Photo credit: Janet Donovan
President Barack Obama shares a wall space with President Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and it’s not at The White House.
An unlikely pairing? Not if you share Irish roots. Obama has some maternal ancestors who came to America from a small village called Moneygall, in County Offaly. His ancestors lived in New England and the South and by the 1800’s most were in the Midwest.
This we were told by James who has been working at Ri-Ra in Georgetown since it opened in December with a Presidential Room and connected Whiskey Bar added in January.
“As most Presidents in America, they all have a small link to Ireland with the most recent being Obama and his 5th cousins who are Irish,” he said with a heavy accent.
“We’re kind of looking to make this area of the restaurant a little bit different from the rest of the space,” he added while pointing to the presidential portraits. Those would be Jackson, Polk, Johnson, Grant, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Truman, Kennedy, Carter, Bush, Clinton and Obama. “JFK was probably the most Irish and there is Bill Clinton who is a big believer in Irish unity not far behind,” he added. Apparently though, there is no documentation of any of Clinton’s ancestors coming from Ireland. As Prime Minister of Ireland Enda Kenney recently reminded us on St. Patrick’s Day: “Everyone wants to be Irish.” We’ll drink to that.
“A lot of the wood, tables and chairs have been shipped over from Ireland – from County Wicklow – which is just southeast of Ireland. The lighting all comes from Ireland too and of course we serve an Irish cuisine in the restaurant, but give it a presidential theme.”
We weren’t sure what to think about Rachael Ewing, the whiskey sommelier at Ri-Ra. We had never heard of a whiskey sommelier before, but being fast on the draw and all, after her demonstration, we’re now drinking whiskey like the best of them – two fisted to be clear.
“I completely fell into whiskey,” she explained to Hollywood on the Potomac. “I was going to school in Aberdeen, Scotland and needed a part time job. I showed up at this local bar called the Grill Bar. Come to find out later that it had won top honors in Jim Murray’s Whiskey Bible, which is the gold standard in whiskey reviews, and was named whiskey icon of the year. And so I went ahead and I showed up there and I asked for a job, and I said I knew nothing about whiskey, I knew nothing about beer, I couldn’t tell you what was in the bottles and what was coming off the taps, but I’d show up on time and I’d try hard so Graham Watson decided to give me a job.”
Rachael Ewing
“You use straight edge measures in Scotland, and you go ahead and you roll the measure to get those last couple of drops out and so you’re going like this, all night and you end up with whiskey all over your hands, just a few drops of it from everything. So I would go home, and I would smell my hands and I’d be like, “It smells like cherries, it smells like fudge,” or “that reminds me of an old leather sofa,” all these different smells. I think my point of conversion was I came home one night, smelled my hand and thought that’s better than my boyfriend’s cologne. And that’s when I decided I really needed to figure out what was in those bottles.
Then I got a shift dusting the bottles every Sunday and so that was taking each one individually down off the shelf and I’d just go ahead and pop open the top and smell what was in there. So, I find my way along the shelf by smell a long time before I started drinking it. It was a very slow conversion. I thought it was harsh fire water, I didn’t like the stuff at all. But once you start loving the smell of it, it’s a very slippery slope into drinking the spirit.”
Her journey took her to East Africa, but the whiskey bug followed so she started doing introductory whiskey classes, first in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania then in Southern Italy and then to Scotch Malt Whiskey Training School, at Scotch Malt Whiskey Experience which she passed and then became certified as an expert in Sales and Service for Scotch Whiskey and is one of just over 1,000 world that are certified.
She started in DC at Jack Rose Dining Saloon until about a month ago and then on to Ri-Ra. “The idea of Irish Whiskey, putting it in context, doing this very hands on whiskey program was just too good to pass up. That is why I’m here doing what I do.”
The Whiskey Sommelier in Real Time:
