of Scotch, one feels shit-faced and accusatory, as if trapped in a bad high school production of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” 

We sip our glasses of Century, and the reactions of everyone at the table are startling in their depth of critical faculty:

“Very smooth.”

“Smooth, isn’t it?”

“Mmm, yes, it’s quite smooth.”

Adjectives move on to include “creamy,” “buttery,” and “fruity.” Tourists and homeless walk past the picture windows of Rose Pistola, enjoying the early afternoon sun, oblivious to the fact that someone inside the restaurant will soon, without irony, mention that a bottle of Scotch contains the flavors of “pineapple and bananas.” (Let’s try to imagine those acres of pineapple fields and banana forests indigenous to Scotland, the monkeys with kilts chattering in the trees, the luaus on the beaches of Islay, with shirtless bagpipers roasting sheep and tossing cabers into the surf.)

Sterling smacks his lips and announces, “I could cook with this. It would be good to deglaze a pan with.”

A waitress samples a glass, as does the maitre d’. I suggest that we might get the entire staff of the restaurant in on the deal. The Scot suddenly whips around with a wide grin on his face, and exclaims in a thick brogue: “That would be good fun!”

Actually, it probably would not be a good idea to get the entire restaurant crew pink-faced in the middle of the day, dancing in the center of Columbus Avenue to some weird jig inside their heads, waitresses alternately making out with busboys and arguing with chefs, dead-drunk tourists peeing against trees, cops on motorbikes knifing through the unruly mob, news choppers thup-thupping over the melee, Jim Cryle and Jennifer Billings swaying from the roof of the Rose Pistola building, singing Willie Nelson’s “Whiskey River, Take My Mind!” and swilling from bottles of Century, their chins and clothing glistening with vomit, while, standing across the street, Alan Black of the Edinburgh Castle Scottish pub in the Tenderloin, organizer of the Scottish Cultural and Arts Foundation events, watches through his fingers in horror as a silly, marketing-driven product from his homeland turns the neighborhood into a cheap spectacle.

But maybe Cryle had the right idea. A hideous afternoon binge would be a lot more interesting than the slew of gushingly positive “news” reports we'll soon be seeing about the Scotch of a hundred Scotches.