It’s Time for Some Dirty Willy
It’s Time for Some Dirty Willy
Whiskey on the Banks of Lake Seliger
The car lurched to one side, then the other, then tipped forward at a 45 degree angle before falling precipitously into the stream with a deafening metallic clank. Without a seatbelt, I bounced up and hit my head on the ceiling, while my neighboring passenger in the back seat, Roman, cursed our driver Aleksandr under his breath. For the fifth time that day we were stuck, the car’s wheels a foot deep in filth, and this time it looked like we weren’t going to make it out.
“Time for some Dirty Willy,” our fourth and final passenger, Igor, suggested. We all readily agreed.
The tale of how we’d ended up here, an uninhabited swamp on the banks of Lake Seliger in Russia’s northeast, and that of Igor’s Dirty Willy, both say much about the changes underway in modern Russia.
With last year’s precipitous fall in the price of the ruble, many young Russians who would ordinarily have taken a summer holiday abroad are instead “staycationing” in places like Seliger to save money. Roman, Aleksandr, Igor, and I were part of a group of nearly 20 from Moscow and St. Petersburg, several of whom had swapped the beaches of Turkey, the Middle East or Southeast Asia for a camping trip closer to home. Not that we’d entirely given up on adventure: Aleksandr had brought along an off-road vehicle, an early ’80s Toyota Land Cruiser. We’d agreed to take it for a spin that morning, but it was unfortunately thus far was proving no match for the Russian countryside.
Dirty Willy, meanwhile, was the contents of Igor’s hip flask: William Lawson’s, Russia’s most popular whisky. I had never heard of it before coming to the country, but in the last few years it has become a ubiquitous presence in Moscow’s nightclubs and hypermarkets. Manufactured by Bacardi, it’s a mass-market Scotch, and to be brutally honest it tastes like it—hence the nickname—but its popularity is indicative of one important fact: where alcohol is concerned, Russian tastes appear to be changing. Against the backdrop of a 15 percent drop in sales of vodka in 2014, whiskey is booming, up 33 percent over the same period. William Lawson’s now accounts for nearly a fifth of whisky sales, leading the challenge to Russia’s reputation as a nation of vodka-drinkers.
Surveying the state of Aleksandr’s car, each of us took turns silently swigging from Igor’s hip flask. The burning sensation of Scotch hitting the back of my throat might have been unpleasant in other circumstances, but with the late afternoon sun beating down and with a three-ton vehicle to rescue, it felt fortifying.
Three hours later, after several failed attempts to winch the car out of the swamp, we finally freed ourselves. Hungry, tired, and stone-cold sober despite polishing off the remaining whisky, we set out for home, to comfort ourselves with dinner, a warming campfire, and a bottle of vodka.