One day not so long ago, says Neil Urquhart, a man walks into the shop. Gordon & MacPhail’s on South Street in Elgin, in Moray, Scotland, opened in 1895. A temple in the malt whisky world. More than 1,000 varieties, pretty much every scotch available in Britain, plus some that aren’t, at least not anywhere else.
Anyway, says Urquhart, who was working in the shop at the time, the fourth generation of his family to join the firm, this chap walked in, more or less off the street: “He knew what he wanted, mostly. A specific Ardbeg, an older Macallan. I steered him a wee bit for the others. He bought four bottles of whisky. For ￡20,000 (US$32,650). He was Taiwanese.”
Connoisseurs will come in here, says David, a third generation Urquhart, standing in said shop — a solid, reassuring sort of place in a solid, reassuring sort of town at the top of Speyside, home to half of Scotland’s 100-plus whisky distilleries — and every month, some of them will drop US$8,000. “Nothing,” he says, “surprises me any more.”
It would, I think, be hard not to spend money here, if you have it and you like whisky. There are your staples, naturally, your Glenfiddich 12-year-old (the best-selling single malt in the world), your Laphroaig 10, your Glenlivets (the biggest in the US, and world No. 2) and Lagavulins, your Taliskers, Glenmorangies and Cardhus, mostly around the ￡25 to ￡80 mark.
There are more unusual whiskies, from distilleries you very probably have never heard of: Caol Ila, Mortlach, Auchentoshan, BenRiach, Pulteney. There are single-cask bottlings, taken from (as the name implies) one, rather than — as is customary — several casks distilled in the same year, “vatted” together and married. There are powerful cask-strength bottlings. There are exotic finishes, when a whisky has spent a bit of time in a barrel that once held port, madeira, rum or Italian red wine.
There are bottles at ￡200, ￡350, ￡400. There’s also a 55-year-old Dalmore, for ￡7,700. And on a pedestal in the middle of the room, with a price tag saying ￡13,000, there’s a bottle of 1940 Gordon & MacPhail Glenlivet, one of only two 70-year-old Scotches on the market.
There are, it seems, plenty of people who have money, and who like whisky. Not least outside Scotland: According to the Scotch Whisky Association, its members sold enough of the amber nectar last year to add a heartwarming ￡3.45 billion to the value of UK exports — 10 percent more than 2009, and 60 percent more than a decade ago: Every second, ￡109 of Scotch whisky is sold.
Scotch has become a multi-billion dollar, global phenomenon. A whole world of its own, of books, magazines (Whisky Magazine, Whisky Passion, Malt Advocate), Web sites (dozens of them, from maltmadness.com to whiskyintelligence.com and whiskywhiskywhisky.com), of festivals from Speyside to San Francisco, Stockholm to Singapore.
And there are bars that specialize in nothing but. In Craigellachie, a few kilometers south of Elgin, Duncan Elphick, genial proprietor of the Highlander Inn, and his expert (if somewhat unlikely) whisky manager, Tatsuya Minagawa, offer 280 different whiskies by the nip, plus a menu of six-snort Tasting Trays with names such as Highland and Islands, Some Great 18-Year-Olds, Aperitif Malts and The Ultimate Tour of Scotland (at ￡136).
“People come here,” says Minagawa, who himself came to Scotland from Japan years ago now, “from everywhere. Absolutely everywhere. Aye.” (He really does say “Aye.”) “Scots, obviously, and English. Also Germans, Dutch, French. Scandinavians, hugely knowledgeable. Americans, lots; Canadians. Japanese. Taiwanese, now. And places you don’t expect. There was a Czech guy in the other week, knew more about Scotch than most Scots.”
All a long way, really, from the small stone cairn at Upper Drummin, in the hills above the valleys of the rivers Avon and Livet, which marks the spot where in 1824 one George Smith built the distillery that’s now widely considered the cradle of the modern industry.
Smith, third of seven children, banged in an application to build a distillery within months of the 1823 Excise Act that made the whole business legal. “It’s safe to assume he learned it from his farmer father and grandfather,” says Ian Logan, an international brand ambassador for Glenlivet, now owned by French drinks giant Pernod-Ricard. “Illegal stills and whisky smuggling were everywhere, had been since the 15th century, doubtless before. They earned cash in what was often a hard existence. It was quite sophisticated, organized networks, long-distance signals for when the soldiers were spotted, all that. Quite a game. People would tell Customs about an illegal still, but only when it was worn out. That way they could buy a new one with the reward.”
We’re standing by Smith’s cairn, looking down the hill. Below is today’s Glenlivet distillery, a monument even in a region where big distilleries are two a penny: rows of long warehouses holding tens of thousands of maturing barrels; a visitor’s center welcoming 45,000 people a year; a spectacular ￡10 million glass-and-timber extension opened last year. With just 10 people involved in each actual production cycle, Glenlivet could now produce, should it so wish, 10 million liters of whisky a year. (“Think of it,” Logan says. “Those guys can go on holiday almost anywhere in the world, walk into almost any bar, and see something they’ve made. Amazing.”)
Like many things, Logan says, making whisky isn’t particularly difficult; making good whisky is — very. First, you malt your barley, soaking it in water and then drying it. (At Gordon & MacPhail’s pretty little Benromach distillery in Forres, Speyside’s smallest, Sandy Forsyth, 40 years in the business, explains that it’s the peat used in the drying that gives some whiskies their characteristic smokiness.
“The nose and the taste will actually change depending on where you cut your peat from,” Forsyth says. “Peat from down near the shoreline will produce notes like iodine, TCP. Laphroaig’s character, that’s from the seaweed in the peat. Speyside whiskies are fruitier. Unpeated.”
Next you crush the malted barley in a mill: “Like taking the wrapper off a candy,” Logan says. Then you mash the grist, adding hot water and stirring until the starches turn to sugar. Then you pump the resulting liquid, called wort, into a large vat called a washback, and add yeast. Sugar turns to alcohol.
Last come the stills, shapely affairs of shining copper. The new still room at Glenlivet is a soaring, almost church-like space, all lofty ceiling and plate-glass windows overlooking the valley. (“It does,” agrees Logan, “feel a bit religious. In fact, the production manager’s daughter got married here.”) Stills work in pairs. In the first, you heat what comes out of the washback until the alcohol rises as vapor (or the whole lot can simply froth over, ruining everything. “Do that once,” says Forsyth at Benromach, “and you might survive. Twice, and you’ll be rolling casks in the warehouse.”)
In the second, or spirit still, you reheat what comes out of the first. The early product, known as foreshots or heads, is no good. Nor is the stuff that comes out toward the end, known as feints or tails. What you’re after is the heart or middle cut, and where you take it will determine the character of the whisky as surely as the cask it’s matured in. Forsyth splashes a little on to the palms of my hands: rub and it smells of pure alcohol; let it dry and it’s woodsmoke and fresh-cut flowers and, well, whisky.
Finally, the cask. Whiskymen love their casks. To be called Scotch whisky, the spirit must be matured in oak casks for at least three years. A whisky’s quality is determined by the quality and type of that cask. The quality and character of the spirit and the time spent in the cask count too, but less so. Used and re-used, every barrel (Scotch distillers use mainly charred American bourbon casks, plus some Spanish sherry casks) affects a whisky differently, adding and subtracting and intermingling flavors, aromas, colors.
At this point, it has to be said, the overwhelming majority of whisky distilled in Scotland will be mixed, either with other single malts or — much cheaper — with whisky made from grain. These are blends, your White & Mackays, Dewars, Ballantine’s, Johnny Walkers, Chivas Regals and the rest. Some are very high quality, aged drinks, others less so. But in any case, 90 percent of the Scotch whisky sold around the world is blended.
Single malt, virtually unknown outside Scotland until the early 1960s, when it was floated almost as a gimmick, may be sacred among connoisseurs in mature whisky markets, and status-seekers in newer ones, but the real volume in whisky is blends. “They’ll be around for a long time to come,” says Campbell Evans of the Scotch Whisky Association. “The economics of the distilleries rely on them, and they’re the way people get into Scotch, often mixed, with cola in Spain, green tea in China.”
But whisky’s real secret is that in a world where the quick buck rules, its makers are forced to think long, long term. Their decisions now will determine what they can sell in 15, 25, 50, 70 years’ time. “It’s the foresight of my great-grandfather, grandfather and father that means we can now sell a 70-year-old malt,” Neil Urquhart says. “At the time, everyone else thought it was absurd. But it does feel odd to think that some of what we’re doing now may not see the light of day until after I’ve retired.”
Warning: Excessive consumption of alcohol can damage your health.
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
RSS