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)

I have always liked Bowmore, but as vast swathes of modern Scottish distillates continue to merge in vanilla driven style these days I find myself loving its distinctive taste more and more. I think there is also something to be said for the way it has changed in recent decades, arguably those changes have been greater and more striking than at almost any other distillery. We all know what I’m on about. I’m talking about that surreal charge from the most glorious kind of tropical heaven sent whisky that it was up until around the mid 70s, through the mind boggling, perfume sodden weirdness of the 1980s until finally emerging as the super fresh, pristine, coastal beauty it has become today. Whether or not you like (probably not) that bizarre 80s style of Bowmore, I know I don’t, I think the most important thing is that it is precisely this kind of idiosyncrasy that keeps this one of the most fascinating and compelling distilleries in Scotland today. Certainly the current style of distillate it produces is, for me, one of the best in Scotland, it is clean, fresh, zingy, precise, expressive and provides a wonderful balance of coastal, peat and farmyard characteristics, at its best it can even show glimmers of its old 60s glory. I like to think of its 90s renaissance as something akin to what happened at Springbank, you might even call it the Springbank of Islay. But then again you probably shouldn’t because it’s Bowmore and Bowmore is very much its own distillery, something to be admired in these times of homogenization where distillery character seems to be a dying light in too many glasses.

I got six samples of Bowmore in the post recently that range from the late 80s to the late 90s so we’ll have a wee two parter tasting session in honor of that fact. For the sake of fun I’ve arranged them in chronological order rather than in the usual rising degrees of alcohol structure. First up is a 1987.

This is the most acceptable image you get when Googling 'French Whores'

There has been a puncheon full of ink devoted to the subject of why Bowmore from the 1980s tastes the way it does. Accusations of the whisky smelling like Nocturnal Gallic Businesswomen are not unfounded in my view, although my experience with such matters is mercifully thin. In fact if I ever met a French prostitute I’d probably nervously tell her she smelled like Bowmore. Many theories have been posited as to why this style arose, they range from dodgy yeast strains, new condensers that scolded the spirit, badly run stills, poor wood management, added soap during the distillation and any other number of tinkering changes in the production process. I’m not going to go into too much depth because Dave Broom has already written an excellent and pretty definitive report on this subject for Malt Maniacs. What I find most fascinating however is the fact that Bowmore (or rather it’s parent company Suntory) have been unable to admit that there is actually a problem or that these characteristics even existed at all. They went so far as to threaten libel action against early writers who dared to suggest such things. Well I’m not arfaid to say their 80s output was flawed and tastes like a wrestlers armpit that’s been stuffed to the gunnels with lavender and bath soaps. What are they going to do? Come and get me?

Anyway, the fact that the style began to arise around 1979 and disappears around 1989 is very telling indeed. It was clearly a problem that was hidden within the precursors in the spirit. Precursors being the various chemical compounds, congeners and reactionary elements in the new make that are initially dormant but with time in cask become more and more apparent. Precursors are the essence of distillery character, they are the wax in Clynelish, the citrus in Bladnoch and the apples in Glenfiddich. Likewise they were the perfume in Bowmore. Clearly after 10 years of maturation someone in the labs said ‘hang on a second..’ and necessary adjustments were made to alter these elements in the spirit. These changes can be clearly tasted if you try a run of Bowmores from the late 80s through to the early 90s. Interestingly these notes have been found in various examples of Glen Garioch (and Auchentoshan some have claimed) from the same era but have long since disappeared from these distillates as well. I think what we should take away from this is the fact that Bowmore changed for the better and regardless of the fact it had a dodgy decade, it is now very much ‘on form’. In fact, many of the bottlings now emerging from the early nineties with good age behind them are starting to reach the status of minor masterpieces. Lets hope there’s much much more to come…

Bowmore 1987/2010. 22yo. Douglas Laing ‘Old & Rare’. Sherry Finish. 244 Bottles. 56.1%. 70cl.

Colour: Honey

Nose: Lavender, smoke and caramel at first, it’s not too intense but it is definitely of that 80s era. Very fragrant, floral and soft with odd notes of cheese sticks and cookie dough. These profiles are so weird that they can’t seem to help but be compelling, very masochistic whisky if you ask me. Now some nice notes of juniper and some faint touches of burned acrylic. Lets add some water: with water it becomes much smokier and a little more natural, those intense notes of lavender have died down and it is actually quite pleasant, leafy and fresh. Not bad.

Palate: Neat it is hot and intense with some massive notes of lavender soap, violets and perfume with chocolate, prunes, some fairly clean and pleasant sherry and dates. The soap is not too big but when combined with those lavender, violet and perfume notes it is just too much, like when you walk into a cloud of deodorant spray at the gym or something. More slight cheesiness, chalk, some drying oakiness, beeswax and rotten orange peel. With water: soap city, not good. Actually becoming unpleasant now.

Finish: Hot, prickly, floral and perfumy. A perfume burp?

Comments: I would say this is a good example of this extremely individual and bizarre make. 1980’s Bowmore is clearly not a spirit to everyone’s taste, but I think it should be tasted by everyone, if only for the experience. The difference between this and the make from the preceding and following decades is truly remarkable.

Score: 74/100

A recent but somewhat obscure bottling of 1990 Bowmore that was done for the re-launch of the British East India Company.

Bowmore Somerled 1990-2008. 18yo. 46%. 70cl.

Colour: Straw

Nose: It’s all cream and brine in big lolloping quantities at first, delicate notes of fresh vanilla sit comfortably with drier aspects like flints, salt, cotton wool, minerals, greek yoghurt, There is something of an ‘80s’ quality in here but it is so faint and minor you could be forgiven for thinking you imagined it. The whole is just a delicious and distinctive smelling 1990s Bowmore. Super-fresh, uber-pristine, very coastal and wonderfully expressive. The nose goes on with coal, tar, hints of marmite, hessian, earthy peat, farmyard, engine oil and some tinned peaches. Some intensely fresh notes of mineral, lemon, wet pebble and seashore at the back.

Palate: Slightly stinky at first with vegetal, earthy and farmy aspects but freshens out as you go moving into more coastal and citrusy areas. Almost a glycerol peat, it’s not huge, not as big as the peat tended to get in Bowmore after 93/94 but it is distinctively velvety and oily in the way it manifests here. I think the palate is not as complex as the nose although the flavours are very distinct and well formed, not to mention well balanced. The best thing though is that there is no shortage of distillery character here and it’s a great example of the natural beauty of this great distillery.

Finish: Long, lemony, salty, briny and all kinds of coastal, with a mouthwatering dry edge to it.

Comments: Just another top notch and very classy 1990’s Bowmore. One of the most distinctive makes around these days I think.

Score: 89/100

I stole this from Dewar Rattray's website, I'm sure they won't mind. Interestingly, they are the only IB to offer a comprehensive and detailed online list of their past bottlings, why the hell can't all independents do this?! It would make life so much easier. Hats off to DR for that.

Bowmore 1990/2010 20yo. Dewar Rattray. Cask 272. 204 bottles. Fresh Bourbon. 50.2%. 70cl.

Colour: Chardonnay

Nose: Pin sharp saline coastal notes at first on top of fresh butter, cocoanut and parsley. It’s almost a bit Laphroaigesque but for a tiny hint of (surprise) lavender, but the cask does the loudest talking with notes of pine sawdust and vanilla. A very creamy, quite modern and well composed Bowmore this one, I think the work is ‘textbook’. With a little time it develops some nice notes of fresh lime juice, salt and germoline. With water: Wow, it got much much fruitier, tinned pineapple, a little passion fruit, some banana, it’s very suggestive of old style pre 1976 Bowmore. Some more drying coastal notes like wet pebbles, seashore, seaweed and fresh oysters. Now it starts to become more herbal and medicinal with notes of yellow Chartreuse, Kummel, dried herbs and brine. Wonderful, complex whisky so far.

Palate: At full strength it is very consistent with the nose but there is also a marvelous chewy aged peat character and a whole load of grass, apricots, garden fruits, floral notes, cereals, plums, green tea and preserved lemons. An absolutely fantastic and flavour filled delivery, with a hint of 80s Bowmore floral character but it appears very restrained and balanced with all those other aspects. Juniper, juicy fruits, salt, green peat oils, jasmine tea, coriander, a real Gin like botanical character to this one. I almost hesitate to add water after that but … With water it doesn’t change too much but seems to stretch all those flavours out and soften them all, it feels like a more lazy version of the same whisky.  More notes of green tea, homemade lemonade, green pepper, some gentle floral notes, orange blossom, more salt, still very good but maybe a bit better without water on the palate.

Finish: Long, saline, classy and very elegant. It seems to go full circle on itself and become a bit more ‘modern’ again with the cask giving up more notes of vanilla and cream.

Comments: This is a very entertaining and drinkable whisky, it seems to be ever changing and delivers a multifaceted showcase of all the various historical styles of Bowmore from the past forty years or so. It really is a lot of fun. It’s also one of those curious whiskies that you’ll need to pour two glasses of, one to nose and one to drink, the nose is better diluted but the palate is better neat. Anyway, it’s another great 1990 Bowmore, well done to Dewar Rattray for bottling this one.

Score: 90/100

Next time we’ll delve deeper into the latter nineties…

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.