Closed Distilleries Week: Glenugie
12 Apr
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.
