A New Dufftown

Dufftown is one of three malts bottled with near-identical labelling, and in a slightly unusual hip-flaskish bottle. Why this should be the case is a matter for another day.

Aside from the twelve and eighteen year old expressions, there are some fancifully named releases without an age statement. Similarly, this latest expression lacks an age, but bears a more traditional or old-fashioned name.

In full then, it's The Singleton of Dufftown Malt Master's Selection.

If you have the patience, you can click or tap on the picture of my tasting note and read it in full. For those of you in a hurry, here's the executive summary, plus analysis.

It's a gentle, easy drinking, well balanced dram. I found flavour notes of:-

• chocolate sweeties (Chelsea Whoppers)
• clootie dumpling (specifically, the outside bit. If you've never enjoyed this delicacy, then I'd make the comparison to flapjacks or raisin-studded biscuit dough)
• lavender & rich tea biscuits
• more chocolate sweeties (orange matchmakers)

In other words, a mild mannered refill sherry barrel whisky.

I think many seasoned malt drinkers would find it a bit too light, or would use it as their warm-up dram. On the other hand, if you're looking for a change of pace from Johnnie Walker but want to keep that ultra-smooth palate and texture, then this is for you.

Distillery Visit: Glenkinchie

I'm probably the wrong person to report on a visit to Glenkinchie. I'm no fan of the whisky, and I don't much care for Diageo either. These caveats aside, there were aspects of the visit that I enjoyed.

(I should say, by the way, that I completely failed to get any good pictures. Diageo, of course, have a blanket ban on photography in production areas or warehousing, but that aside, I failed. I took the distillery bus from Edinburgh, which gives you very little time to wander about. And Glenkinchie is tucked into a wee valley which doesn't offer many telephoto opportunities.)

The first pleasant surprise of the tour was meeting the guide, an ex-colleague from Oddbins days. She knew of old my penchant for pedantry in the nth degree, and was very tolerant of my questions. And, as is nearly always the case with Diageo, the tour script was factually accurate, concise, and very clear. It was great to see the huge wash still (30,963 litres—biggest in Scotland), which hinted at the historical role of Lowland distilleries as volume producers of low quality spirit.

I also enjoyed the tasting at the end of the tour. The bar at Glenkinchie has a very good selection of Distillers Editions and Flora & Fauna bottlings, which isn't always the case. After trying the Glenkinchie 12 (workmanlike) and Glenkinchie Distillers Edition (decent sherry casks, no spirit character) I had a Benrinnes 15 (always a pleasure, at least until 2020 or thereabouts, when the last of the spirit produced by partial triple distillation is finished) and a Lagavulin Distillers Edition.

I always think of Lagavulin as the malt whisky equivalent of Guinness in a crap pub, so to extend the metaphor, Lagavulin Distillers Edition is like going into a pub and finding unpasteurised Guinness, or Guinness Foreign Extra, on tap. In other words, a surprise and a delight.

On the down side, the warehouse we were shown seemed awfully Potemkin village. There was a remarkable absence of dust, dirt, or Baudoinia compniacensis. And when I looked up I could see plenty of daylight through the gaps between the floorboards, which rather implies that the upper warehouse floors are empty.

I also happened across a couple of interesting snippets. The first of these was a Heath Robinson print, about an imagined redesign of the Johnny Walker bottle.

I'm a huge fan of Heath Robinson, so this made me grin. (can you see me grinning in the reflected image?)

The second was this manufacturer's plate on a filter (for worts, I suppose).

Royal Letters Patent

Magnien's

Filtre Rapide

No.2

P.A.Magnien

22-23 Great Tower Street London

Manufactured Aboad

I don't know why, but to me words like these from the past have a very strong appeal.

In summary, this is a great tour for visitors to Scotland. You can be picked up from Edinburgh and be back in the city centre in an afternoon, having enjoyed an imformative trip at a pretty distillery, plus a few acceptable-to-decent drams. For the seasoned malt drinker (as for me), Glenkinchie's main appeal is to add a stamp to your Classic Malts passport.

Distillery Visit: Dalwhinnie

On one of those rare glorious days when the sun is blazing down from a cerulean sky and Scotland seems more beautiful than any other place on Earth, I made the three hour train journey to Dalwhinnie.

The distillery sits just to the north of the village, clearly visible with its whitewashed walls and neat wooden worm tubs. It's a compact distillery, rebuilt in the late 1930s after a disastrous fire, and it feels like it could be the original Victorian buildings. The large impressive worm tubs at the front of the distillery have just been renewed in 2015 and add to the spick and span feel. It's a Diageo distillery, so no photography, which is a bit of a shame, as the mash tun is housed in what was a malt kiln, so there's a fantastic view of Charles Doig's roof from the inside.

Diageo also means a tightly scripted tour, but I was very lucky to have an enthusiastic guide who was happy to address my many supplementary questions. The guide gave a very thorough explanation of the whisky making process, and talked about Dalwhinnie's now abandoned experiment with shell & tube condensers, and how worm tubs are an essential component of the Dalwhinnie character. It was also interesting to learn that Dalwhinnie controls fermentation times by raising the temperature to kill the yeast.

The tun room has one 60,000 litre full lauter mash tun, with the rakes set high so as not to disturb the cereal bed, thus leading to a clear worts. There are six wooden washbacks, which ferment for about 60 hours, to produce a wash of about 9% alcohol.

The stills are large, lantern style, and they are worked hot, so that the spirit vapours don't get too much copper contact.

Dalwhinnie produces about 1 million litres a year. Most of this is stored elsewhere, with only a few thousand casks held onsite, in both racking and dunnage warehouses.

The recipe for Dalwhinnie, so to speak, is to make a fruity wash, distil it quite fast in big stills which don't give much reflux, and cool it rapidly with extremely cold water. The result is a new make spirit which is fruity, but also has a sulphur note. Consequently, the spirit needs long ageing, so as to reduce the sulphur to a trace, a suggestion of meatiness and a fuller body.

After the tour I did the Friends tasting, which includes five different expressions of Dalwhinnie, plus the new make spirit. I would sum up Dalwhinnie thusly:

* Key flavours: toffee citrus(lemon, with a little bitter orange), honey, grist

* Dalwhinnie really doesn't take water very well.

* The variations on the basic theme of the 15 Year Old don't really go anywhere very exciting. The Distillers Edition is allegedly sherried, but you would hardly know. The two outstanding drams were the 25 Year Old (which cost north of £300), and a 1991 cask sample which was delicious, but where the cask character was very dominant. (This is not necessarily a bad thing, but to approach perfection a whisky ought to meld a distinctive spirit with good wood in a way which lets both shine without either dominating)

I had quite a bit of time to kill before getting the train home, so I went for a wander to the south end of the village. It was an absolute belter of a day, and I ended up getting slightly sunburnt, but it was worth it. Just look at that beautiful, beautiful view:

Click on the picture to get the big version in all its sunny glory

Comparison: Càrn Mòr Strictly Limited Mortlach 1998 vs Wemyss Pastille Bouquet Mortlach 1998

Wherein I make invidious comparisons between similar whiskies from different bottlers, and indulge in a moan about pricing.

Càrn Mòr is the brand of a family run Perthshire based bottler of malt whisky. Wemyss Malts is Fife based, but similarly a family affair.

Càrn Mòr's packaging is, to be kind, cheap and cheerful, while Wemyss is rather more classy, with a retro bottle shape, pastel coloured labels, and poetic names (or, if you want to be unkind, word salad).

I tasted Càrn Mòr's Strictly Limited Mortlach 1998, which is a bottling from two ex bourbon hoggies, versus Wemyss Malts Pastille Bouquet Mortlach 1998, from a single hoggie. Both are bottled at 46% ABV. There was a great deal in common between the two, with plentiful confected fruit flavours tending to the yellow and red parts of the flavour rainbow (or map or wheel or mandala or whatever it is these days) in both bottlings. Both also showed an elegance, and had a rounded and long finish.

But, whereas the Càrn Mòr whisky had well integrated wood notes, which added to the overall complexity of the dram, the Wemyss bottling seemed rather dryer, and the oak tannin was slightly aggressive in the finish. Only in the direct comparison, mind you. Having previously tasted both these whiskies separately (or rather, against other malts, not other Mortlachs), I would have struggled to describe the differences.

It seems to me that Càrn Mòr obtained the better casks, or were able to produce a better whisky by selecting two casks of contrasting character. So it's probably about right that the Wemyss is a fiver cheaper (£53.50).

Both of them, however, seem cheap when one contemplates the forthcoming new official Mortlach releases. On commercial grounds Diageo can't be faulted for their decision to reposition Mortlach as a luxury brand, competing in the same segment as Macallan and Dalmore. But in going from £55 for 70cl of 16 year old malt to  50cl of no-age-statement malt for the same price they're really taking the piss underlining the arbitrary nature of whisky pricing. Their costs haven't suddenly jumped up (although I suppose that bottle design doesn't come cheap)

To me, a whisky drinker with a long memory (and an obsessive note taker), the current steep upward trajectory of malt prices, despite rising demand, looks awfully like greed and short-termism. Here's hoping it doesn't precipitate another crash and a wave of closures. Caol Ila as the Port Ellen of 2050, anyone?

Distillers Editions Worth Their Weight

Diageo don't have a great reputation here in Scotland. The brutal self-interest which has led them to announce the closure of their Kilmarnock operation is a case in point. But it cannot be denied that they produce some superb whiskies.

It was the 1986/2002 Lagavulin Distillers Edition which made me sit up, pay attention, and start tasting whisky seriously. (A more accurate description would be to say that I fell into the whisky for a minute or so, becoming completely oblivious to the crowd of 1000 jolly, drunk people around me)

At a whisky dinner I hosted at The Bothy back in February the dram of the night was the Clynelish Distillers Edition. It outshone even the Highland Park 18 Year Old, a whisky which has more than once been called the best in the world.

Tonight's example, the Caol Ila Distillers Edition, maintains that standard. It is a profound dram, the nose an intense swirl of sweet bacon wood smoke, with a briney tang like the saltiness when you are swimming in the sea and accidentally swallow some seawater.

The palate is at once sweet and oily and salty and smoky, long lasting, with a hit of pepper in the finish. The flavours persist for more than a minute, and the smokiness for nearly three.

Compared to the twelve year old expression , the Distillers Edition is more intense, longer lasting, bigger, more complex; still the same whisky, but with the intensity turned up to eleven.

I haven't tasted any of the Manager's Choice whiskies, but it is hard to see, at the price being asked, that they can be anything but an exercise in separating collectors from their money, when such gems as the DEs are available for a fifth of the price