A whiff of Amontillado

I just came from a whiskey tasting in Taipei, in Kavalan Distillery which produced the best single malt whiskeys in the world at least for 2016 and 2017. Kavalan is produced by the same conglomerate called King Car which makes coffee, bottled water, noodles, and orchids.
So we had this blind tasting and there is this one Kavalan blend which struck me — Number 5 — because it smelled like old books.
This is a weird revelation because I don’t connect books and whiskeys. You may not believe me, people, but I don’t drink and write. I’m no Edgar Allan Poe or Bagnos Cudiamat. I can’t write under the influence.
Maybe now, because I had shots of different Kavalan including Amontillado which won in 2016.
It cost 10,000 Taiwanese dollars per bottle, which is equivalent to a laptop in the Philippines, a Taiwan-made one.
Also, amontillado reminds us of A Cask of Amontillado, a short story of Edgar Allan Poe I first read in Grade V which made me claustrophobic. Later, I would ask, what is in amontillado that entraps and thralls people? Now, I know.
But books and whiskeys.
An article entitled Material Degradomics said: On the Smell of Old Books, scientists at University College London used “headspace analysis” to measure the volatile compounds produced when paper decays: among others, rosin, acetic acid, furfural, and lignin. It’s the latter that does most of the work. In his review of Dzing!, perfume critic Luca Turin explains that lignin is a polymer that stops trees from drooping, and is chemically related to the molecule vanillin.
“When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla absolute, subliminally stoking a hunger for knowledge in all of us.”
So what I drank must have that vanilla hint.
Argentinian writer Alberto Manguel said he likes old Penguin books because they smelled like biscuits.
Some Filipino books smell like dried seaweeds because the book paper quality wasn’t that good.
Maybe Inquirer smells like soy sauce because they use soy-based ink?
For old books, the chemicals responsible for the sweet smell of old paper are benzaldehyde, vanillin, ethyl hexanol, toluene, and ethylbenzene. These chemical reactions, which produce such volatile compounds, are called ‘acid hydrolysis’.  Chemical reactions spanning a considerable amount of time making these compounds produce sweet odors.
For new books, the smell can be attributed to three factors: the paper itself (it smells good because of the chemicals used to manufacture it), the ink used to print the book, and the adhesives used in the process of book-binding.
If we look at the smell of paper itself, we would find that a lot of chemicals are used to manufacture paper (although it is largely manufactured from wood pulp). Furthermore, there are certain chemicals, such as sodium hydroxide (caustic soda), that are added to the paper to diminish its acidity and swelling of the fibers of the wood pulp used in the paper.
But I’m writing this on an iPad, which never smells like anything unless I burn it.
So if this sounds uninspired, blame it on the disconnection of electronics to the sensorial experience.
No whiff of Amontillado to inspire you and entrap you till you lose your breath.