Scotch or Bourbon?

     My forebears were Scots. For reasons lost to memory they came long ago to scatter across the mid-South, some as farmers, some as tradesmen.
     I don't know if they were active in the Celtic tradition of whiskey-making. I do know that some were inclined to take a drop. Among these was a distant uncle, one of my grandmother's elders. Once a year, borne down by the labor and borderline poverty of small family farming, he would take a shotgun and a jug of moonshine into the attic for a solitary toot.
    The gun was his sign that he would not brook interference. The family did not believe that he would actually shoot, but they were mindful of accidental possibilities if he were provoked into waving it.  When they decided he'd been up there long enough, they sent my grandmother -- then a girl -- to coax him down. She was a favorite and had a way with him.
     I wonder what he would make of tippling's entry among today's great cultural divides:
     -- Morning people versus night owls.
     -- Neatniks versus slobs.
     -- Punctual people versus those who run blithely on their own time.
     And ...
     -- Scotch drinkers versus the bourbon folks.
     I've always been a scotch man, for no valid reason. When I approached drinking age, the older guys said this was the sophisticated choice.
     The novelist Walker Percy would not agree. In an essay years ago he celebrated "the hot bosky bite" of bourbon. In comparison, he wrote, "drinking scotch is like looking at a picture of Noel Coward."
     In a differing essay, another writer declared that she enjoyed Noel Coward, and she imputed to scotch drinkers the added merit of being inclusive. She reported a finding that 42 percent of scotch drinkers will also drink bourbon, while only 20 percent of bourbon drinkers will drink scotch.
     Once upon a time, as I recall, bourbon was a boots-and-denim kind of snort, while scotch drinkers might be imagined in ascots. But nowadays, cousins of wine snobs may be found in either camp. In a stratospheric remove from  bourbon's origins in the corn whiskey of the yeomanry, one brand sells for more than $2,000 a bottle. My distant uncle might say, That whiskey has got above its raisin's.
     A distillery in my town makes a very nice single malt.  The owner is a big, bluff Irishman who'll take you on a personal tour if you catch him at the right time. Then he'll take you to the tasting room.
     On my visit, he offered a sample of his poteen -- Irish moonshine. Cradling the bottle he said, as much to himself as to us: My grandfather was the first one in our family to make this, and he got arrested for it.
     We Celts try not to get above our raisin's.  I think I may visit him again.