Single Malt Whisky: To Age or Not to Age?

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Count Silvio
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Fri Nov 07, 2008 9:08 pm

Scottish distillers are getting more playful with what they add to their whiskies and how long they leave them in the cask

By David Kiley

Bill Lumsden, the head of distilling and whiskey creation for Moët-Hennessy Louis Vuitton's (LVMH.PA) Glenmorangie and Ardbeg single-malt whiskies is a character. Not that the whisky business isn't full of creative, irascible, intriguing folks in charge of keeping our glasses filled. But having played a preposterous party game with Lumsden and others until 3 a.m. one night last May and drank from the spring that supplies Glenmorangie, I feel confident that Lumsden will have no problem getting his portion of the angel's share of whisky when he is in heaven.

Like any good distiller, Lumsden loves to play with aging his whiskies in different kinds of woods and fooling about with the mash mix. He is relentlessly curious about flavor in his whisky expressions without resorting to simple aging in oak. "I refuse to be slave to long aging when it comes to creating premium, exciting products," Lumsden told me during my recent trip to Glenmorangie in Tain, a breathtaking spot on the east coast of Scotland where poets and lovers of the sea and honey-like whisky will think they had died and gone to heaven

He has a point. Blended whiskies get along without putting an age statement on their highest volume products. The consistency of taste of, say, Pernod Ricard's (PERP.PA) Chivas Regal or Diageo's (DEO) Johnnie Walker is what makes them great and successful. That consistency is achieved by blending sometimes up to 50 single malt and grain whiskeys from as many distilleries. Single-malt distilleries like Glenmorangie blend only their own whiskies to achieve their expressions.

Glenmorangie has just released Signet from Lumsden's laboratory, a non-age stated audacious expression that will run you $185 for a 750 ml bottle. No age statement? The nerve! Is it worth it? I'd have to say, yes.
Read rest of the frontpage.
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forrest
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Sat Nov 08, 2008 2:57 pm

Great article, i don't know David Kiley, but that was a fantastic job!
i am writing up the Glenmorangie Signet for Dec, and Lumsden is right-it is voluptuous (Kiley is right also i notice a touch of maple on the back palate, but cocoa was the surprise for me).
Also Jim Swan is right Penderyn is amazing as it is--white tea, jasmine, ripe green apples--yum.

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Sat Nov 08, 2008 8:33 pm

It must be a dream of every businessman working in the whisky business to be able to charge extraordinary sums for their product, no matter how much - or indeed, little - it has cost them to make.

In recent times, despite of an exceptional boom in whisky consumption, the distillery-owning companies have been complaining loudly of increased production costs due to rise in cost of raw materials, lack of capability of increasing production (due to their old batch-process methods) and also costs of transport. All this combined with more & more unashamed marketing schemes often drawing on the exclusivity of a particular bottling has sent the prices of whiskies soaring - regardless of their age.

At the same time, I am not alone in the feeling that when the whisky industry is doing well, it is the whisky quality that suffers. Why? Because in the old days before the boom distillers making say a 12-year old standard bottling single malt for example would easily put into the mix (remember, even a standard single malt bottling is a vatting of dozens of casks per release batch) much older (or better) casks in order to improve flavour, or to keep the style as they wanted. These days I am pressed to believe that this is getting rarer and rarer, because quite simply the distillery-owning companies have realized that they can sell these "special" or older casks as "limited editions" - for far more money.

Everyone understands that apart from the cost of raw materials, energy & labour that goes into making the new distillate, storing whisky in warehouses has a cost of its own. Lets not also forget the angels that tax the casks every day of the year, causing them to contain less & less spirit with an ever-declining alcohol volume over a period of time. All these factors alone, even without exclusivity, supported the reasoning behind asking a higher price for an older whisky. Some other factors could be added to this, i.e. what type of wood the cask was made of: Sherry butts cost significantly more than ex-bourbon hogsheads.

What Lumsden and his like, however, are trying to say to us today, is that regardless of the age, they wish to charge exorbitant amounts of money for their whisky creations - and that they are also shying away from giving us facts about the contents of their bottles (such as the actual age of whiskies used). How very convenient.

If whisky industry takes this path, I feel they might as well then start lobbying for changing of UK laws and going the Cognac way with intentionally broad and unclear rules of classifications that shy away from age statements. For example, an X.O. cognac - a term that most of us associate with long maturation - may contain a significant portion of very young distillate, because by law & rule the youngest distillate can be only 6 years old. This to me at least does not exactly match the image conjured up by the statement "XO", but no doubt comes in handy for many cognac producers who would never tell us exactly what their particular cognac blend contains.

Already the industry has changed its age-old standard methods in an attempt of making the most money: A good example of this is the current standard of lowering the distillate's alcohol percentage down to about 63,5% before putting the new make into a cask. In the old days, all new make went into casks at its original strength. Clearly the idea here is that they never intend to age whisky for very long, because if they do, the alcohol percentage may just drop below 40% (and the product can no longer be sold as whisky - at lest unless they change the laws on this matter..).

Recently I was totally put off from the current whisky industry attitude of "get as much as you can, or hopefully a little more - for your product" by two cases: On was when I noticed a rather nice-looking bottle of 21-year old Laphroaig on the shelf of a store at Heathrow airport. This "limited release" (how many limited releases has Laphroaig had in recent times?!) drawn from several casks, bottled at cask strength came with a price tag of £ 299 per bottle. TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY NINE POUNDS FOR A 21-YEAR OLD WHISKY?!?!? Oh my. By comparison, last year's Lagavulin 21yo priced around £ 100 - 120 was ridiculously cheap (even if people felt justly it was pricey as is). Lagavulin guys must be crying blood now, realizing they could have upped the price..

Another example was the price of the latest Port Ellen annual release: Previous ones have been rather dear, carrying a pricetag of about £ 120 - 130. The latest one, release eight, is £ 180. Holy pricejump, Batman! "Liquid gold" is no longer just a metaphore..

I am for one am glad I enjoy rum as well as whisky. [Sadly same giant companies have started to realize the potential of the rum market as well..] Greed knows no bundaries sadly.

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Sun Nov 09, 2008 6:45 pm

Another excellent post JaRiMi.

I'm with you on that one. The "limited edition" term seems to have almost become synonymous with the "super premium" term that the producers want to use so much these days to market their spirits. In addition to Laphroaig, that you mentioned, Bruichladdich seems to be pushing out new limited edition Islay malts so often (around every three weeks or so I get a mail advertising their new upcoming or released products) I can barely keep up with them!

If they are released so often to me the limited edition or special edition, call it what you will, will lose its meaning - Its not so special anymore if I can just replace it with another special edition, now is it? (Obviously they're different whiskies but you get what I mean).

I have to wonder, when the prices go ridiculously high, who will keep buying these products so much it is worth to keep the price up for long? Surely they will lose some market if only the people who earn more than the average Joe can continue buying these bottlings.

I'd hate to see how much more the £299 Laphroaig bottling would cost over here with the added suomi-lisä (Finn-"bonus")
forrest wrote:Great article, i don't know David Kiley, but that was a fantastic job!
i am writing up the Glenmorangie Signet for Dec, and Lumsden is right-it is voluptuous (Kiley is right also i notice a touch of maple on the back palate, but cocoa was the surprise for me).
Also Jim Swan is right Penderyn is amazing as it is--white tea, jasmine, ripe green apples--yum.
Would you then also agree with him that the Signet is worth the price? (Assuming you don't have a whole lot of money to spend). And before I forget, happy birthday Forrest!
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Sun Nov 09, 2008 9:38 pm

My thanks for sharing yet another series of excellent points JaRiMi!!
Count Silvio wrote:Would you then also agree with him that the Signet is worth the price? (Assuming you don't have a whole lot of money to spend). And before I forget, happy birthday Forrest!
Well thank you very much kind Count!

To clear things up, i do not have a lot of money, i am a clerk in a liquor store (albeit an amazing liquor store);
i am , and have been well below what is considered poverty level in my country my whole life-- which is nothing compared to the harsh, vile and cruel reality many of our brothers and sisters in the human race are forced to exist in.

To answer your question kind Count yes, if you were the type to spend that sort of money on a whisk(e)y (or any other beverage) then it is well worth it. i, as we have already discussed, i am not in that financial position; so it is not for me.
Fortunately working where i work (and knowing a lot of wonderful people who are 'well off' enough and who are willing to share) i get to taste an astounding plethora of wonderful things, and for that i am thankful.

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Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:04 pm

I have not had the pleasure of tasting the Glenmorangie Signet yet myself, but here is a link to Malt Advocate's John Hansell's opinions on it (from his judgement, it is good, but not exceptionally so):

http://blog.maltadvocate.com/2008/09/14 ... morangies/

The same opinions seem to be echoed at Serge's whiskyfun: http://www.whiskyfun.com/archiveseptemb ... tml#050908

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Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:13 pm

I tried to contact Glenmorangie to get more information but their websites contact page is broken and the e-mail will bounce back.
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Thu Nov 13, 2008 3:57 pm

Well i found a quote from Bill Dowd that i thought summed up the 'Signet' issues:
I usually like to build my case for making a "good" or "bad" judgement step by step. I'll dispense with it here to immediately declare that anyone who does not find Signet a brilliant product should have her/his taste buds removed. They're obviously out of order.
Jon Hansel, of Malt Advocate, agrees:
This is a fun whisky and earns bonus points for being unique in taste
As does Serge from Whiskyfun:
Either way, it’s another very good ‘modern’ whisky by Glenmorangie, kind of the missing link between their experiments with wine casks

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Thu Nov 13, 2008 8:20 pm

Quotes taken out of the context of the whole rarely tell the whole story..I don't want to be nitpicking, but

Quote from Serge's review: "rather heavy notes of paraffin are a bit too much for our taste."

Quote from John Hansell's review: "I think its dry."

Quote from Dowd: "Precise ingredients are being kept vague"

See the point? In any case, I did not try to put down the product - but nor did I try to lift it to a pedestal. By following the links, one can read the complete reviews and digest the useful information from them.

In any case I do really look forward to getting the chance of tasting this whisky: The only points or reviews that really matter to me at the end of the day are coming from my own palate. 8) (But for what its worth - I do believe it is a nice whisky; Lumsden's rep is on the line here, he wouldn't make a dud & charge £££ for it).

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Sun Nov 16, 2008 9:23 pm

JaRiMi wrote:Quotes taken out of the context of the whole rarely tell the whole story.
i agree wholeheartedly, i was only posting a 'synopsis' line from the posted reviews, which is why the quotes were embedded with links, so people could easily find the article that i was pulling quotes from to see for themselves the 'synopsis' from the respective reviews in context.
JaRiMi wrote:See the point? In any case, I did not try to put down the product - but nor did I try to lift it to a pedestal. By following the links, one can read the complete reviews and digest the useful information from them.
i see your point, and i did not think you were trying to put the product down-- it seemed rather that you were attempting to reserve judgment about a product that you hadn't tasted; in which case i think the conclusion that you drew from the reviews is correct-- this is not a perfect whisky, but it is fun, interesting and quite worth trying. That is also what i attempted to say in regards to the Signet.

The point of my synopsis quotes was to show 'the conclusions' of qualified reviewers, and point them to the reviews if they were interested.
JaRiMi wrote:In any case I do really look forward to getting the chance of tasting this whisky: The only points or reviews that really matter to me at the end of the day are coming from my own palate.
i agree with that also, but like you i read the reviews anyways; for me it is to enhance my vocabulary for discussions regarding certain products-- where i work people come in and read bottling #'s\ editions, and judge them arbitrarily based on this review or that one, and i have found from much examination that what the un-experienced reader is seeing as castigating dismissal is really just pointed examples: "to much paraffin", "very dry", "overly vague".

Anyways thank you again JaRiMi for your excellent points, and i do hope you get to try the Signet soon.

This is my 4 line review for our Dec newsletter, and you will notice there is no criticism, i don't have the space to resolve those kinds of statements so basically it is (what i call) a 'search and discover' review:
GLENMORANGIE SIGNET
Aromas of dark chocolate dust, demerara sugar, and perfectly cooked pie crust invite you to taste. The mouth-feel is syrupy with cocoa, coffee, brown sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon, full and delightful. The dryer finish shows clean leather, tobacco, roasted nuts to articulate a svelte emphatic conclusion to an exhilarating kinetic journey of exquisite surprising flavors.

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