Wristmas & The W’s

I’m alive. Barely, but here we are.

Approximately 45,000 people didn’t wake up today. I try to keep that number somewhere close when life gets strange, and life has been plenty strange lately. The point is: we’re here. That’s half the battle, and some days it’s the whole thing.

It’s been about a year since I regularly sent these newsletters. I’ve missed them more than I expected to. Time hasn’t been cooperative, and before you say anything, yes, I’m aware Timex released a 25-hour watch a few April Fools ago. Still not enough hours in the day.

This one’s a long one. You’ve been warned. Pour something good.

First — the news that actually matters.

I got married!

Scotland. Friends. Family. Scotch. It was exactly what it sounds like, and better than I had any right to expect. We traveled around Scotland before and after the wedding, and if you’ve never been — go. Seriously. There’s something about that country that gets into you. The light, the landscape, the people. And the whisky, obviously. We’ll get to that.

One thing I’m particularly proud of: I converted (mostly) a room full of skeptics into scotch drinkers over the course of one evening. A large part of that credit goes to Steve from Fountainhall Wines in Stonehaven, who was an absolute legend and deserves his own newsletter. More on that in today’s whisky piece.

What’s changing, and what to expect.

I’ve moved the newsletter over to beehiiv, you might notice things look a little different. That’s intentional. New platform, cleaner layout, same obsessions.

Going forward, here’s how this works. Every two weeks: news and reviews across whisky, watches, and wheels. Once a month: an OpEd for opinions, rants, things I’ve been turning over in my head. The fourth issue each month is still under wraps for now, but trust me, it’ll be worth it.

Weekly cadence.

Now — let’s get into it. Poured. Worn. Driven.

Why the most divisive dram in whisky is also the most honest one.

Let’s get one thing straight: nobody is neutral about peated Scotch. You either lean in, or you recoil. There is no polite middle ground, no diplomatic sip followed by a thoughtful nod. Smoke and iodine don’t allow for that. They walk into the room and demand a verdict.

That binary reaction is exactly what makes heavily peated whisky the most honest category in the glass. It doesn’t flatter you. It doesn’t try to be approachable. And if you think the whole point of a good whisky is to not offend anyone, Laphroaig or Ardbeg or Lagavulin or Ledaig, they would like a word.

Here’s the thing the whisky world doesn’t say loudly enough: the people who are put off by peat are often the same people who stay surface-level with everything they love. They want complexity, but comfortable complexity. Complexity that smells like vanilla and dried fruit and doesn’t ask too much of them. Peat asks. It challenges you to figure out why something that smells like a burning hospital can be transcendent in a glass.

The misunderstanding is almost always the same. People smell the peat first, that medicinal, coastal, almost antiseptic hit, and conclude the whisky is aggressive. What they’re actually tasting is terroir in its most literal form. Islay’s peat bogs are ancient. The water that cuts through them carries millennia of decomposed moss and heather. When that water is used in the malting process, it leaves a fingerprint. You’re not tasting smoke. You’re tasting a specific island off the west coast of Scotland, encoded in every molecule.

I understood this properly for the first time, standing cliffside in Scotland. The wind off the Atlantic hits you before anything else: cold, salted, carrying something almost iodine-sharp from the seaweed below. It doesn’t smell like land. It smells like the edge of something. When you put a glass of Laphroaig to your nose in that moment, the connection is immediate and almost absurd in its clarity. The whisky isn’t trying to evoke the place. It is the place, distilled and bottled and handed to you. Peated whisky carries me back to my moments in Scotland. Almost frozen in time.

That experience changed how I think about peat, but I’ve also seen it change people who had no intention of being converted.

At my wedding, I built a whisky tasting around a single idea: earn the peat. We started with Bruichladdich Classic Laddie; unpeated, clean, approachable. Grain-forward with a gentle coastal character. Nobody was threatened. From there we moved to Glenallachie 15, still unpeated but rich with sherry cask depth, dark fruit, chocolate. The room was comfortable. Then Benromach 15 — lightly peated, just enough smoke to shift the atmosphere without alarming anyone. You could feel people leaning in, recalibrating. And then we finished with Ardbeg Uigeadail. Full peat. Navy strength. A dram that announces itself.

The reactions at that last pour told me everything. Some people set the glass down. But some of them [people who would have told you an hour earlier that they didn’t like smoky whisky] finished it slowly and asked what it was. That’s the journey. You don’t convert people to peat by arguing with them. You walk them there one glass at a time, and then let the whisky do the talking.

This is what separates the deeply curious from the casually interested. Not just in whisky, in anything. The collector who goes deep doesn’t stop at the surface note. They want to know why the thing is the way it is. Why does Islay peat taste different from Highland peat? Why does the same distillery’s 10-year taste nothing like its cask-strength expression? Those questions don’t have easy answers, and they don’t have boring ones either.

My dram is Laphroaig. A 10-year, neat, no apologies. [I apologize to those in the UK for being only 40% abv] There’s a glass of it with a specific weight of personal meaning, the kind that doesn’t belong in a tasting note. What I’ll say is this: I’ve had more expensive whisky. I’ve had rarer whisky. I’ve stood in distilleries all across Scotland and tasted things off the barrel that most people will never access. None of it has replaced that particular glass. Some things earn their place not through prestige, but through honesty. Laphroaig is peat in its most uncompromising form. It never pretends to be something else.

That’s the paradox: the whisky that polarizes the most is the one with the least to hide.

WHAT TO POUR — THE WEDDING PROGRESSION

Try it in order. Each one earns the next.

On the Omega Seamaster 2351.80, and what it means to own a witness.

There’s a theory in watch collecting that the right watch finds you before you know what you’re looking for. You don’t research it into existence. You see it somewhere, on a wrist, on a screen, on the wrong side of a glass case you can’t afford yet, and something clicks. Not the movement. Something else.

For me it was James Bond.

Not the suit, not the car (okay, maybe a little of the cars… I am obsessed with Defenders, Jaguar & Aston Martians...), not the mythology of effortless competence that Hollywood spent fifty years constructing. It was specifically the watches on his wrist. Especially the Omega Seamaster. Blue dial, wave pattern, brushed and polished steel that somehow worked in a tuxedo and a wetsuit in the same film. I was young enough that I didn’t fully understand what made a watch good. I just knew that one looked like it meant something.

What I didn’t know then was that I was buying something that would become a kind of autobiography on my wrist. That’s what happens when you commit to one watch for every significant moment in your life. It stops being a timepiece and starts being a record. I’ve worn that Seamaster to every major event since graduation, every milestone, every celebration, every photograph worth framing. The goal, stated plainly, is this: I want to look back at the photos of my life and see that watch in all of them. A consistent thread running through the timeline. My wedding included.

The Seamaster earns that role partly because of what it is technically. Omega introduced the Seamaster line in 1948, their 100th anniversary, and it has never stopped evolving. The reference I own sits in the era when the Seamaster was at its cultural peak, the co-axial escapement arriving just years later to cement Omega’s technical credibility alongside its cinematic one. This is not a watch that coasted on Bond’s coattails. The Seamaster was a serious diver’s instrument before it was a spy’s accessory, rated to 300 meters, with a helium escape valve and a unidirectional bezel that existed to keep someone alive underwater. The Bond association gave it glamour. The engineering gave it legitimacy.

What I’ve come to appreciate more as the years pass is how the 2351.80 sits between worlds. It dresses up without trying too hard. It dresses down without looking out of place. Blue dial against a white shirt and tie is one of the better combinations in menswear, full stop. The same watch with a worn denim jacket looks like you know something other people don’t. That versatility is rare and worth far more than most people price it at when they’re chasing the next grail.

There’s one more detail about my watch that I’ve never fully resolved, and I’m not sure I want to. The day this watch was purchased new from Omega London: September 11, 2001. Specifically to that month, that year, that date. I noticed it years after buying the watch, and it stopped me cold. A graduation gift to myself, bought to mark a beginning, stamped with the date of one of history’s most significant endings. I don’t know what to make of that. I’m not sure it means anything. But I’m also not sure it doesn’t. What I know is that it makes the watch feel even more anchored in time — not just my time, but time itself.

That’s what the best watches do. They don’t just tell you what hour it is. They remind you that the hours are passing, and that some of them matter more than others.

Mine has been on my wrist for all of them.

On the 2014 Subaru WRX, and what it means to keep something that keeps breaking.

My father taught me cars the right way. Not from a manual, not from YouTube, with his hands under a hood and mine beside his (sometimes yelling…), learning that a machine you understand is a machine you respect. You don’t just drive it. You know it. You know the sound it makes when something’s about to go wrong, the feel in the wheel when the alignment drifts, the particular silence of an engine that’s happy versus one that’s lying to you. That education never leaves you. It just waits for the right car to make itself useful.

Mine has been a 2014 Subaru WRX hatchback. I’ve owned it since new. Eleven years, a few engines, and more maintenance bills than I’ll ever admit to in print.

But the story starts earlier than 2014. It starts at Englishtown Swapmeets in New Jersey, somewhere in the early 2000s, where my father and I used to walk the aisles on weekend mornings looking for nothing in particular and always finding something. I came home one of those days with a die-cast model of a WRX hatchback. Black, with gold wheels. I put it on my shelf and kept it there for years. That car, the shape of it, the stance, was lodged somewhere in the back of my mind long before I could afford a real one. Rally racing had something to do with it. So did a certain film franchise that shall not be named but absolutely will be: Fast and the Furious, when it still felt like it was made for people who actually loved cars. The WRX was everywhere in that world. Turbocharged, all-wheel drive, a hatchback that looked like it had somewhere important to be. I was sold before I was old enough to drive one.

So when Subaru announced in 2014 that they were discontinuing the hatchback body style [moving the WRX to sedan-only going forward] I was a college senior with no real job and no real plan, and I bought one anyway. Because some decisions aren’t rational. They’re just right. The last of something is always worth more than people realize at the time, and I realized it then.

Let’s be honest about what this car is. It has a CD player. AM/FM radio. No wireless anything. The kind of interior that automotive journalists in 2014 were already calling dated. The turbocharged flat-four is characterful in the way that means it occasionally tries to destroy itself, and the suspension communicates every imperfection in the road directly to your spine without apology. By every rational measure, this car should have been replaced years ago. Probably more than once.

It hasn’t been. It won’t be.

The WRX hatchback generation that ended with 2014 represents something that’s genuinely harder to find now. A turbocharged, boxer-engined, all-wheel-drive car with a proper five-speed manual, no drive mode selector, no torque vectoring algorithm making decisions on your behalf. When you push it, it pushes back. When you make a mistake, you feel it. That feedback loop — the honest, unfiltered conversation between driver and machine — is what’s being engineered out of cars in the name of progress. The new WRX is a better car by almost every measurable standard. It’s also a little less yours every time you drive it.

The EJ255 engine that powered my generation of WRX is a famously complicated relationship. Subaru’s horizontally opposed four-cylinder is brilliant in concept and occasionally catastrophic in execution. It runs cool on the outside and holds heat in places it shouldn’t. It rewards meticulous maintenance and punishes neglect with an efficiency that borders on personal. I have not always been meticulous. The engine has not always been forgiving. We have reached an understanding.

What keeps me coming back (beyond stubbornness, though that’s part of it) is that this car taught me something. Every repair deepened the knowledge my father started. When you’ve been inside an engine, you stop being a passenger in your own vehicle. You drive differently. You listen differently. You notice things that people who’ve only ever handed their car to a dealer simply don’t. That intimacy is worth something that doesn’t show up in a spec sheet.

Because new isn’t the point. The point is knowing it. The point is the miles.

My WRX has a CD player and a turbo that’s been through more than either of us would like to admit. It also has eleven years of muscle memory in my hands. Every gear change, every on-ramp, every early morning when it fires up and settles into that flat-four burble that sounds like nothing else on the road. My father taught me that a car is more than transportation. This one proved it.

That’s Issue No. 1.

Three things I love, three stories I’ve been sitting on. This is what these OpEds will be like— not a recap of what’s trending, but a record of what matters to the people who go deep on the things they care about.

If something in here resonated, send it to someone who’d get it. That’s how this grows, not through algorithms, but through people who recognize something of themselves in a glass of Laphroaig, a watch worn to every milestone, or a car that should’ve been sold years ago and somehow never was.

See you in next week!