Bruichladdich Biodynamic Project

Last week I attended the Glasgow launch of Bruichladdich's new Biodynamic malt at Rémy Cointreau's offices in Blythswood Square.

There were wonderful canapés provided by Fallachan (that Chicken of the Wood - good lord what a flavour), excellent mixed drinks by (my colleague) Danny McManus, and I had several fascinating conversations with different 'Laddie folks around the topics of biodynamics and sustainable agriculture. We even drifted slightly into terroir territory. But most importantly, we tasted the whisky.

 

We were joined from the Bruichladdich distillery by head distiller Adam Hannett, who talked us through the growing of the barley and the making of the whisky.

Here are the facts I found most interesting or important about this new whisky:

• Biodynamically grown barley gave Bruichladdich higher yields than conventionally grown crops of the same variety.
  

• The whisky making isn't biodynamic, just the farming of the barley itself. Adam says that, with Bruichladdich making so many different expressions, they prefer to keep the brewing and distilling processes the same, since they're focused on barley varieties, locations (the T-word again), and barrel type. Although he's not ruling out future experiments with yeasts...
  

• As yet, Bruichladdich doesn't have any Scottish biodynamic growers, so for this cuvée they sourced the barley from Yatesbury House Farm in Wiltshire. It's their only expression not made with Scottish barley, and I did rather get the impression that Bruichladdich is a little unsure of how their fans and followers will respond to that point of difference.
  

Tasting Notes

This is a cask sample at 55%, whereas the finished product will be bottled at 50%. It was distilled in 2011 from a variety called Westminster, and the whole batch has been matured in first fill ex bourbon barrels.

To nose, it's bright and fresh, with a slight initial spirity fire. There's a load of sweet dried grass or haylage, plus a real honey sweetness. Over time, fruitiness develops - peaches, stone fruits, ripe yellow orchard fruits.

With water there's more fruit and less grassiness, and I also found a floral note; specifically roses.

The palate is full bodied, very sweet, and mouth coating. I'm reminded of vanilla ice cream and peaches. There is a drying oak note in the finish, which is more emphatic with water. As with the nose, adding water brings out more fruit character - ripe yellow apples, peaches, and other stone fruits.

In conclusion, I enjoyed this whisky very much. Comparing this with other expressions of the 'Laddie, I'd say it has a really rich, mouth coating texture — oily, even. It also seems sweeter than most, and I didn't find any of the lactic or funky notes that I would often associate with the distillery. Excellent, would recommend.

You can read more about this whisky on Bruichladdich's website.

Single Malts of Scotland Bruichladdich 1992 26 Year Old

This is cask #3841, bottled at 54.9%, a sample very kindly provided by Elixir Distillers.

First impression: Fust! lovely old fust.

On the nose there's rich old malt and fust, and perhaps something savoury. It seems rather prickly for a twenty-six year old.

Yep, it's definitely rich, and smells properly old, and a little funky. Perhaps the herbalness of a tomato sauce as it cooks.

I do keep mentioning fust, don't I? It's a good thing too, in my book, but it does rather dominate. I don't see any of the lactic character one finds in younger Bruichladdichs.

On the palate it's sweet and thick and slightly bitter. There's an interesting spicy or peppery note, and something of bitter almond. I'd say the sweetness tends more to syrup than honey.

Over time the malt elements become stronger. It's persistently jaggy on the tongue and soft palate.

In conclusion I'd rate this whisky as good. There's a degree of complexity to it, and the fustiness (that damp-seeming aroma which reminds us of the delights of a dunnage warehouse) is great, but it's definitely a wee bit sharp for twenty-six years, and I don't think it really shouts Bruichladdich.

3+ (on a scale of 0: faulty / 1: poor / 2: adequate / 3: good / 4: excellent / 5: outstanding)

Youthful Malt Not Considered Harmful

The cyclical nature of Scotch Whisky sales, forever moving from boom to bust to boom to bust, has occasionally led the industry into difficulties of its own making.

The slump of the eighties led in turn to an oversupply in the oughties of well aged malt, which the industry attempted to tackle by emphasising age as the one true mark of quality.

The (inevitable?) consequence of that tactic, of course is that during the most recent boom many producers have been reluctant to admit that they are bottling younger whiskies, resorting instead to the modesty blanket of a fanciful brand name, and taking advantage of the fact that they aren't actually obliged to state the age of a whisky.

This has led to much public argumentation between, broadly speaking, two camps. On the one hand there are those irate persons, generally not employed in the industry, who consider Non Age Statement whiskies to be a bad thing, and on the other the more emollient voices, often of those in the trade, who defend the practice as a sensible response to a shortage of aged stock.

(It has also, amusingly, led to Compass Box's clever dancing round the rules, and to Bruichladdich's rather more low-key activities in the same vein. Both of which I consider to be a good thing.)

But few bottlers have bitten the bullet and released young whiskies with prominently displayed aged statements. Which leads me to Càrn Mòr.

Càrn Mòr is the single malt brand of Morrison & Mackay, the Perthshire independent bottler and erstwhile maker of whisky cream liqueurs. I'm a fan of their whiskies for several reasons. Their labels are admirably clear and informative; young Peter Mackay, their envoy in the West, is an entertaining and charming fellow; their bottlings offer, in my opinion, good value for money; and most importantly, they generally bottle good whisky.

I expect I'm wrong (and please do correct me) but I believe they were the first bottlers in recent times to offer a malt with a '4' prominently displayed on the label, on a Glentauchers distilled in 2010 and bottled from a sherry puncheon in 2015. That was a fine dram; fiery, but also packed with marmalade and demerara sugar flavours, and ridiculously good value for money.

Tonight's bottle, by contrast, is a venerable five year old. It's from the blessed Glenburgie, and is a very fine example of the fruity style at which that distillery excels. The nose immediately shouts out "Fruit!" at you, and a deeper sniff reveals it to be Opal fruits. The palate is light, soft, fresh , and fruity. It's not complex, and there is a wee bite to it, but that fruit is just charming. A lovely wee dram, and very sensibly priced too. Oh, and it's really rather fruity.

I suppose I need hardly say that I wish more bottlers would follow the example of Càrn Mòr. I'm not that fussed about the age of a whisky, as long as it tastes good, but I don't care for smoke and mirrors. Or heritage and haggis and no age statement.

Terroir, again.

I keep having the same sort of argument with different people about terroir and whisky, most recently with @maltreview and @WhiskyPilgrim. Since Twitter doesn't lend itself well to lengthy exposition, here's a blog post instead.

The notion of terroir is deeply bound up with wine, and with France. The word itself is French, although my copy of Hachette unhelpfully translates it as "land". The Oxford Companion to Wine offers the slightly more useful "total natural environment of any viticultural site". The Companion then goes on for some two or three thousand closely spaced words which—and I hope my twitter antagonists can agree—don't really serve to settle the matter definitively.

But I think all sides can agree that a terroir wine has flavours unique to the place where its grapes were grown and where it was made.

How, then, does this idea transpose into Scotch whisky? I would argue that it doesn't.

We can straight away disregard the hundred plus distilleries who buy their malt from Crisps or Bairds or whatever, since that barley is sourced from all over the UK and beyond. For them, there can not be the total natural environment of the triticultural site. Their barley is not site specific.

But even when we look at Springbank or Bruichladdich or Ballindalloch, the idea of a flavour unique to the place where the barley is grown does not stand up to any sort of scrutiny.

That's because the analogy with winemaking is just that, an analogy - and a poor one at that. Wine is the all but inevitable consequence of not drinking the grape juice, of leaving the juice to rot. Humans need do little more than pick and press the grapes and something wonderful (or at least drinkable) will result. Whereas whisky is the end result of a multi stage process, with each stage contributing flavours. The human element is far more important than in wine making.

From the peating level of the malt to the length of fermentation to the shape of the stills to how the stills are run to the choice of casks, all these human choices contribute much more than the place where the barley is grown.

We see this in the resulting product. Yes, Bruichladdich's Islay barley bottlings are slightly different from their Scottish barley expressions - but they are unmistakeably, first and foremost, Laddies. And Springbank's Local Barley bottlings differ from other Springers of similar age and cask type, but they are most definitely Springbank.

By contrast, were Laphroaig to take barley from Rockside farm and turn it into whisky according to the Laphroaig method and procedure, which would it more resemble, Laphroaig 10 or Bruichladdich Islay Barley?

The unvoiced answer to this rhetorical question is why we talk about distillery character and not barley field character. Whisky terroir does not exist.