IN THE PARISH OF PEATS Charles MacLean Since the 1850s, when Andrew Usher, Snr., produced the first blended whisky, the whisky trade has been passionate about the unchanging consistency of its products. You can understand why. Only when you have a consistent product can you brand it and sell it widely: if the bottle of Johnnie Walker you bought this year in Berlin tastes entirely different from the one you bought last year in Boston, you can forget any idea of brand loyalty. Malt and grain whiskies had been blended before Andrew Usher arrived on the scene. Familiar names like Johnnie Walker, George Ballantine, Arthur Bell, John Dewar, James Chivas and Matthew Gloag (later of famous Grouse fame) were active in their grocers’ shops, with wine and spirits departments, producing blends for sale locally. But Usher is generally given the credit for being the first blender to go for consistency. Changes in the law in 1860, which permitted the blending of malts and grains in bond (i.e. before excise duty had to be paid) made it possible to blend in much larger quantities than previously. Then the phylloxera louse arrived and devastated the vinyards of France, rendering cognac unavailable to British consumers. Blended whisky of consistent quality and flavour was there to replace it.. and thus was born the whisky industry as we know it today. You can imagine my astonishment recently at Macallan Distillery where the 1982 vintage 18yo was being launched, when David Robertson, the distillery manager and custodian of the whisky’s quality not only admitted that each bottling of this highly sought after expression was different, but drew it to our attention in a comparative tasting of 18yos from 1965, 1972, ’79, ’81 and ’82. They were different, although sharing core Macallan profile, which might be summarised as orange peel, dried fruits, wood resin and spice. The 1965 introduced a fragrant, waxy note (church candles), with cloves and cinnamon; the 1972 was more fruity (pears and plums), with a light medicinal note; 1979 was oilier (linseed oil), with creme brulee and cloves, and a drier flavour; 1981 was a kissing cousin of 1979, but with barley sugar, increased fruits and ginger; and the 1982 had more aniseed, nuts, leather and fruit. Different and all excellent. But the traditional whisky trade would say: ‘different and thus inconsistent from batch to batch, and the essential part of your job, Mr Robertson, is to make sure there is no flavour drift from batch to batch, otherwise how will consumers be able to rely on the Macallan 18yo. Collect your P45 on the way out’. Of course, we consumers have not been consulted about whether we might prefer slight flavour variations from vintage to vintage, as is the case with wine. Just so long as there is no slip in quality. Indeed amongst connoisseurs certain bottlings are spoken of in awed tones—the Springbank 1966, the Glenmorangie ’63 and ’71, two single casks of Glengoyne from ’68 and ’72, even the Dalmore Cigar Malt—while others of similar age (the Glenmorangie ’72, for example, let alone some of the expensive millennium bottlings) do not achieve quite the same legendary status. To his great credit, David Robertson has always been in the vanguard of disclosure. He has never sought to hide any aspect of production or maturation from those who really wanted to know; he has never hidden behind ‘trade secrets’ to disguise his own lack of knowledge. In truth malt whisky does not yield up all its secrets, even to scientists. So rather than refusing to admit that there were differences between one 18yo and the next, he set out to discover why there should be such differences. We all know that the chemical structure of the wood in every cask is different, but since the late 1970s Macallan have gone to great lengths to source Spanish oak, cooper it in Spain and season it with sherry, so as to achieve the maturation results they require—and pay around seven times as much for the privilege as they would for a normal, ex-bourbon cask. Why, then, should these whiskies at 18 years be different? The 1965 and 1974 vintages were outside the controlled regime, filled into casks which had been used for maturing and shipping sherry to the U.K., but the others? And we’re not talking ‘single cask bottlings’, here, where the differences between one cask and the next are more apparent: 260 butts of mature malt went into the 1982 expression. David Robertson believes it might be to do with the ambient temperature of the warehouses in which the spirit matures, since the maturation process can be speeded up if the temperature is raised—a fact exploited by many bourbon makers, who warm and cool their warehouses artificially in order to achieve just this result. Macallan Distillery does not warm its warehouses artificially, and Robertson has discovered that between 1965 and 1999 the average daily mean temperature rose steadily by nearly half a degree. Could this be enough to account for the increase in wood extractives, and therefore the slight difference in flavour over the years? Whatever has caused it, the point is that the maker of The Macallan is prepared to celebrate the differences from one batch to another. Will other distillers follow his lead when they are bottling old and rare expressions of their malts? Where will it end? While we, the consumers, hope and expect our blends to remain consistent (and this is another matter), I have a feeling that we might take even greater enjoyment in our malts if we were encouraged to look for differences from one batch to the next, just as wine buffs celebrate vintages. But at the moment this is heresy.