Yet was there a sort of indefinite, half-attained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant.
Moby Dick, p. 12
Ishmael, almost at the very beginning of Melville’s masterpiece, feels a kind of hungry wonder while looking at the Spouter Inn’s curious artwork. Thanks to its impenetrability, its ‘unaccountable masses of shades and shadows’, his imagination catches fire. ‘Ever and anon a bright, but, alas, deceptive idea would dart you through. – It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale. – It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements. – It’s a blasted heath. – It’s a Hyperborean winter scene. – It’s the breaking-up of the ice-bound stream of Time.’ I feel something very similar inspecting the webpage for Johnnie Walker Blue Label Legendary Eight.
It’s the Diageo blending team exercising complete creative freedom. – It’s 37YO Brora. – It’s power and age and balance. – It’s the Pyramids of Giza in Kilmarnock. – It’s the Sutherland coast and the tenements of Dundashill as painted by Turner. – It’s the spirits of the past captured in amber. As Robert Macfarlane has noted in Mountains of the Mind, ‘the alchemy of the imagination can turn a lake into an entire world’. Frequently in my case, the inscrutable depths of expensive blends offer ample space for fanciful speculation. Why?
Mountains of the Mind puts my inclination to mythologise whisky into historical context; Macfarlane examines how, when it comes to interacting with and understanding the physical phenomena that surround us, empiricism and wonder are constantly tangoing with one another. His thesis centres around the Victorian era, when collecting knowledge of the earth’s surface became something of a compulsion for scientists. In the process, it was as though the value of leaving some spaces untouched finally occurred to them. ‘There emerged an impulse to preserve the unknown for its power of resonance, for its quality of nullity.’
It was as if every bagged summit endangered the space in which we could dream. In Macfarlane’s words: ‘The age of realism discovered that it yearned for mysteries.’ There is a valuable mystery at the core of Legendary Eight: just how much Brora did Dr Jim Beveridge OBE and his team dump into the vat? As with all Johnnie Walkers, the recipe is ‘unaccountable’, a mass of ‘shades and shadows’. Like Ahab with his quarry, though, I know the mighty Brora is in there somewhere, I just cannot corner it. This unknown quality of Legendary Eight lends it a powerful resonance.
The Johnnie Walker website has this to say on the Legendary Eight: ‘…made using our rarest whiskies from across the untamed wilds of Scotland’. Pleonasm aside, this reimagines the Blackgrange warehousing complex as the South Sea fishing grounds in Melville. Rare casks resemble sperm whales, pursued for their ennobling oil. Though Brora has been going into Diageo blends for decades (that was its primary purpose, after all), only after many years of ‘lying in state’ has its name become a tool for the storyteller. Brora’s ghostly presence is the whole point – Legendary Eight is like the Spouter’s painting: the vacuum of understanding allows our imaginations to flood in.
As Ishmael notes:
[W]hile in life the great whale’s body may have been a real terror to his foes, in his death his ghost becomes a powerless panic to a world.
Are you a believer in ghosts, my friend? There are other ghosts than the Cock-Lane one, and far deeper men than Doctor Johnson who believe in them.
The sepulchral aura of Brora, and other closed distilleries, is a foundational component of Legendary Eight and the Ghost & Rare releases. Many of us want to believe in and pursue whisky ghosts but we should never, like Ahab, be allowed to get too close to our targets. Such whiskies can operate like Macfarlane’s mountains, or Melville’s ambiguous ‘monstrous fable’, where truth is not as powerful as our interpretations. Any blend in which a lost distillery serves as a headline act is, first and foremost, a Whisky of the Mind.
Because I work for Compass Box, where we fully disclose the contents of the whiskies we make, I should probably have a more conflicted reaction to the Legendary Eight and the Ghost & Rare series. I do believe that recipe information ought to be shared, but – thanks to Macfarlane – I also now appreciate that the mind renews itself amongst ‘shades and shadows’. Like the Victorian mountaineers, I am withdrawing from Everest to preserve its ‘imaginative potency’.
Moby Dick only surfaces in the closing chapters, but he doses the entire novel with threat and awe. In the same way, Brora’s spirit underpins the character of Legendary Eight and it doesn’t matter if the blenders had access to thirty hogsheads, or only a thimbleful. My credit card won’t be harpooning this blended leviathan, however. Legendary Eight cannot hope to be a better whisky in real life than the ‘larger, darker, deeper’ mystery I’ve constructed in my head.
