Whisky Online Blog

The low lying vineyards of Turckheim in Alsace. Home to some of the worlds most beautiful wines (not to mention a few good whiskies too).

Well that’s me returned from Alsace. I came back by train all day yesterday from Colmar to Glasgow. It all started out well with the French TGV running smoothly and comfortably on time. Unfortunately as soon as I got to King’s Cross in London I assumed there had been some unforeseen apocalyptic cataclysm take place while I was in the channel tunnel. It seems that a few inches of snow renders the entire British transport infrastructure impotent. Obvisously this is understandable, how could we have forseen such weather conditions, cold, snow, icy winds, it’s almost as if it were winter or something. So I dutifully stood with British dignity in a train to Edinburgh that was doing its best to impersonate a carriage on the Northern Line on a friday rush hour. Men and women of all ages stood proudly armpit to armpit as we marveled at the glacial abilities of the UK rail network. I might have found this all the more annoying if it hadn’t been for the fact that I just had one of the best weekends in years visiting friends in Turckheim in Alsace. It was Serge Valentin and his wife’s mutual 50th birthday celebrations coupled with their annual distillation party (D-Day). The result of this is that I have returned with exactly 33 samples of beautiful (in some cases once in a lifetime) spirits to write about. I’m not sure how to tackle this so we’ll start appropriately with two 1960 Strathislas.

The Party on friday night...a rare and beautiful night of good food, brilliant music, amazing wines, wonderful drams and great friends.

Upon arrival at the dinner on friday night the guests were greeted with a seating plan that listed everyone’s name in alphabetical order with the name of certain bottles of spirits next to theirs. This was the seating code so everyone had to find the table with the bottle that corresponded with their name. There was a mix of Cognac, Armagnac, Calvados and whisky, all dating from 1960 (with the exception of the 1926 Lemorton Calvados). Luckily our table had been specially constructed from the attending whisky nuts so we located our 1960 Linkwood fairly swiftly. These two Strathisla were among the various bottles opened that night and seem like a good place to begin wading through this plethora of almighty drams. I’ll refrain from making the ‘it’s a hard job…’ joke.

Strathisla 1960-2000 30yo. Gordon & MacPhail. 40%. 70cl.

Colour: Teak

Nose: Fresh pine resin and furniture polish straight away. A big old bucket of clean, nutty, fragrant sherry with not an open drain or a whiff of sulphur to be seen. Lots of soft, supple stewed fruit characters along with dried fruits, citrus peel, fruit n fiber cereal, fig rolls, jelly tots and dried banana. A really pristine, beautiful nose, the epitome of a good, clean, sherried Speysider.

Palate: Here the delivery is quite big on tannins, woody notes, delicate fruit esters, various fruit cordials, gomme syrup and raisiny, tobacco notes. Some very active wood here methinks. Lighter leafy notes now of wet forest and earth, with pecans and macadamias, quite autumnal in some ways. Orange blossom, marmalade and notes of soot and coal. Becomes a little oily towards the back with some nice camphor elements but still has quite a bit of astringency to it.

Finish: Warming, toasted nuts, fresh bread, olive oil, lots more stewed fruits but becoming a little chalky and cloying from the wood.

Comments: I’ve had a few 1960 Strathislas by G&M in this series and the profiles seem very similar, beautiful on the nose but too woody and heavy on the palate. Sherry heads will probably love this but I think it’s too overpowered. Still wonderfully clean and indulgent nonetheless.

Score: 88/100

Strathisla 1960-2010, 49yo. G&M ‘Book Of Kells’ label series, bottles for the Whisky Fair. 53.2%. 70cl.

Colour: Amber/Bronze

Nose: Wow! Totally different, not nearly the same level of sherry influence in this one. More like an abundance of minerals and fruits. Wet gravel, hessian, camphor, sultanas, rancio, milk chocolate, milk bottle sweets, little herbaceous aromas of fresh chives and parsley and demerara sugar. Bold fruity notes of greengages, freshly baked apple crumble with custard and newly-mown grass. With water there are these big notes of baked bananas, custard and caramelised brown sugar.

Palate: Big delivery all on sultanas, selkirk bannock and roasted spices like cumin and light curry powder. Some of these lovely dried fruit flavours of dates, figs and prunes then more waxiness, hessian and mineral qualities. This is really delicious and it feels stronger in the mouth than it really is which is surprising. Lets try some water… the speed at which this whisky separates when you add water is quite incredible, it happens almost instantaneously. Now there are a few curious tannic elements and lots more thick, oily spiciness with refreshing notes of greengages and kumquats underneath.

Finish: Long, earthy, spicy and lively with more baked apples, sultanas and some distant mineral notes.

Comments: This is fantastic old whisky, still fresh, vigorous and entertaining, a great example of just how beautifully Strathisla can age. Go get some!

Score: 92/100

Many thanks to Serge for these two drams.

Looking back over recent posts there seems to be an excess of good whiskies being tasted on these pages, with many scoring over 90 points. I am not in the habit of being overly kind to whiskies but I am in the habit of getting my grubby mitts on as many great drams as possible and spoiling myself at the expense of other more ‘realistic’ drams, things you might actually buy or happen across in a bar. Well I have decided that come the new year I will endeavor to include lots more down to earth tastings but until then I still have far too many great drams to get through. So for the next month or so this blog will have to become whiskyporn in order to accommodate them. Maybe get some sort of bib for reading it in the coming weeks. Stay tuned tomorrow for a report on the olfactory enormity that was D-Day.

Slante!

And this was only after the first hour of D-Day. A veritable celebration of all things delicious.

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.