You know the type. The basilisk-eyed authority glaring down his capillaried proboscis at the back of the wine bottle you bought to dinner.
Checking its terroir, vintage, eyeballing any tasting notes: dark berries, ripe cherries, plum, oak characters, maybe some spices, roasted coffee beans …
It’s a curious process to witness but put one of these hams behind a whisky bottle and ask them its Julian age and watch the clouds roll over their eyes.
It’s just a jump to the left, to quote Stuart Wagstaff. A time warp thing. But few in this nation of boozers could decipher an L210911 20:27 if it spat in their eye.
So whiskey school’s now in. Okay, the L2’s 2022. The 11’s the batch number. The 20:27 is the time. The 109 in the middle is the trick, it’s April 19.
How’s that? Well, January has 31 days, Feb 28, March 31, 90 by my slide rule. Another 19 gives April 19. On the old Julian calendar, which is how distillers measure time.
Goes back a bit. Pope Gregory XIII replaced the Julian calendar in 1582. Time’s been running 13 days fast ever since. While basically everyone’s adopted it, whiskey distillers being the Middle Age alchemists they are, are sticklers for tradition.
Alchemist mate Bob Connor apprised me of this trivia night spoiler, and other things too, in a recent bar-top battle of wits. My arsenal, I learned, was lacking.
I knew the Julian calendar, introduced in 45BC by the tyrant Caesar, adding new months – one to celebrate himself – was meant to get the Earth’s annual solar orbit of 365 and a quarter days right by throwing in a leap day every four years.
I didn’t know it’s actually more like 365.24 something days, and an extra day owing every 129 years. Must be one due soon.
As for missing days, I didn’t know either about the conspiracy to expunge the Early Middle Ages from history, 614 to 911, when Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, Pope Sylvester II and Byzantine Emperor Constantine VII supposedly banged their heads together to recalibrate the calendar and put themselves all together at 1000 AD.
Bit like psycho Pol Pot renaming 1975 Year Zero and doing away with families, medicine, schools, hospitals, books, music, money …
Then there’s the missing year 536 AD when the Northern Hemisphere was thrown into darkness, courtesy Icelandic volcano ash.
Don’t forget all those missing years pre-4004 BC when creation scientists tell you the world was created. About 4.6 billion, not counting the full 13.8 billion since the Big Bang.
Time warps could exist in strong gravitational fields and high speeds, says Einstein. And scientists at Boulder Colorado say they’ve measured a warp at a distance of a millimetre, if you know what that means.
So maybe there is something in it. Time will tell, ha! If only I could understand how we escaped that Y2K time-warp black hole. Wow, 25 years ago. Tempus really fugits, eh?
This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 20 August 2024.
