Loch Fyne Whiskies - Scotch Whisky Review

I have been asked if I would write something to guide you in the matter of enjoying your dram. This is not the sort of thing I usually do, believing that people should be left to their own devices in such matters. We do it naturally; so do most other critters. If you’ve ever seen a pig with its nose in the swill, you will know what wholehearted enjoyment is about. Or some pompous diner with his snout in a balloon of expensive cognac. What the two have in common is the conviction that it’s good stuff, and the absence of any critical faculty. (I can count on my fingers the people I’ve met who know anything about brandy.)

I think what Richard wanted was a few hints from me as to what to do with the bottle you’ve just paid him fifty quid for, so as to enhance what the marketing geeks call post-purchase gratification. That shouldn’t be too difficult, for it is liable to be very good stuff and the chances are you will like it, irrespective of how you consume it. However we enjoy different things in different ways. The enjoyment of fine liquor is augmented when, by the addition of experience and understanding, it becomes appreciation. Experience allows us to compare what we taste against some standard—or at least against previous, similar tastes—and understanding allows us to organise and inform the experience.

So if you want to enjoy your dram properly, you will have to think as well as drink. The pleasure is as much intellectual as sensual. When we set up the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, the Tasting Committee was a bunch of my chums who met in my kitchen. I chose them for their literary ability as much as for their knowledge of whisky. Indeed, they didn’t have to know much about whisky at all—though of course all of them did. What was important was that they could produce words to describe what they tasted. That said I remember one, certainly one of the finest scholars and poets of his generation, who could come up with nothing better than the comment that, “It’s chust a lovely whisky, chust a lovely whisky.” He should have known, having had more than half a century of drinking the stuff, but we could get nothing better out of him all night. So you don’t have to be able to describe it to appreciate it.

I suppose if you are a relative novice, what you want is the word from the horse’s mouth; somebody to tell you what the rules are and what is the right and only way to drink a malt. Well, despite what you may have heard from the born-again malt buffs (a species which emerged a few years ago), there are no rules and there isn’t a right way. There is only what is right for you; what, after consideration, you find most pleasurable. The following are a few thoughts which you may find helpful.

Malt whiskies and blended whiskies are usually treated rather differently; blends being taken with ice and mixers. This distinction has become something of an orthodoxy, though it is worth mentioning that in the Scotland in which I grew up all the men (and most of the women) drank blended whisky with only a little water. Ice, soda, ginger and stuff like that was for nobs and foreigners. When I drink I mix it with whatever will make it palatable. Cheap in blended whiskies as in malts doesn’t necessarily mean nasty, just as dear isn’t always good. Blended whisky is much better than it used to be and I think a lot of the better blends are best taken with only a drop of water. But if you like the stuff with pineapple juice, fine. I have drunk Bell’s with diesel oil, though I have to say I prefer it without.

The same goes for malt, but you lose a lot of the quality—and therefore the interest—if you mix it with anything other than water. Ice kills it and mixers mask the more subtle flavours, so if you wish the sensual to be augmented by the intellectual, you should take your dram with a little water. Make sure it’s decent water, though. Most water tastes, so before you have any with your malt, taste the stuff. If you don’t have good water on tap, buy bottled—but taste that as well, for some of the bottled waters are lousy. And don’t use sparkling water; fizz is for infants and the gas produces carbonic acid, which is fine for lemonade and champagne, but not for seriously good liquor.

As important as the water, is the glass. Contrary to what you might think, the glass you drink out of has a great influence on what you taste. Best is the nosing glass used for generations in the whisky industry. It is based on the copita, a sherry glass, but a bit bigger and not so narrow in the mouth. Various of the distillers (Glenmorangie and Bowmore come to mind) have produced fancy variants, but none are an improvement. However, they aren’t dear and perfectly good. If you can’t find a nosing glass, use any wine glass which keeps the spirit in while allowing you to slosh it around and thus saturate the air in the glass.

Which brings me to a very important point; most of what you will learn about a whisky you will get by sniffing the air in the glass, not by drinking the whisky. As with wine, whisky tasting is predominantly about nosing. We get most of what we call taste through our nose. We may be smarter than the pigs, but our noses aren’t in the same class as pigs’, so that we may fairly say the chap with his nose in the balloon may actually be experiencing enjoyment of a lower order than the porker with his in the trough. On which point; do make sure you can smell before deciding to become a whisky buff. If you can’t, do something else. (If you think this is a daft thing to say, I can tell you that I know two people, one in this country and one in the USA, both of whom have managed to pass themselves off as experts on whisky, neither of whom has any sense of smell. It just shows how gullible is the public in general and the malt buff in particular.)

So you take some good whisky, and you put a little of it in the bottom of the right sort of glass and you add a little sweet water, and you slosh it around and you sniff. That’s about it. Do it quickly, for the more volatile odours will soon go off. First impressions are the most valuable, for so will your nose (go off that is). A really good malt will continue to provide smells of interest and variety for twenty or more minutes after it is poured. When I visited Loch Fyne Whiskies the other day, Richard poured me two malts; after half and hour, one was still producing interesting odours while the other was completely dead. (The latter, significantly, was one of the few malts I don’t much like.) (And the former, our own Living Cask— ‘Proud’ Ed.)

If you want to write about your whiskies (some folk keep a cellar book—a practice which I would deplore, were it not for my gratitude to the admirable and eccentric Saintsbury) then do try to use you own words and wits. If there is anything that smacks of the pseud, it is the malt buff who reads in a book descriptive terms culled from someone else’s experience, and then tries to apply them without knowing what they mean. Myself, I think whisky is a thing of the spirit, in more senses than one. If you subject it to the plodding circumscription of the train spotter’s mentality, you merely waste good drink. It is after all, an intoxicant and it holds infinite possibilities in the realms of song, speculation and, eventually sleep.

A traditional whisky tumbler is fine, even a pleasure, for a blended whisky but for malt whisky appreciation there is a better glass for the job.

Malt whisky is best enjoyed with a glass that will hold aromas, such as our port glass, the new blender’s glass or a classic nosing glass with its generous belly to accumulate aromas, a narrow rim to focus those delights for consideration and a lid to keep them for you rather than the fairies. Engraved graduations allow accurate dilution.

For more relaxed malt drinking we recommend our port glass. Its wider rim and better balance aid contemplative enjoyment.
We also enjoy using our simple water carafe, far less fuss than a lipped jug.

Blender’s Glass (second left) £ 4.50

Classic Nosing Glass (middle) £7.90

Port Glass £3.50

Water Carafe £3.50

When evaluating a dram it is helpful to have more than one kind in order to prevent familiarity setting in. Sampling in increasing intensity and then going back again will reveal more than concentrating on one alone. Many LFW customers enjoy ‘one-to-five’ parties where whiskies are selected according to our taste score of 1 to 5 from our stock list for a convivial evening of descriptor bandying, hence....

The LFW melamine tasting mat is a white, wipe clean mat for five glasses and an aide memoire of descriptors to assist discussion and note taking.

Finally, to record those inspired sensory discoveries, Neil Wilson’s Malt Whisky Cellar Book is a handsome tome to treasure those thoughts and memories of your most special tasting sessions.

LFW Tasting Mat £4.90

Malt Whisky Cellar Book £15.00

Special! Five classic nosing glasses, a carafe, tasting mat and cellar book £55.00