Whisky Online Blog

I was fortunate enough to be in the Scotch Malt Whisky Society Vaults in Leith, Edinburgh yesterday. Everything seemed pretty normal, it was exceptionally relaxed, there were legions of bottles behind the bar, there was Haggis on the menu, all as it should be at the SMWS. However something caught my eye, a line of bottles all familiar but a bit out of place. To cut all the nonsense short it was a a row of first bottlings from certain distilleries, the difference being these were not in the display case but behind the bar. First bottlings by the society are notoriously hard to track down. The early ones were almost all consumed and rarely collected or stashed away. In the early days I’m sure few people bought multiple bottles or thought to keep hold of their purchases. This makes finding the very early bottlings exceptionally difficult. So I was pretty excited to see these ones open and available. I got quite a bit more excited when I learned which distilleries two of them were from.

St Magdalene SMWS 49.1. November 1975-October 1987. 64.6%. 75cl. Screw cap. 

Colour: Straw Gold

Nose: Typically difficult, closed and unsurprisingly spirity at first. Not particularly aggressive, just very quiet, grumpy almost. After time it starts to show a little fresh cut grass and pin sharp notes of lemon juice. Starting to open up more now with notes of butter, old riesling and quite a wonderful silky waxy streak as well. Becomes also quite leafy and herbaceous with notes of sorrel, sage and bay leaf. With water: Now it’s alive with stone fruits, super lush notes of peaches, nectarines, plums, white flowers, greengages and green apples. There are also some light hints of eucalyptus, cereals and petrol, very rieslingesque this one. A really beautiful, old style nose that keeps dancing around.

Palate: Quite a buldozer at full strength but it carries some fantastic notes of lamp oil, wet pebbles, minerals, motor oil and old canvas. Then cocoa, over-stewed black tea, mints and something quite carbolic. Devastatingly unsexy and difficult but charmingly so, clearly needs quite a bit of time though, not to mention water… With water it becomes more about honey, wax paper, mead, more drying qualities, cereals, buttered toast and lots of ashy minerals. Something like smoked butter and burnt almonds as well. It’s not as glorious as the nose due to its extreme difficulty but it’s such a huge personality.

Finish: Long. All on toasted cereals, butter, dried herbs, mineral notes and oil.

Comments: It’s always a huge privilege to taste early society bottlings but to taste the first edition St Magdalene is on a different emotional plain entirely. This style of whisky is really up my street but it’s a hugely personal preference, the whisky itself remains excessively difficult and almost uncooperative. For this reason I won’t technically go above 90, but if you like this extreme old style then you’ll adore this one. It’s one of those cases where the beauty is in the mouth of the taster.

Score: 88/100

Brora SMWS 61.1. July 1976-January 1989. 63.6%. 75cl. Screw cap.

This was the first ever bottling of the Brora distillate that was made at the old Clynelish distillery from 1969-1983. Examples of this age are otherwise non existent so, needless to say, I’m pretty thrilled to try this one.

Colour: Straw Gold.

Nose: Hyper clean medicinal notes at first with a really elegant background farminess. Then big notes of bandages, tincture, oysters, lemon juice, mercurochrome and fresh limes. Super clean, pristine peat, the kind that draws in industrial, farmyard, coastal and medical qualities in perfect balance. A feat that only Brora seems to be able to pull of. Further notes of eucalyptus oil, petrol, dunnage and tar. There is also something incredibly fresh about it, notes of wet leaves and brine give it a kind of supercharged freshness. With water: It doesn’t change too much, it just seems to to soften slightly and become even more coastal. Notes of sea breeze, sea weed, lemon thyme, chives, smoked mussels and wet grains, a touch more smoke as well. Utterly stunning!

Palate: At full strength this is almost like peat jam! Hugely thick, oily, waxy and fat! Lots of motor oil, candle wax, tar and phenols, ashy, drying phenols and peaty sweetness as well. Very compelling. Coal soap, more tar, iodine, TCP, muesli, floral blossom notes, juniper, gin and then smoke and wood resin. This is powerhouse stuff that somehow manages to be incredibly drinkable at full strength. Let’s try with water all the same. With water: Oh God! Unbelievably the peat gets even bigger, but at the same time also sort of stretched out and more complex. It feels like a much bigger dram with water (which I wouldn’t have thought possible given its potency when neat). Fat, luscious minerals, flowers, tar, garden fruits, more medicine… lets stop this madness.

Finish: Have you ever seen The Neverending Story?

Comments: I can’t tell what a privilege it is to taste Brora at such a young age, evidently it was already in the realms of greatness in its early teens. This bottling is yet more proof, if any were needed, that Brora is probably one of the most distinctive and personality laden malts in the world. It is also interesting to note that they were clearly still producing very heavily peated batches in 1976. Anyway, this one is a magnificent whisky.

Score: 94/100

A huge thankyou to Nick from the Society for these drams.

If you get a chance to go to the Society vaults in Leith I strongly recommend you do, apart from the stunning array of bottlings to try there is also an incredibly useful and informative collection on display of all the first edition bottles from their archives. It really is worth checking out. What stuck me the other day, whilst looking at many of them for the first time, was that so many were in fact very young and super strong whiskies, like the pair above. It seems they didn’t begin to bottle much older casks until the late 1980s/early 1990s. In other words, great time capsules for those fortunate enough to try them. Keep your eyes peeled.

The elusive 1.1 (An 8yo Glenfarclas)

Well I’m back, which in itself is good news considering the questionable nature of my existence a couple of weeks ago, I even managed to avoid any major sunburn. We had some rather sticky issues at the Ecuador/Peru border at 1 in the morning, overslept and ended up much further into Ecuador than intended and I was seduced by the charms of a ridiculously oversized Alpaca hat in Lima much to the pain of my finances. Still, a wonderful, thrilling and often life affirming time was had. There are too many shreds of overlapping experience to begin talking about here but I will say a few things of interest/note.

1: Ecuador is fucking hot! I stepped out of a very comfortable, air conditioned bus into an oppressive weight of smothering, tropical heat that felt like being wrapped up in moist, recently microwaved, blankets.

2: Placing your body at the unfamiliar heights of 5000 meters above sea level is akin to having lengths of rope slowly tightening round your chest and head while someone pumps anorexic air into your brain with a large pair of fire bellows. It affected me so greatly that by the time we reached our destination of Lake 69 I was scarcely able to behold its otherworldly blueness (see below). Let alone make pointless and inappropriate jokes about its obvious sexual connotations (a missed opportunity that is most unlike me).

Lake 69. This photo is, believe it or not, completely unedited, the water really did look like that.

3: To be on a boat again after so long, winding lazily through a dark river beset by jungle, is something with true power to remove any weight from your shoulders.

4: A bottle of Johnnie Walker Green Label costs around 200 Soles (£45), Blue Label costs about 800 Soles (£175) and a bottle of Dom Ruinart Champagne costs in the region of 400 Soles (£88) while Dom Perignon will set you back at least 1000 Soles (£220). If there are any bottles of single malt whisky to be found in South America then I’m looking in the wrong places so far.

5: The best Ceviche is served in Lima.

6: Alpaca slippers are comfortably within the top five most wonderful things you will ever put your feet into.

7: Good cheese is more addictive than heroin and is technically classed as pornography when displayed in full colour A4 photographic form.

8: Macdonalds still tastes like shit on other continents.

9: I’d probably be dead if it wasn’t for the help, kind heart and multi-lingual might of Maartje Koelemij.

10: There is certainly not enough time in even the longest lifetime to fully explore and understand the vastness that is South America and its many incredible cultures and peoples.

Anyway that’s enough holiday notes for now. I was going to make my first new post a tasting note or two seeing as I have been fortuitously furnished with a fresh set of tasting samples. However, in light of recent musical developments, I have decided to do something I haven’t done on these pages for a while, a whisky and music pairing.

I think the second or third post I did on this blog was concerning my love for the music of Paul Simon, I said I would write again about his music and, true to my word, here we are. Simon released a new album in April, ‘So Beautiful Or So What’, new Paul Simon albums are rare thus making them special by any standards but this one came in a kind of perfect storm of happenstance. I was about to travel as it was released, this meant long silent night busses to spend alone with the music, to become deeply acquainted with every flicker of melody and couplet of lyric, to know the darker corners and hidden shades of the album as a whole. It was also at a point where I have recently been learning many of Simon’s songs on guitar simply to force myself to improve my simplistic abilities, this has lent me a whole new understanding of his songs and his staggering fluency as a musician, not to mention an even deeper respect for the man. Finally this album is actually brilliant, which helps a great deal. All too often with your most cherished artists you find yourself listening to a new album and subconsciously making excuses for them, politely pretending to yourself that this is still good stuff they’re doing. Here there is none of that, the album is the best he has done since ‘The Rhythm Of The Saints’ twenty years ago, it is comfortably the equal of that great album (if not quite as majestic as 1986′s ‘Graceland’).

Through the years Simon has strived to explore new musical territories, many of them rhythmic in nature as his songwriting has for a long time been based from the rhythm upwards. Here he seems to offer a musical landscape populated by the hallmarks of his past and yet still somehow new. The elegant melody of his folk derived sounds is in rich abundance, but like on all his albums the melodies are never obvious enough to drift into predictability or trite prettiness. Instead they are woven through a textured fabric of world class musicianship that is not about grandstanding or solos but about the service of the song. Simon has, over the years carefully surrounded himself with some of the most intuitive, sensitive and brilliant session players in the world and this album seems to showcase this achievement almost more than any other. The impression upon listening is that everyone cares deeply about ‘the song’, the musicianship is bereft of ego or vulgarity, the guitar lines are sparse and beautiful, focused in such a way that only intensifies the power of the music and channels your attention deeper into the innards of each song. There are the Latin and African influences that are a career mainstay since ‘Graceland’ only here they are a balanced, if essential, component of a larger whole. Those flickering rhythms and beds of percussion percolate the whole album in a way that gives it a ‘sound’ yet still allows each song its individuality. Simon has stated that this album was an experiment to some extent with the idea of the album as a piece of work in its own right. In this age of downloads, randomly mixed Ipods and instant playlists, is the album a dead artform? The answer is obviously no but the album is very much an ‘album’, perhaps the most thematically cohesive work Simon has produced since his eponymous solo debut in 1972. Nowhere is this in better evidence than in Simon’s lyrics. Most songwriters seem to lean in strength either towards musicality (ie McCartney) or lyricism (ie Dylan) in their songwriting skills. Simon however seems to be one of the few who truly balance the gap with equal ability on both sides of the songwriting coin. The answer is probably in the fact that he releases an album so infrequently, his style is one of a slow and playful craftsman, a deeply intuitive ability with music but a methodical and disciplined will to take the right time to perfectly craft the songs. This natural method hasn’t always worked but when it does, as with this album, the results are almost unbeatable. He displays levels of songmanship and musical craft that leave most other contemporary songwriters miles behind in the shallow waters of distant memory. Songs like ‘The Afterlife’ (see above) set the thematic tone for the album with a deep rooted yearning for spiritual comfort but channeled through a fabric of humour, wit, warmth and cold honesty in his social and self assessment. The journalistic nature of the song reveals a recently deceased man waiting in line for the afterlife where in equal measure he is lost against the incomprehensibility of God and the universe…

After you climb, up the ladder of time, the Lord God is here.
Face to face, in the vastness of space, your words disappear.
And you feel like swimming in an ocean of love, and the current is strong.
But all that remains when you try to explain is a fragment of song…

… and yet, while he waits in line he tries to chat up a girl…

Woah, there’s a girl over there, with the sunshiny hair, like a homecomin’ queen.
I said, “Hey, what you say? It’s a glorious day, by the way how long you been dead?”
Maybe you, maybe me, maybe baby makes three, but she just shook her head…

His ability as a lyricist is showcased on this album almost better than on any other, although they lack the bite of earlier works they compensate with riveting honesty and depth. His ruminations on love and God that are the emotive driving forces of the album are typically melancholy but inescapably truthful and bereft of cliche or sentimentality. The power is compounded by the warmth and truthful intimacy of his voice. For a man pushing 70 his voice is in remarkably unchanged condition, slightly darker in timbre here and there but otherwise his levels of expression and freshness remain startling. The overall impression is that the extra years have served to impart a wisdom to his voice that has come naturally in place of some his earlier more powerful vocal passion. In all this album is a beautifully crafted and thematically precise collection of songs that seem effortless yet offer haunting and humorous speculations on loss, life, love and God. Without a doubt one of Simon’s best albums and a perfect example to shatter the idiotic myth that songwriting is a young man’s game. These songs are seething with experience and sound just like the thoughts wrung from a mind startled by the immense pain and joy that a lifetime can bring in equal measure. If you are at all interested in songwriting and the art and craft of the song as a means of communication then listen to Paul Simon, most others pale in comparison.

So, as is tradition on this blog, lets pick a whisky to drink while listening to this album. This, I am realising as I type is a much greater challenge when considering a whole album, a work full of twists and turns, quirks of melody and lyric that offset various moods and themes against each other, jumping over and between different feelings and ideas and often returning to but equally abandoning these same contemplations. Tricky in other words and the only thing that comes to mind is a whisky that keeps developing, a dram that evolves in complexity and depth over time but returns upon itself to central flavours and aromas, a whisky that has an obvious structure but with a myriad of adorning and overlapping complexities that add flesh and personality to its bones. It is tempting to just say ‘fuck it lets have an old Ardbeg or Brora‘ but this is a cop out I feel. Besides I don’t really feel compelled to wrestle with such a beast while listening to this music, the two forces need to be complimentary not competitive. A whisky in this situation should be a liquid conductor that helps to fuse the music to your mind and soul.

Oban is an often overlooked or underrated spirit. This is probably due to the fact that most people try the 14yo and quite like it but never get any further because the whisky world is virtually bereft of independent or aged examples. They do exist and most are actually fantastic, the majority of the more obscure expressions you can try range from good to utterly stunning. Like Paul Simon with his rare album releases, he never really wrote a bad song or made a bad record, some are just better than others. I’ve been fortunate enough to try this old seventies era bottling a couple of times and it is a wonderful dram, an example of west coast highland whisky that is not made any more, except perhaps at Springbank (and arguably Oban but lets not get into that). Salty, coastal, powerful and fruity with a gentle complexity that keeps it interesting and evolving all the time. Like the best Obans it is deeply evocative of the place it was made, of the west coast of Scotland and all the weather and memory that those words entail but it is also a mentally nourishing dram. Not overtly peated, not boisterous, just confidently full bodied and potent in its flavours and intensity of personality. I love Oban and, like the music of Mr Simon, I wish there was more available but I suppose the rarity is part of the charm, that’s what makes it special, when one comes along, you can bet it will be worth waiting for.

Next time we’re going to Campbeltown, until then, have a joyful time of it and try and listen to ‘So Beautiful Or So What’, ideally with a big dollop of Oban in a glass.

This post was supposed to be up before the weekend but sadly this was delayed due to my desire to party, thus shattering the idea of a closed distilleries ‘week’. So in reality it is now more like a closed distilleries ‘period of time’, but I think we’ll retain the former title as it is a little more snappy than the alternative. I didn’t post this before as I decided to take a last minute, well earned weekend break in Huacachina, or to give it its full name ‘Huca-Fukin-china’, as the PSF gringos have dubbed it. Huacachina is an oasis in the desert stuck on permanent tourist mode, a place where it is possible to buy all kinds of jewelry, trinkets, polished fossils, fabrics, drugs, postcards, cocktails, various local nik-naks and Peruvian themed oddities. However it is also a fine place to ‘chill the fuck out’, a deep elemental relaxation is easy to find in Huacachina, there may be parties, gringos, locals, sandboarding and pedal boats but there are also quiet corners of solitude and peace. Walking around it seems as if some hippy deity has flown across the sky and anointed Huacachina with a shower of randomly placed hammocks, comfy slings of serenity that close around you and block out the troubles that dog your outside life. It seems strange that only up the road is a nightclub that heaves and oozes at the gills with the sweat and beat of its dancing human populace. I ventured in there once before and found myself fed through the tidal crowd like sausage meat being forced into its casing only to be spat out the other side. A cavern of heat cloaked in a thick fug of evil music and staggering madness, strange then that only a few minutes walk away is silence and bright stars above the soft edges of a desert still warm from the day’s sun. A good place all round in other words.

Huacachina from above...

But back to whisky. I saved Glenugie for last because of all the distilleries lost in the last thirty years or so it is probably the most cult. Not cult in the way of Port Ellen or Brora, they have an almost mainstream level of ‘cult’ about them, cult in the true sense of the word. Almost no one who isn’t seriously into whisky has heard of it, and even then it has only really come to be known to a wider group of drinkers in the last few years due to the rise of social networking and a level of information sharing that could only be facilitated by broadband and wifi. Serge Valentin on Whiskyfun has played a big part by drawing attention to Glenugie’s consistently high quality and showering it with much due praise (maybe we Glenugie lovers shouldn’t thank him for this). Not to mention all the other bloggers, discussion forums and websites that have championed the deceased gem. Nevertheless it retains a genuine cult aura about it. Aided by the fact that new bottlings are very rare, and the legendary ones such as the Sestantes and Cadenheads of old are now so hard to obtain unless you’re unseemly wealthy.

The old Glenugie Distillery from above. A site that now houses and engineering works.

For me Glenugie is exemplary more that almost any other distillery (with the possible exception of old Clynelish) of a style of coastal/highland whisky that is utterly and tragically extinct in contemporary Scotland. It was located far up on the north east coast near Peterhead and almost all bottled expressions display distinct coastal aspects. The best reveal a fantastically complex mix of soot, fruits, wax, minerals, oils, metallic, coastal and farmy qualitites, in short about as old style and unsexy as its possible to get but also show-stoppingly beautiful as well. The one we’ll taste today is not one of the greats but it is still a fine example of the make and the stylistic diversity it was capable of offering.

Glenugie 1977-2010. Signatory. Cask no 1. 670 bottles. Finished in an Oloroso cask for 90 months. 58.6%. 70cl.

Colour: Amber

Nose: Hot, grassy and mineraled at first nosing with big notes of fresh tangerines, jaffa cakes, orange juice, marmalade and some wet sooty notes, obviously the sherry speaking first but it seems very well integrated. Becomes a little more austere with quite a metallic edge on top of beeswax, cola cubes, some quite sharp and extractive notes of wood lignin and big notes of green peppercorns. With water: wow! Lots of menthol, wax and hessian, suddenly becomes very old school and more ‘Glenugiesque’. Wet earth, clay, minerals, a riesling like petrol quality and soggy leaves on a bonfire. Eventually develops quite a few hints of honey and mead, very nice.

Palate: The attack is big and hot at first with lean tannins, strawberries, cassis, black peppercorns, odd notes of oatmeal and more metallic notes like oily steel wool and something slightly greasy. Orange bitters, lemon wax, dried fruits and some nice nuttiness from the sherry that still feels very well integrated. Develops some fresher, greener aspects like under ripe bananas, apple peelings and damsons. Water softens things down but brings out a massive kick of flinty, almost arid spices. Really lively now and very youthful, lots of green fruits and more honey like on the nose. Quite intense but still very enjoyable, one to keep you awake.

Finish: Long, camphory, powerful and gristy with lemons, oil, salt raisins and more fruits.

Comments: This is complex and difficult whisky, not one for beginners as it doesn’t even have the easy cloak of age about it, it really makes you work. I think it is also an example of a finish that really works quite well, although I would argue that this is not a finish, more of a double maturation so to speak. I think maturing whiskies in different cask types is good when enough time is given for proper balance to occur, a good example was Diageo’s Glenkinchie 20yo from a few years ago that had 10 years in bourbon and a further 10 years in brandy casks. The same is true here where the spirit has had almost eight years to adjust to the sherry influence. However I would still have loved to try it naturally without the sherry. This is by no means the best Glenugie, I think it is too disjointed in places and difficult to be 90s material but it is still damn good whisky and a great example of the kind of complexity and multifaceted character this distillery could produce.

Score: 86/100

While doing the tasting notes for this series of tastings I have also been working on individual distillery profiles for Whisky Online’s main site, you can read them if you go to one of the individual distillery sections (although I haven’t finished them all yet). What has struck me throughout this process is that most of the distilleries that closed in the eighties were smaller, two-stilled creatures that belonged to an era of whisky that was dying, slowly drowning in the loch of overproduction and modernisation that characterised Scottish whisky in 1980′s and now seems to be doing the same today. These distilleries were the products of the old generation, a fact evidenced in the styles and flavours of their distillates. They were the old school, distilleries designed to produce smaller quantities of spirit at a slower pace. Distilleries who’s long gone heydays were in a world of coal fired stills, worm tubs, almost natural, painfully slow fermentations, fresh sherry casks and old refill wood. A world of floor maltings, more localised production and self reliance. This world is easy to draw through the rose tinted glasses of retrospect but the old bottlings tell enough of a story if you taste them to know that things did change and have changed irrevocably. Names like St Magdalene, Glenugie, Brora, Coleburn, Banff, Glen Mhor and Millburn were unloved at the time and looked upon merely as unfeasible piles of numbers. They would fall away and in their place would rise the monoliths of the late sixties and early seventies, the Mannochmores, Auchroisks, Macduffs and Tamnavulins of this new world, multi-stilled blending machines that churned out distillates with characters that told a different story and spoke of a new industry. So when we taste these rapidly disappearing spirits today, the remnants of the old guard, it is difficult to taste them without a sense of melancholy, or an awareness of what was lost in their death. During the next decade stocks from these distilleries will inevitably dry up, what’s left in cask and bottle will become unfeasibly expensive and for most of us there will remain only tasting notes and memories. So try these spirits while you still can, taste the great lost distilleries in all their weird and wonderful splendor, when you find a truly great example it is so worth it. Despite the fact they they are lost, the joy in tasting them makes any sadness at their loss worth it, better to have tasted and lost than to have never tasted, or for it to never have existed at all.