Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i Whisky Magazine

Port Ellen 44 Years Old 1978 Gemini Original Cask Diageo 54.9% ABV Nose: Classic Port Ellen notes of grapefruit pith, chamois leather, lemon drops, and delicate mossy smoke. Hints of coastal salt and liquorice, with damp autumnal forest floor notes. Palate: New leather at first, which develops into rich, smoked crème anglaise. Sweet barley water. The smoky notes are again delicate and earthy, with a slightly energising note of eucalyptus. Lemon posset and finally a hint of coal dust, moving into tropical fruits. Finish: A note of suede, lapsang souchong tea, bergamot, and that mossy, earthy smoke with white peach. Comments: A brilliant example of classic Port Ellen which is reminiscent of the early Special Releases and a great example that carries enough energy to belittle its extreme age. One…

A quarter of a century ago, whisky tourism was in its infancy, even in its spiritual home of Scotland. Knocking on a distillery door to request a look around and a chat with whoever was on shift that day was generally the province of the serious enthusiast, and few distilleries were set up to cater to visitors formally. Into this landscape steps the Spirit of Speyside Whisky Festival. First held in 1999, it was a chance for Scotch fans to get inside the distilleries producing their favourite malts and enjoy face time with the people that made them. The festival has flourished in tandem with the region’s whisky producers over the past 25 years. More than half of the 51 distilleries now operating in Speyside are set to participate in the…

Ducking in from the heat of a Miami night, down a gritty corridor and into a freight elevator I am disgorged into a room lit entirely by candles. The temperature is higher here than outside. Outside had been all flamingos, baby pinks, pale blues, and neon; inside there is hushed reverence. The candles reveal a single long table. The view flickers between the medieval and the post-apocalyptic as one’s eyes adjust — part of the ceiling has collapsed over here, graffiti on the walls over there. Apparently this was once a famous department store, which closed in the 1990s and has been opened exclusively for this event. As wordless, beautiful men in black kilts waft around with delicate snacks on silver trays, there is a sense that this will not…

In 1958, Sam Bronfman’s Seagram distilling empire officially arrived in New York City. Though its new skyscraper, with its bronze facings and large glass windows, changed American architecture, it blended into the New York skyline as though it was meant to be there. Bronfman’s son, Edgar, remarked proudly that the building established Seagram globally, once and for all, as a company that cared about quality. Mosaic-clad ceilings, marble floors, and priceless works of art decorated the interior, with the famous Le Tricorne, a 19ft x 20ft Pablo Picasso canvas stage curtain, hanging at the ground floor’s Four Seasons restaurant. The classic painting demonstrated Picasso’s accomplishment in integrating colours with precision, balance, and elegance. Seagram, too, brought these qualities to the architecture of blended whisky. Sam Bronfman once declared, “Distilling is a…

The latter half of the 20th century was a challenging time for Scotch. The drink’s fortunes waned in the late 1970s, and as a result 20 whisky distilleries closed their gates across Scotland in the early 1980s, with seven more closing in the early 1990s. By contrast, there were just two new whisky distillery openings in this time. During this downturn, the Scotch business was driven almost wholly by blends such as Bell’s, Teacher’s, and Johnnie Walker, with single malt only starting to make its way into bottle and on to the shelf. As the thirst for single malt grew towards the end of the last century and into this, the liquid legacy left behind by some of the closed distilleries started to become highly prized by drinkers and collectors…

Think of Edinburgh and the city’s striking gothic architecture, sleek townhouses, and curving cobbled streets spring to mind. New Town elegance, the tourist bustle of the Royal Mile, and the dramatic backdrop of Arthur’s Seat. Leith, with its timeworn warehouses and waterways, isn’t always top of the location list, yet its vibrant history of commerce underpins much of the whisky industry. It is here in the late 1700s that wine, port, and sherry imports were landed. Blenders soon set up shop — names from Haig and Vat 69 to Bonnington were all created here at some point. There is good reason why Woven Whisky, one of the newest names on the blended whisky block, found its home in Leith. “It has to be forward facing as opposed to nostalgia facing,”…

When asked if she feels any pressure in working with old blending stock, Stephanie Macleod from Dewar’s has a quote — attributed to Gustav Mahler — to hand: “Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire,” she says. You can see why this would resonate with a master blender responsible for preserving the flame of a blending dynasty which has survived for more than 175 years, but today’s market for old blended whisky also shows signs of some worshipping of ashes. While age may just be a number, with more and more modern consumers coming to recognise that blends can be just as good (or better) than single malts, there is no doubt that old blended whisky is currently booming. This term encompasses both bottles of…

The Glenlivet has come a very long way from its illicit origins on a Speyside farm to its current status as one of the world’s best-selling single malt Scotch whiskies. Good reason, then, to celebrate its 200th anniversary extravagantly this year. The Glenlivet was the first distillery in the area to be granted a licence in the wake of the highly influential 1823 Excise Act, which came into being as a result of the high levels of illicit distillation being practised in Scotland, particularly in more inaccessible parts of the Highlands where detection by the government’s revenue officers was unlikely. By the early 1820s as many as 14,000 illicit stills were being seized by government officials each year, and it was estimated that more than half the whisky consumed in…

With the clock ticking on the Scotch Whisky Association’s target for net-zero emissions, 2023 was a year of expansion and eco-centricity in Speyside with several producers undertaking ambitious projects to grow capacity or to minimise their carbon footprint, with some endeavouring to achieve both objectives at the same time. Of these, Chivas Brothers’ Glentauchers took centre stage in the autumn, hosting 130 guests at an ‘open house’ to share some initial lessons from its introduction of heat-recovery technologies that have seen the site reduce total energy consumption by 48 per cent and carbon emissions by 53 per cent. Elsewhere in the region, GlenAllachie has seen similar results from its use of mechanical vapour recompression and Knockdhu took advantage of an extended summer shutdown to install a thermal vapour recompression system…

A lot of the whisky conversation today centres around single malt (a proportion as high as 90 per cent sounds plausible). Emails flood the inboxes of the whisky press to highlight new malts from Macallan, Talisker, or Aberfeldy. Tastings and whisky festivals generally celebrate single malts, while social media is flooded with accounts praising its virtues. Blends are few and far between. Tellingly, even those who don’t pretend to know much about whisky will confidently proclaim that “single malts are better than blends”. And yet, depending on the source, single malt whisky accounts for only 10 or 11 per cent of the Scotch whisky industry’s sales. That is a lot more than it once was, but it remains relatively diminutive. There is a distinct discrepancy between the copious attention showered…

Since 1830, when Aeneas Coffey revolutionised whisky with the invention of his continuous Coffey still, blends have dominated the Scotch scene. Through his patented distillation method, Coffey had enabled whisky to be produced far more quickly and cheaply than ever before. What is known today as grain whisky came into existence — and so it was blended with malt. Blending made whisky more palatable and plentiful. As the industry developed, it was normal for distilleries to trade stocks with each other to craft their own recipes. This practice continues in Scotland. Modern-day blends can have as many as 40 different component parts. It is partly why the industry thrives (let’s not forget, blends account for more than 90 per cent of Scotch whisky). What may be surprising is that this…

The year 1824 saw the establishment of some of Scotland’s most illustrious malt whisky distilleries, including The Glenlivet, Macallan, and Cardhu — all founded in the wake of the previous year’s Excise Act, which stimulated legal distilling in the Highlands. But there is another distillery celebrating a bicentenary this year whose name is rarely mentioned alongside those Speyside giants: Cameronbridge in Fife, which produces grain spirit for owner Diageo’s blended whiskies, along with Gordon’s and Tanqueray gin and Smirnoff vodka. The relative anonymity of Cameronbridge is not surprising. Grain distilleries have always been the workhorses of the whisky industry, usually lacking the visual glamour of their malt-making counterparts, located in places far from the principal tourist trails, and with little or no liquid presence in the marketplace. While Scotland currently boasts…

The bodegas of Jerez might not seem an obvious place for whisky blenders to take inspiration for their craft — beyond the search for the perfect European oak for ageing and finishing. Nevertheless, a growing number are doing just that, looking to the Spanish practice of using a solera as a way of bringing innovation and interest back into Scotch whisky blends. The solera system dates back to the 18th century. It is a method of fractional blending that ensures the sherry from a particular bodega remains consistent in quality. Casks of sherry of the same age are stacked on top of one another. The bottom tier is the tier that is ready to be bottled, and the tabancos (sherry bars) of southern Spain sometimes even have a tap to…

It is a simple but brilliant idea: take a top-notch bourbon and collaborate with leading figures from the food and drinks scenes of five global cities to create a collection of exclusive bourbon bottlings with unique flavour profiles that celebrate the zeitgeist of the cities they were developed for, then showcase these bourbons in the international airports that serve these five cities. In a nutshell, that is the concept behind the Maker’s Mark Wood Finishing Series, which after five launches in New York, Sydney, Frankfurt, and Singapore has arrived in London Heathrow Terminal 5. The new Maker’s Mark Wood Finishing Series London Edition has been made in collaboration with two of London’s most celebrated food and drink stars: master mixologist Ryan Chetiyawardana, perhaps best known as the founder of the…