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
Whisky Books

Dialogos

I have grown up. My maps are out of date.

Lanark, Alasdair Gray

[This piece deals with mental health struggles – if this isn’t something you’re in the right place for currently, return next week for more carefree drinks chat.]

When the WHO fired the starter’s pistol for the Pandemic Steeplechase, I was already running on fumes. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in that, although it felt like it at the time.

By October 2019, I had survived nine months of a weekly Glasgow-to-London commute. However, a pincer movement of debilitating whisky festivals and a successful proposal generated turbulence I simply could not withstand. A deep-seated instinct urged me to contain and control my future; instead, the knotted needs of my mental health violently resisted arrest.

A handful of sessions with a counsellor and I believed the problem had been fixed. I could think again and, while I still felt like a social leper around most humans most of the time, seemed to be functioning. By the time COVID-19 overtook us all, I shuffled into lockdown and, like most people, hoped for the best.

April was the cruellest month. I didn’t so much come apart at the mental seams as implode. Whatever meagre foothold I thought I had in my own sense of self was washed away by a surging, unseeing public health cataclysm – solid ground, and the map by which I navigated it, was gone.

In post-lockdown issues of Noble Rot – an exemplary liquid text if ever there was one – I read how many regained a sense of happiness via their wine fridges. Uncorking special bottles, during that agonising phase where paranoia tangoed with tedium, was a self-sustaining act – a route to meaning and joy.

I can’t credit a 3cl sample of Octomore 9.3 for getting me through the pandemic’s early stages, but what it did do was restart a dialogue with the world beyond my febrile mind. Long after the sample was finished, I started asking why a barley-based distillate occupied so much of my psyche. I’m still engaged in this process. That with which we most closely identify – the elements we have taken to be fundamental to our self-concept – is often the last to be cross-examined and exorcised.

The 9. series of Octomores bears the subheading ‘Dialogos’; Bruichladdich have never shied away from provoking conversation, but this trilogy of heavily-peated whiskies makes it explicit. Conversations were mortally dangerous things to me when I opened my Drinks by the Dram bottle on a humid, rainy afternoon in May – I didn’t need others doing greater harm to the concept of who I was, and all those industry Zoom hangouts passed me by. I was, however, desperate to connect again with flavour of a pronounced and divisive kind.

How to describe tasting the 9.3? As I assessed nose, palate and finish, it was as if I summarised the purest and most visceral sensory memories I had gathered through my life to that point. More than that, it made me hopeful for sensory experiences I would have in future.

The concept of a ‘complete’ whisky occurred to me on that day. I marvelled at the fearless suffusion of flavour it represented: it smelt of peaches, rockpools and sourdough starter; the taste was of smoked shellfish served beneath a broth of strong black tea. The finish was endless and profoundly emotional.

I coveted a bottle instantly. However, when you’re furloughed and unable to face the future, dropping nearly £200 on a whisky still feels wantonly irresponsible. Octomore 9.3 did encourage a reappraisal of my priorities, though. When I purposefully sought to change conditions around me and moved to London, I began examining the bedrock of my character. As the internal dialogue progressed, I became increasingly enamoured with the voice that spoke back to me. Crucially, I realised that the whiskies I bought, tasted and made did not define me.

When I was developing the idea for Liquid Texts, creativity and imagination kept cropping up as key themes. I knew I wanted to write about my encounter with this Octomore, and the question became which text to bring it into conversation with.

Lanark, published 41 years ago this week, is one of my top-3 favourite books. The novel aims at a kind of totality – the text, the image, then the playful commentary on both – and is an example of the creative daring I have always admired. When I re-read Lanark in 2017, I noticed further themes of self esteem and kindness. In spring 2020, creative daring, self esteem and kindness were even harder to find than hand sanitiser, and time was needed to show me how intractably I was locked in my own fear. Alasdair Gray wrote Lanark to ‘tell the world what he thinks of it’; gradually, some of this spirit has been fostered in me.

I also see Octomore 9.3 as a kind of totality. PPM geekery rubs up against borrowed Ancient Greek-ery; the absurd bottle is an erect middle finger as well as container for the wilful genius of the spirit. The learning, the imagination, the fits of madness and desire – Gray’s text and Adam Hannett’s composition are both marvellous in the truest sense of that word.

The Epilogue to Lanark is a dialogue between the author and his creation. Many would call this onanistic – Gray certainly does: “The critics will accuse me of self-indulgence, but I don’t care.” It is a joyous and subversive chapter, where socio-economic history is interwoven with petulant, wry swipes at sci-fi endings. As Gray/the author/the conjuror goes on to write: “I faced the fact that my world model would be a hopeless one. I also knew it would be an industrial-west-of-Scotland-petitbourgeois one, but I didn’t think that a disadvantage. If the maker’s mind is prepared, the immediate materials are always suitable.”

Seeing beyond whisky to the creative contributions we all can make has enabled me to grow out of the pandemic. I am more hopeful than Lanark‘s author says he is. If I proceed with greater assurance towards myself and warmth towards others, though, it is in part thanks to the artistic adventurousness of people like Gray. Liquid Texts is not a Lanark – obviously! – but it is my vehicle for expressing my weirdness and wonder. To inhabit a better world – or even a self – we must first imagine it.

“One if to five ises! That’s an incredible amount of freedom.”

Please visit https://www.grayday.info/ for more details on how the genius of Alasdair Gray is to be celebrated this year.