Fall 1996 Volume I Issue 4

BY ELIN MCCOY AND JOHN FREDERICK WALKER

twenty years ago, it was hard to find a Scotch drinker who knew there was anything more to great whiskey than knocking back a 12-year-old blend. Today's upscale Scotch connoisseur sips, sniffs and savors his unblended single malt the way a wine-snob scrutinizes a glass of big-deal Bordeaux. If you need more proof that Scotch -- at least in single malt form -- is getting to be as fashionable as Chardonnay, check out what's lined up on the back bar the next time you're in a trendy restaurant. Chances are you'll see a dozen or more brands of single malts -- the more obscure the better -- and a handful of ultra-premium blends. At Stars in San Francisco, diners can choose from 54 different bottlings. At Bern's Steak House in Tampa, you can pick from over 200. What do single malts offer that blends don't? Well, cache, for one thing, but also striking highly individual aromas and tastes that are far too good to submerge in a mixed drink. Each is the straight, unblended (but aged) product of one of over a hundred distilleries, and each has its own distinctive character. Some are light and elegant, some full-bodied and rich, some smokey and pungent, in other words, they offer the sort of complexity, variety and authentic character and flavor that everyone now expects to find in whatever they drink, from coffee to Cabernet Sauvignon. Like fine wine, single malts can be compared, collected and, of course, discussed -- before, during and after they've been drunk. We've been fans of the scented, burnished smoothness and glowing aftertaste of single malts since visiting Scotland's distilleries back in the mid-1980s. On our first stop, we tasted a 10-year-old Tandhu single

malt after touring the compact distillery of the name near the River Spey. We drank it the way the Scots do, cut partly with cool water (in this case the very water with which it had been made) to release the full aroma. Light and round, with that slightly sweet, smooth-as-satin impression we soon came to associate with Highland malts, that "wee dram" made us instant converts to these element spirits. But if single malts are the class act of whiskey, where have they been all these years? In blends. Single malts are the key components of all the world-famous brands of blended Scotch sold everywhere from Greenland to New Guinea. Only a fraction of Scotland's malt whiskies are marketed on their now, unblended -- in fact, 97% of the Scotch sold worldwide is blended. Even in Scotland, single malt sales are a mere 8% of sales. Partly, it's a matter of business: virtually all the distilleries are owned by the giant blending firms to supply the needs of their brands. Until sagging sales of blended Scotch and the fashion for single malts took off, most blenders were reluctant to bottle their single malts on their own, much less promote sales. Now that top brands sell for $30 a bottle and up, whiskies no one but a scholarly Scot ever heard about are showing up on retail shelves. To find your way through the malt maze, it helps to know why they taste the way they do... MAKING MALTS AND BLENDS The process of making malt whiskey -- distillation of malted barley in pot stills, followed by aging in oak casks -- is basically the same in every distillery, yet even neighboring distilleries produce perceptibly different spirits. Why? Key factors are thought to include proximity to the sea, the air, the weather, the source of barley and amount of

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