Category: Agitprop

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Agitprop

Ardbeg: A Close Reading

I have a confession to make; I love modern Ardbeg. This is not a stance shared by my blogging counterparts, for whom every one of the Islay distillery’s limited editions is a bitter, 1,200-word disappointment. But I’m okay with being the black sheep – or should that be Blaaack sheep? – on this one.

My admiration for the brand is only partially based on its whiskies. Ardbeg, to an extent and degree not seen elsewhere in Scotch whisky, are content creators, their marketeers bent on stoking Reddit and the Malt Reviews of this world. Their central belief is that a following, brand recognition, even brand equity, should all serve brand engagement.

You can look at the brand in a similar way to Star Wars. Ardbeg under Allied Distillers was a bit like the first trilogy from Lucas Film – a cast of characters and a universe are introduced which become hugely meaningful to a passionate (and niche) group. Then Disney/LVMH take over and production gradually goes into overdrive; the universe expands, and schisms emerge. Some old fans stay with the ship while others mutiny; meanwhile, plenty of new disciples join the crew. Crucially, everyone has an opinion on what’s happening, and they want to share it.

A Long Time Ago, On An Island Not So Far Away…

What began as Ardbeg’s coterie of aficionados quickly grew. After the revival in 1997 and the creation of the Committee in 2000, the Ten was re-released and Uigeadail won Jim Murray’s Whisky of the Year. Ardbeg was pulling itself up by its bootstraps. Once the distillery began selling new expressions exclusively to Committee members first, there was a crush of people wanting to be in the club. Every website crash confirmed that the cult was reaching critical mass, the race to acquire bottles becoming another means of radicalisation. For a long time, it didn’t matter what Ardbeg released – if you were really part of the Committee, you had to have it.

One Underwhelming Spin-Off Too Many

This state of frantic FOMO endured until around 2012. I noticed that Galileo had a mixed response. Personally, after Ardbog in 2013 and Auriverdes in 2014, I was beginning to question matters too. A pun as an excuse for a new whisky? An Islay single malt for the football World Cup in Brazil? The liquids failed to convince, too – NAS, with modest cask variation dressed up as something compelling and essential. The hype was as heady as ever, but whisky nerds began to suspect that they were being hoodwinked – and said so.

The brand team could have swithered, but instead they doubled down. After sending ‘whisky’ into space, the marketeers continue to widen the conversation beyond a pair of stills on Islay’s south coast, conscious that there is a whole universe to explore.

Brave New World

Ardbeg are now prolific authors of liquid texts, seizing upon the boldness fostered by the distillery’s resurrection. Weird and wacky are all fine, so long as they stimulate (or provoke) conversation.

Compare the content created for Alligator from 2011 with Scorch in 2021 – it’s effectively the same whisky, only the amphibious reptile of the former has become a fully-fledged, fire-breathing mythical beast in the latter. It is telling that ‘Alligator’ drew on whisky geek arcana (the nickname for a no. 4 char in barrel coopering), while Scorch went full Game of Thrones instead.

Another fascinating pairing would be Lord of the Isles and Arrrrrrrdbeg!. We swivel from a medieval ocean-going fiefdom at 25 years of age, to former manager Mickey Heads dressed up as Long John Silver. Ardbeg have gone from the prim nod of Airigh Nam Beist (2006-08) to the arch wink of Wee Beastie (2020). Tongues are firmly in cheeks now – Ardbeg doesn’t want to be taken too seriously.

The Dark Side?

LVMH understands today’s attention economy and nothing spawns headlines quite like money. In 2022, Ardbeg eschewed whisky-making messaging altogether in favour of cold-eyed commercialism.

From £16m for a cask of Ardbeg 1975 to 1ETH for something called Fon Fhòid, Ardbeg could have malted a lot of barley with the hot air generated by these two stories. What was at stake – and what got whisky nerds particularly cross – was the way in which the value (and values) of Ardbeg could be so comprehensively rationalised.

If you know about gas fees, you can ‘own’ a piece of Ardbeg in a way that has never been possible before. The NFT that accompanied Fon Fhòid represented the brand as a transubstantiated entity – incorruptible, non-perishable, tradeable with zero friction in cyberspace. The gates of the Ardbeg distillery could close again tomorrow, but the brand can live forever on the blockchain (supposedly, if you believe Elon Musk et al).

The Next Phase  

Ardbeg want to be part of modern conversations, the brand reflecting life in a bloated, pathologically distracted, and inane 21st century consumer society. We should all remember that content comes first – Ardbeg know this better than the rest, a Youtuber cosplaying as a Scotch malt whisky distillery. Its frivolous, occasionally venal, but great fun.

Some questions do remain.

  • How expensive will the Ten become if the new wave of Scotch distillers has demonstrated you can charge £45 for a 5YO?
  • What are Thomas Moradpour’s views on imminent ecological collapse?
  • Can I make a request for the next limited release, Dr Bill? Lardbeg: 18YO Ardbeg fat-washed with discarded dripping from the Glasgow Central Blue Lagoon. Comes with a free macaroni pie and a Peloton subscription.

However ambitious and fanciful the liquid texts may become, though, their origins will always be bottles from and bricks on Islay. Ardbeg have only got to where they are by understanding who they were, and where their prestige and allure sprang from. As Ardbeg say in their own graphic novel: “The City of Desires isn’t just clever marketing… this town is built on powerful magic” [emphasis mine].

Categories
Agitprop

What is a ‘Luxury Whisky’?

Obviously this ought to have been published on Earth Day, but I’ve had Covid and life has been busy.

From Gods Own Junkyard, Walthamstow.

It is easy to forget, as Compass Box was releasing This is Not a Luxury Whisky in 2015, just how heated the debate around premiumisation once was. Over a number of years, more and more companies had been releasing expressions of great age, in limited quantities, with eyebrow-raising prices and noteworthy packaging. Indeed, for a while Hamilton & Inches appeared to be co-authoring press releases with a sequence of major Scottish distillers. Many dyed-in-the-wool Scotch drinkers were getting thoroughly pissed off – whisky was not supposed to be a luxury product.

In 2022, premiumisation has swept all before it. Every distiller now trots out a very expensive release on an annual basis so as to confer a ‘halo’ upon the brand. The superyacht Macallan, in its endeavours to fashion itself as 100% halo, leaves the rest pitching wildly in its wake. Macallan’s owners are not targeting those dyed-in-the-wool Scotch drinkers[1], nor do they care what they think.

Macallan is a fascinating brand to follow as regards the possible evolution of what ‘luxury’ means. While on the one hand you have the grasping ambition of something like the 81-Year-Old The Reach, on the other you have – somewhat jarringly – Rich Cacao. For The Reach, you hand over $125,000 and receive most of three arms cast in bronze, a lot of decorative oak, and 70cl of the oldest Scotch whisky ever released. This is luxury as we have come to understand it: opulent, no-expense-spared, resource intensive, over-the-top, wasteful.

Rich Cacao, however, subverts all of these tropes of conventional luxury. Its packaging is still noteworthy, but not because of the luxury materials that have been used – the story here is wrapped up in the luxury materials that have been spared. The giftbox was formed from spent cacao husks, left over from the chocolate-making process and typically thrown away. Someone at the Edrington Group saw an opportunity to weave a sustainability message into the luxury conversation, and I genuinely salute the effort. It’s a shame that that person clearly doesn’t work in the cubicle opposite whoever commissioned the pack for The Reach. As a vision for where luxury whisky could go, though?

Rich Cacao has built on the insight that there is a growing market with the money to buy expensive whisky, but who find Veblenian conspicuous consumption a little vulgar. An influential group of people prefer for their pleasures to tread lightly on our abused planet and expect their chosen lifestyle brands to get with the programme. Demand for luxury remains, but luxury that allows ethical choices to be articulated and seen.

The evolution from 2015 to today is that whisky still wants to be premium, but ‘premium’ is bifurcating. As newer players in the industry (and sometimes Macallan, when the feeling takes it) launch their mindfully-made spirits, they are also selling environmental responsibility as a value add. “We steward energy, cardboard and glass so you may sip with a clear conscience.”

I never expected a message around resource conservation to come from a Macallan product – it’s like all lions suddenly announcing their conversion to veganism. By explicitly connecting luxury whisky to ecological sustainability, though, it starts a new conversation. For example, what if we looked beyond the materials that comprise a whisky’s giftbox to the resources required to produce the whisky in the first place?

Whisky is resource intensive. Soil, water, energy, wood, occasionally peat – a lot of natural materials make a dram. This has long been acknowledged and the entire Scotch whisky industry is striving to make itself greener (use less, conserve more). But all packaging controversies aside, we must acknowledge that many of today’s whiskies depend on a level of material abundance and global supply chains analogous to a Versace jacket or an iPhone. Single malts may be more sustainable than smartphones, with most of their ingredients being renewable, but that does not make those ingredients any less precious. None of the rhetoric around whisky’s greener future acknowledges its inherent luxury nature.

Take oak. It is not rare like sandalwood, nor is it expensive like gold (although the price of timber is escalating). Nevertheless, when a cask created from an oak tree that grew for 100 years is filled for the first time, the whisky that emerges carries the astonishing intensity and complexity of the forest’s contribution. The life of a cask is long, its cost is amortised, but the impact of that first fill is genuine luxury. Kids with multiple siblings know the value of first use, but do we communicate it enough in spirits? That singular character of active, seasoned oak can only be imparted once. Bourbon is therefore a luxury spirit. In this narrow sense, Jack Daniels – with all the sugar maple also felled in its manufacture – is even more so.

Peat is another prime example where purely economic conceptions of luxury leave so much out. While whisky’s use of peat is a miniscule fraction of other industries (considering current levels), draining any bog so peat can be extracted removes it from the carbon capturing crusade, and burning peat to kiln malt of course also releases greenhouse gases. The idiosyncratic flavour of peat smoke comes at a price, and tradition should not blind us to that. Why should frankincense be considered a luxury, but not peat? Change the relationship of supply and demand, and scarcity can rapidly appear. We need to recognise that, if everyone suddenly wanted the flavour of heavily-peated single malt, aged exclusively in first-fill Bourbon barrels, there wouldn’t be enough to go around.

So, when you do have a fresh barrel or butt, or a couple of tonnes of peat, you should make the best whisky you possibly can with them. Delicious whisky draws attention to the skill of the maker, but also the quality of the materials they have used and where those materials have come from.

I’m a big fan of what Dhavall Gandhi and the team at The Lakes Distillery are doing. They fill the juiciest Sherry, wine and Bourbon casks with spirit designed to extract the richest flavours from them. Those casks are watched over obsessively, re-racked often, blended together with passion and exacting skill before the final whisky is slowly reduced and bottled, with absolute care. Dhavall’s use of materials is intensive. But I would argue that, by extracting their maximum potential, he is doing them true justice. The Lakes should really charge more than the £70 asked for the latest Whiskymaker’s Reserve.

The ultimate luxury whisky in this paradigm is something like Octomore 12.2. So much peat, ex-Bourbon barrels, then a finish in Sauternes casks of stupendous quality (barriques that have actually delivered some of the wine’s fruit, rather than just the wood’s spice) that were shipped over from France. Tasting this expression, the generosity and intensity of flavour is truly impressive. More impressive, I would argue, than a 30-year-old single malt, fermented and distilled quickly, then left to mature in a refill hogshead. Octomore is light in years but heavily adorned with the riches of the Earth. These whiskies are given a luxury positioning by the parent company, and it is merited.

This is Not a Luxury Whisky was built around 18yo Glen Ord from first-fill Sherry butts, with geriatric Caol Ila, Strathclyde and Girvan in the mix. The liquid itself conformed to contemporary expectations of luxury, with price and scarcity two further factors countermanding the bottle’s own assertion. It was a luxury whisky then and would be in 2022. But whisky doesn’t have to reach 18 years of age to qualify as luxurious. In terms of energy, land use, and ingredients, thousands of today’s whiskies should be conferred luxury status the moment they enter a cask.

[1] Since 2015, I’d wager that many of this group have signed up to the ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ distance learning course. They are to Springbank Local Barley allocations what Smaug would be to branches of H. Samuel.

Categories
Agitprop

Insignificant Single Casks

Within whisky, the single cask enjoys something akin to sacred cow status. The situation is more severe in the US, where it wouldn’t surprise me were single barrel fetishism to achieve its own Amendment to the Constitution.

I am not a single cask sycophant. I see it propounded, here and there, that they are intrinsically special, and I gnash my teeth. Individuality, purity of process, singularity of flavour – many assert that these attributes find their ultimate expressions in single casks. Leaving aside for the moment that all three strands of this argument can be challenged as a multi-refill hogshead of utter hogwash, what about a further aspect of a whisky? What about significance?

Let me be clear that single casks can be very tasty. I know a number of people bottling casks and their selections typically land in the 5-8 out of 10 scale in terms of flavour quality. However, in a world increasingly awash with delicious, thoughtfully constructed spirits, ‘quaffable’ alone does not justify the financial risk and liver outlay. My experience tells me that greatness in spirits is far more likely to have been finessed than ‘found’.

In The World Atlas of Whisky, Dave Broom contends that ‘[whisky] is about singularity (the forgotten word in single malt whisky)’. He is writing in the context of distilleries; Glencadam, Miyagikyo or Westland might produce hundreds of thousands of litres of alcohol a year but, his argument goes, only Glencadam, or Miyagikyo, or Westland – or North British, Four Roses or Hampden – endeavours to make spirit of this style, in this location, with this equipment and these people. Where there is singularity of approach, there is also significance. It is possible to meaningfully distinguish distilleries, therefore, but what about the individual casks containing their spirits?

To the human mind, ‘single’ carries much emotive power. With whisky, we can be persuaded that any one cask is as unique as we are. Sadly, the reality of the supply chain makes such faith in the sui generis nature of single casks untenable. Today, spirit from Clynelish (for argument’s sake) will have been filled into a couple of hundred impressively uniform ex-Brown Forman barrels somewhere in central Scotland. Some of those casks will end up on the books of independent bottlers. When they are individually bottled, besides different cask numbers, what makes one distinct from another?

There is an oft-repeated parable that two casks, filled on the same day and left to mature alongside each other for their entire lives, can end up tasting radically different. Totally true. However, what is far more often the case is that those two casks turn out functionally identical.

As I touch on above, even in those instances where oak does manage to throw out random flavours, this is far less interesting to me than men and women consciously shaping taste and texture. I’m a blender, writing a blog about human imagination as expressed through drinks. Of course I’m going to find conventional single casks intellectually barren. I want to know more. ‘Why does this bottling matter?’ In broader terms: ‘What does it mean?’ There are almost as many independent bottlers now as discarded face masks in the Mediterranean Sea: if everyone has single casks, they aren’t so special anymore. Any company that defaults to the position that the singular is automatically significant, or that uses ‘natural’ presentation as a selling point in and of itself, is going to disappoint me.

My advice to the indies is to impose themselves. Tell the story on the cask’s behalf. Intervene. Have you taken the spirit to higher levels of deliciousness? Can you make a statement with this release about your whisky world view? Can I connect with you, the bottler, on a philosophical level?

There are more companies going the extra mile these days, not just picking single casks but playing tunes with them. Infrequent Flyers and the SMWS are merrily re-racking spirit, often into assertive oak. Single Cask Nation are experimenting with re-introducing empty wood from their previous releases as finishing vessels for new projects, creating a chain of flavour cameos within their own SCN cinematic universe.

Decadent Drinks adds value in other ways. Yes, the bulk of what they release is single casks, but they evidently relish editorialising, enriching the space in which their bottlings live. Rather than single casks sent out into the world like isolated, perfunctory Tweets, they created threads of releases in 2021 with context, opinions and more than the occasional joke. Whether it was the trio of Ballechins to create the Spongetopia triptych, or the genius revenge tragedy that was the Glen Grant/Caperdonich dyad, Decadent Drinks weave stories by bringing whiskies into a relationship. Single casks are never lonely: they can be connected in creative, sometimes educational ways.

The one single cask I’ve actually bought a bottle of since possibly 2017, though, is last year’s Thompson Bros. 9-year-old Ben Nevis, finished in a Cromarty Brewery ex-rye ale cask. Why put my money there? I love what Phil and Simon stand for in whisky; their own Dornoch Distillery, and the whiskies they bottle independently, unfailingly reflect their geeky sensibility and no-nonsense values. The fact that their family runs a hotel in these terrifying times – one I’ve stayed at before – also compels my support.

However, this whisky stands apart from their other single cask bottlings because it embodies the collaboration of two makers from the same locality. It is a unique amalgamation of intriguing factors, both practical and creative, that gets my mental cogs turning with each glass. While it could be repeated, only this first release of 166 bottles represents the what-if/devil-may-care plunge into the unknown of genuine experimentation. The beer influence is unmistakable, the Ben Nevis mineralic fruitiness a capable foil. I don’t reach for this bottling often – it won’t go into my Top 10 Tastiest Spirits Ever – but when I do, I salute the Thompsons for creating something both truly singular and satisfyingly significant.