It’s like pulling teeth to get card-carrying whisky connoisseurs to step out of their echo chamber. And even if they do momentarily set aside preconceptions (blind tastings are great for this) it’s not long before cognitive dissonance takes over, and they’re once again comfortably rooted in the gospel of the same tired cliches: older better, sherried better, vintage better, Islay better, rarer better — '“only one of two-hundred and eighteen bottles and when it’s gone, it’s gone!”
Sure, American and Japanese whisky (even Canadian!) may now be fashionable, but this has been decades in the making, and for the most part it’s taken hold with a newer generation of enthusiasts, as opposed to long-in-the-tooth single malt Scotch aficionados having a sudden epiphany and declaring, “Aha, let there be bourbon!”
I say this after twenty years of organizing a whisky show, and opening bottles for Spirit of Toronto to pour at our own table. We’ve been unique in that regard since the event’s inception: every year hosting a table of our own selections, the sole purpose of which is to share our passion with kindred spirits.
In Year One the first Spirit of Toronto table offered guests a Jameson 18 Year Old, an absolute Irish belter of 18-to-23-year-old whiskey that had just been launched; Ledaig 15 Year Old, an underrated classic from that distillery packaged in a handsome blue box; the Cragganmore 1990 Distillers Edition finished in port wood that I was crushing on at the time; the well-loved sherry monster Aberlour a’Bunadh (Batch 12, I believe) a malt that has converted many Scotch whisky agnostics; and Corner Creek 8 Year Old bottled at 44%, a nondescript yet moreish bourbon from the Kulsveen family who bottled Noah’s Mill and Rowan’s Creek, and revived the Willett Distillery in Kentucky.
Oh, and there was a secret pour that we literally hid under the table: the Port Ellen 4th Release, a 25-year-old distilled in 1978. It was an amateur move in retrospect, meant to be a kind of bartender’s handshake for fellow whisky geeks, only there were relatively few of us in those days, so not much of a dent was made in the bottle. Those were the days. Somehow I doubt we’d be able to keep this kind of bottle a secret anymore, but I can always try.
Since then I find myself in the same quandary year in, year out: deliberating over what to open for Spirit of Toronto as I pull out bottles and place them on our sideboard, switching them out when better ideas come to mind, or Charles gives me the side eye.
It’s the tyranny of choice made more difficult by my desire to geek out and finally open some of the off-beat, lesser known selections we’ve stowed away – ‘inside baseball’ to quote our video editor – versus populist whiskies, those shiny look-at-me bottles from the Grand Cru distilleries that everyone will recognize as they clamour for an Instagram flex. And few of us can resist the occasional flex, even though the hype seldom matches the spirit. Port Ellen? This can be anything from amazing to good to what-the-hell, depending on the cask and bottler. Black Bowmore’s First Edition? A great whisky, absolutely, and it had better be, given the ridiculous asking price. Jura 3 Year Old from the distillery’s initial run of peated malt in 1999? Nothing to see here, move along…
After years on the receiving end of these kind of po-faced stares (see picture of deer above), I’ve learned my lesson, and know better than to bother proselytizing about my finds from Glen Deveron or Abhainn Dearg, a ‘Rare Old Liqueur’ bottled by Matthew Gloag & Sons, or a dusty Royal Lochnagar from the John Begg era. Not to mention a humble single cask of heavily peated 3-year-old single malt from the Isle of Jura when it was run by Michael Heads, who would be subsequently known as Mickey when he became manager at Ardbeg.
This is the part where Charles reminds me that the small, intimate nature of a masterclass is better suited to these kind of bottles, a setting where the story behind the whisky can be shared. He’s right of course. This would the right occasion to explain how Jura first trialed malt peated to 40ppm for two weeks in 1999, yielding 20,000 litres of spirit. Once matured for three years this peated Jura was then married with much older casks and bottled as the sadly defunct Jura Superstition, a superlative whisky that was in high rotation on our sideboard in those days.
I’d explain that as a fan of Superstition I lunged at my keyboard in 2002 when I saw The Whisky Exchange selling a single cask of heavily peated 3-year-old Jura bottled for the Japanese market, and how I was smitten by the quirkiness of its pale blue label and its oval portrait of a deer as a nod to Jura’s nickname as Deer Island, not to mention the delightful, naive simplicity of its typography, harkening to the innocence of a bygone era, an era that continues on this simple, peaceful island.
I’d then point out the signatures of both Richard Paterson and Michael Heads as master blender and distillery manager respectively, and explain that while it suggested that this Jura was an official distillery bottling, it was actually one of a series of casks selected by Matthew D. Forrest for Japan – still more inside baseball, as our video editor would say.
I’d share what little I know about the mysterious Matthew Forrest, a Scottish American financier based in Asia with a wide network and a number of business interests, and how a chance meeting with Richard Paterson in Tokyo presented him with the opportunity to cherry-pick casks from Whyte & MacKay’s inventory, which he bottled under the distilleries’ own label to be sold in Japan. He was known to be a discreet character which would explain why his name seldom appears on the relatively small clutch of whiskies he bottled. That said, he had a knack for selecting choice casks and his whiskies quickly garnered respect among the cognoscenti.
Among the most memorable are this Jura 3 Year Old that still flies (just barely) under the radar, though for many his masterpiece is a Tamnavulin 1966 that rivaled the best Macallans; it was matured in a cream sherry butt and – for some aficionados – reputed to be one of the finest casks of sherried whisky ever bottled. “He was a curious guy, somewhat cagey, and very particular about only selling his whisky to a select group within his network, friends of friends and the like,” collector Sukhinder Singh has related to me. “When he passed in 2005 I purchased the remaining stock of his whisky from his family. His cask of Tamnavulin 1966 had yielded 472 bottles, and more than four hundred were left!”
I’d also show off the letter I received from Michael Heads, then distillery manager at Jura, with his thoughts on this wunderkind of a 3-year-old cask. It was in response to the copy of Single Minded I had sent him – the print journal I was publishing at the time – alongside a note enthusing of my fondness for peated Jura and my scoop of this Jura 3 Year Old. A true gentleman, he took the time to write me back, by post no less:
“I was interested to see that you managed to purchase a bottle of three year old heavy peated which was bottled for Japan. It just shows how each individual cask can mature on faster than some of the others filled to cask on the same day. This was a three year old which had the complexity of a 12 year old. Living on this small island off the west coast of Scotland it amazes me how word gets round the world so fast to you single malt enthusiasts especially on the smaller individual bottlings.”
What else to pour in such a masterclass? A slew of other young peated Juras followed suit, and while it would be tempting to do a vertical tasting, in fairness to Matthew Forrest none that I’ve tried have the panache and oomph of his 3-year-old. No, to my mind this Jura’s place is in a line-up of similarly precocious younglings, a Signatory Ardbeg 1991 – an 8-year-old from the distillery’s sporadic production under Allied’s ownership – bottled at cask strength, immediately comes to mind, and it wouldn’t take me long to find some others to join them.
Food for thought, but for another year. In the meantime we’ll have to slum it with some Bowmore 1996 from first fill Oloroso sherry casks, or a Bruichladdich 1984 bottled exclusively for Germany.