Whisky Online Blog

I haven’t posted anything for a while and the reason for this is that I have been heavily engaged in extensive and exhausting ‘research’ as of late. I am just returned/recovered from the Whisky Show and needless to say I had a blast down in that big old concrete and glass pancake they call London. Congratulations and the dothing of all kinds of headgear are in order for the good people at TWE and Speciality Drinks who organiised the event, it was thoroughly enjoyed by everyone there that I spoke to.

Happy punters in the early hours of the afternoon at the fabulous Brewery venue.

One of the highlights of the show was the review pod, run by the good people at connosr, where you could review your favourite (or most hated) drams of the day on camera. It made for some quite entertaining nuggets of olfactory rumination over the course of two days, the collection features such luminaries as Serge from whiskyfun, Joel and Neil from caskstrength and even some gibberish from a lunatic in a kilt. Check them out here.

Of course I did my fair share of sample bagging while I was there. As a professional blogger obviously my goal was to sift carefully though all the bottlings on offer at the show and carefully select a mix of interesting new releases and fairly priced bottlings along with a balance of official and independent examples, with just a smattering of premium drams. Sadly my attempts to do this amounted to little more than catastrophic failure as I was seduced by ridiculously premium drams one after the other. I was a common sight, dashing about filling my sample bottles with every drop of amazing, rare and expensive liquid I could get my grubby mits on. So instead of measured, useful tasting notes in the coming weeks, expect to be bombarded with a torrent of gushing, praise packed, ridiculously over the top tasting prose. I was truly guilty of filling my boots, but what the hell, I’m a whisky lover, isn’t that an excuse for most things..? Anyway here are two of the most stellar offerings at the show, a pair of ancient Glen Grants.

Another in Gordon and MacPhail's seemingly inexhaustible supply of incredible old speysiders.

Glen Grant 1948-2006. 58yo. Gordon & MacPhail. 40%. 70cl.

Colour: Dull Gold

Nose: Immensely fragrant notes of wax polish, old smoked tea, antique shops, leather, old books, cigar tobacco and painfully fragile phenols. This is one of those utterly classy old school aromas that seems to come through so beautifully at this lower strength. Hints of aged sauternes and old liqueur with really pristine crystallized fruit. Just brilliant.

Palate: Feels like a bigger strength than 40, wonderfully dry and mineral with smoky tea flavours again and beautiful dry fruit. Hints of liquorice, lots of menthol and more really delicate peat, already a little metalic edge in there as well. Tastes like most pre-war bottlings from the same distillery. You could drink yards of this stuff it’s so gentle.

Finish: Incredibly delicate with orange muscat and more metallic notes. Tiptoes away like a ghost.

Comments: This is beautiful but also incredibly delicate whisky, I think this one really would have benefitted from being bottled at full strength but we know that will never happen with G&M. Anyway it may not be the best old Glen Grant ever but it’s still utterly glorious.

Score: 91/100

A very inviting 1954 Glen Grant by MacLeods.

Glen Grant 1954. 50yo. MacLeod’s. Bottle 37/100. Cask no: 3612. 42.2%. 70cl.

Colour: Amber

Nose: Much fresher and fruitier than the G&M. Lots of green and tropical fruit syrups with hints of fresh butter and candyfloss on top. Big notes of fresh mango, guava and chocolate limes, then some hints of older qualities like furniture polish and beeswax. Becomes more mentholated with time, getting more like the G&M in some parts but still much fresher and without the same peat qualities. This nose is amazingly fresh for fifty years old, the oak is so balanced.

Palate: Lots of menthol, toothpaste and chewing gum, with really ethereal fruit qualities. More fruit syrup flavours and big chunky fruitiness, mangos and lychees with hints of rosewater, this is becoming like a great old Gewürztraminer. Amazingly there is almost no overbearing oak whatsoever, a little soapiness comes through after a while but it is of the very fragrant, floral kind. Also hints of cherries, really gentle spice and cocoanut, this gets more and more complex all the time. Hessian, steel wool, soot, motor oil… ok enough enough. This is getting crazy.

Finish: Long, waxy and intense, a real mouth-coating fanfare.

Comments: If ever there was a whisky that showed just how amazing Glen Grant can be when properly aged then this is it! Is it worth the hefty price tag? Who cares, it’s beautiful.

Score: 94/100

No doubt there will be more useless Malt Porn to follow in the coming days. Slante!

Just a quick post today as I’m off on holiday tomorrow for a week and a bit and there is still some packing of stuff to be done. Today I thought I would choose a piece of music to suit a whisky I tried very recently in the great Bon Accord pub in Glasgow. It was over a week ago and I’ve been racking my brains since trying to think of something to pair it with. The whisky in question was this little joybeast:

This GG fizzes with flavour like a sherbet jacuzzi (whatever one of those might be).

I had seen this Glen Grant kicking about in a number of places in recent years and always been curious about it, its 75cls so presumably was bottled in the early nineties and distilled sometime in the early sixties. Already this is alluring enough but it didn’t prepare me for what I found in the glass. Given it blind I might have said Glen Grant/Mortlach/Strathisla/Macallan but more importantly I would have sworn it was some kind of pre-war distillate. I’ve never smelt anything with that combination of peat, fruit, menthol and rancio that was distilled after 1947. It had something devastatingly old-school about it. One of these whiskies you feel guilty for not drinking while in a gentleman’s cigar club, sporting a monocle and discussing the problematic upkeep of the serving staff at your manor in dorset. For a while I considered trying to be really clever and find some sort of obscure, juxtapositional indie band to pair it with, I listened to things like Mumford & Sons and fleet Foxes, then I thought maybe Radiohead or The Bees. I realised it was time to re-evaluate this angle when I was staring blankly at various online videos of Lady GaGa trying to fabricate some tenuous link between a beautiful, thrillingly retro malt whisky and a be-frocked, all prancing, all singing diva that looks like the accidental product of a meldown at the handbag factory. She’s like the Joker realised by Gucci. Anyway I decided to just go with what felt right not what seemed clever and in five minutes I came up with this.

Ragtime is a very difficult style to play, at least it is on the guitar, I couldn’t speak for the piano but I imagine it is a great deal more difficult than the utterly brilliant Winifred Atwell makes it look here. Just listening to this brings back some olfactory memories of these kind of old school whiskies. You can imagine the world in black and white with Winifred at the piano, a smoky club and a few empty bottles of Haig littering the bar. Ragtime has such an unmistakable, familiar sound to it, it manages to be somewhat timeless yet of such a distinct era in history. Who among us has not grown up with The Entertainer engraved on our subconscious from an indeterminate early age? You could probably pair these kinds of whisky well with Jazz just as easily, it makes sense, the musical freedom of Jazz, its unpredictability, its luxurious expressive qualities, they compliment the complexity in great whiskies, bringing to life their more surprising and quirky personality angles. But for me there is something in the melodic, off-beat structure of Ragtime that is more appealing, I suppose its my love of song craft. Ragtime is exactly what it says, ragged time, it can be malleable, played with and improvised within but there is still a skin, a beautiful, melody draped framework to hang these variations around. It is these compositional qualities inherent in ragtime, the basic foundations that hold everything in place, that makes it so good with whisky, the structure and balance of a great dram, its length and progression, the journey from aroma to finish and all the nuances in between. Sadly there aren’t many players of Winifred’s class, but then there aren’t that many whiskies in the same league as these old style drams, I’ve probably said this before but its worth repeating, life would be very dull if there were. Please check out more of Winifred’s music and go out of your way to try this glorious Glen Grant.

Cinema Paradiso is one of those films that everyone remembers. Its the sort of epic, passion infused, sumptuous narrative that reeks of masterpiece. Its a kind of cinema that I think really doesn’t exist outside Europe, sure there are many life affirming films from many parts of the world, its just something about the sheer celebratory joy of this film that is so unmistakably… continental.

One of many famous images from the film.

Taken from a critical standpoint this is, on the surface, a film that is probably overly long, over indulgent, shamelessly sentimental and melodramatic. In short, its not without its flaws, its just very difficult to care about any of them. When I was at university, I did four years of Film and Television studies. Four years of analysing films and learning to deconstruct every shot and frame to wring meaning from a complex canvas of dialogue, music, mise en scene and narrative. You learn to read a film, it becomes second nature and after this it is difficult to switch it off, even during something as disposable as Transformers 2 you can still find yourself subconsciously deconstructing what’s going on. This is not as annoying as it sounds, for me it adds to the richness of the film experience but it is something that is almost impossible to loose. Cinema Paradiso is one of the rare films where I find myself just getting lost in the film, I often react against a film’s attempts to pull me in but with Cinema Paradiso the joy is in letting go, surrendering to the film and being dragged down into it.

The film is basically an unashamed celebration of the joys of cinema and film. It is a love story on many levels, romantic love, love of cinema, love of life, family and, perhaps most crucially, friendship. It is long and sprawling but its length is so liberally filled with moments of overwhelming beauty you can’t help but become caught up in its narrative. It is really a film that is defined by its moments, whether they are single, beautifully realised shots or tiny classic scenes that brim with wit and pathos. Its beauty is in the sum of its parts and its greatness is in the majestic skill with which it weaves those smaller parts together so seamlessly. It is one of those rarest of films, one that revels in beauty and joy, there is no bitterness, no cynicism, no hyper-stylised excuses for lack of substance, it is simply masterful, joyous story telling. If you can make it to the end scene in the cinema with the kissing montage without shedding a tear you should see a doctor about the shard of ice in your heart.

This delicious Bruichladdich is just one of many utterly mind blowing Italian bottlings from the seventies and eighties.

It seems appropriate that such a masterful piece of cinema should hail from Italy, especially when considering matching it with a whisky. I say this because Italy, during the 1970s and 80s probably had a higher and more consistent stream of world class bottlings done for it that any other country at any time. Samaroli, Intertrade and Sestante, to name but a few, between them managed to import some of the greatest whiskies yet known to man. It was a stroke of ingenuity and foresight that was largely thanks to a pioneering whisky enthusiast named Edward Giaccone who imported some utterly stunning casks (particularly some legendary Clynelish). Of course others soon followed of which the most famous is undoubtedly Mr Silvano Samaroli. I recommend here the Bruichladdich, shown above, because it is a fantastic example of beautiful, old school, life-affirmingly good whisky. However you could pick almost any of the Samaroli bottlings from the late seventies and eighties, he selected stunning examples from Bowmore and Glen Ord for his glorious ‘Bouquet’ series, wonderful aged speysiders like Glen Moray, Strathisla and Glen Grant, top class Ardbegs and not forgetting the 1967 black sherried Laphroaig. These were whiskies that give you the same overwhelming sense of joy that is to be found in the film. Some whiskies are so spellbinding with their depth of flavour, balance, complexity and seemingly endless and multifaceted characters that they offer something of an affirmation that life can, on that rare occasion, be fucking marvelous. Obviously many of these whiskies are neither cheap nor common these days but this is to be expected. If you do want to try them then the best bet is, as usual in these cases, to check the multitude of rare dram stands at some of the more serious festivals in Europe. Still, its always worth keeping an eye out for the occasional bargain bottle here and there, you never know, there are always hidden gems to be found gathering dust on obscure shelves in the darker rural recesses of the continent. These are drams that truly make life worth living and liquid worth drinking. Just remember, if you do happen to crack one of these bottles open, make sure you have some sound friends around to help you send it on its way.