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December 2011

Accepting you know nothing is exciting!

Welcome to the second in a series of guest articles written for our blog by interesting characters, wonderful writers and friends of Balblair. Today we have a real treat for you, a man who requires no introduction. Dave Broom.

***

“Yes, I know that already.” How many times have I heard that phrase, or variants on it, being uttered by passionate whisky lovers (he asks rhetorically)? Not that I blame people for saying such things. After years of tasting hundreds of whiskies, logging down your findings, visiting numerous distilleries and hearing roughly the same thing, it is easy to come to the conclusion that you do indeed know it all. It seems a perfectly logical conclusion, but whisky doesn’t work in that way.
Whisky has a way of disturbing your sureties, confounding your expectations, throwing curve balls at you. You realise, at some point, that you aren’t all-knowing. Rather, you know nothing, you still have to learn.

Balblair rather neatly symbolises this model. Here was a distillery which people tended to dismiss, because it wasn’t bottled as a front-line malt. It fell into that grouping of ‘fillings malts’, and because of the paradigm prevalent among many whisky lovers that blends are evil, its whisky was less worthy than those single malts who had been elevated to membership of the canon.
It’s a logic which doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. You could argue that the reason blenders want Balblair is because it is of high quality. Anyhoo, when in 2007 Balblair emerged in its new guise: elegant bottle, fancy box, Pictish symbols, vintage releases, people were bemused. Then they tasted and the liquid showed what the blenders knew - that this was a high-class malt, this was a great malt, this was a malt with complexity and intrigue. We didn’t know it all and so had to learn a new landscape.

Balblair proved itself to be a shape-shifter, a new make which emerges wreathed in sulphur, whose veils partially obscure its core mix of fruits, flowers and spices. Sulphur? We’ve been told that’s bad. Again, we don’t know it all. Sulphur in new make can be desired because it is a marker for the purity and complexity which lies beneath. It is there on purpose If it weren’t there Balblair wouldn’t be ‘Balblair’. Aye, it’s deep, in the way in which ‘light’ whiskies often are. Paradoxical? Yes. That’s whisky.

I once said that Balblair wasn’t a didactic malt - one which immediately stated what it would be and never swerved from that line, one which shouted and forced itself on you. Instead, for me at least, it subtly weaves different patterns from a complex starting point. It plays variations on those themes of flowers fruit and that ever present spicy finish.

The question, therefore, is what kind of Balblair do you want? Ones where fragrance is to the fore like the 2000 with its scents of elderflower behind it; the 1989’s mix of chypre and pear drops or 1965’s mix of apricot blossom and damp linen.

Maybe you want a weightier, fruitier aspect: 1997s succulent layers of melon and banana, or 1979’s exotic notes of passion fruit, mango and frangipani blossom. Perhaps a firmer nuttier character is more up your street: 1990’s mix of toffee and jasmine, or 1978 where the flowers turn into lilies and the nuts go to Brazil, the sweetness concentrates and sticks and tropical fruits lurk in dried form. Even the idiosyncratic 1975 shows these core elements, but with more sherry there’s added varnish on top of the tamarind and galangal.

Accepting you know nothing is exciting!

Dave Broom

Back

December 2011

Accepting you know nothing is exciting!

Welcome to the second in a series of guest articles written for our blog by interesting characters, wonderful writers and friends of Balblair. Today we have a real treat for you, a man who requires no introduction. Dave Broom.

***

“Yes, I know that already.” How many times have I heard that phrase, or variants on it, being uttered by passionate whisky lovers (he asks rhetorically)? Not that I blame people for saying such things. After years of tasting hundreds of whiskies, logging down your findings, visiting numerous distilleries and hearing roughly the same thing, it is easy to come to the conclusion that you do indeed know it all. It seems a perfectly logical conclusion, but whisky doesn’t work in that way.
Whisky has a way of disturbing your sureties, confounding your expectations, throwing curve balls at you. You realise, at some point, that you aren’t all-knowing. Rather, you know nothing, you still have to learn.

Balblair rather neatly symbolises this model. Here was a distillery which people tended to dismiss, because it wasn’t bottled as a front-line malt. It fell into that grouping of ‘fillings malts’, and because of the paradigm prevalent among many whisky lovers that blends are evil, its whisky was less worthy than those single malts who had been elevated to membership of the canon.
It’s a logic which doesn’t stand up to close scrutiny. You could argue that the reason blenders want Balblair is because it is of high quality. Anyhoo, when in 2007 Balblair emerged in its new guise: elegant bottle, fancy box, Pictish symbols, vintage releases, people were bemused. Then they tasted and the liquid showed what the blenders knew - that this was a high-class malt, this was a great malt, this was a malt with complexity and intrigue. We didn’t know it all and so had to learn a new landscape.

Balblair proved itself to be a shape-shifter, a new make which emerges wreathed in sulphur, whose veils partially obscure its core mix of fruits, flowers and spices. Sulphur? We’ve been told that’s bad. Again, we don’t know it all. Sulphur in new make can be desired because it is a marker for the purity and complexity which lies beneath. It is there on purpose If it weren’t there Balblair wouldn’t be ‘Balblair’. Aye, it’s deep, in the way in which ‘light’ whiskies often are. Paradoxical? Yes. That’s whisky.

I once said that Balblair wasn’t a didactic malt - one which immediately stated what it would be and never swerved from that line, one which shouted and forced itself on you. Instead, for me at least, it subtly weaves different patterns from a complex starting point. It plays variations on those themes of flowers fruit and that ever present spicy finish.

The question, therefore, is what kind of Balblair do you want? Ones where fragrance is to the fore like the 2000 with its scents of elderflower behind it; the 1989’s mix of chypre and pear drops or 1965’s mix of apricot blossom and damp linen.

Maybe you want a weightier, fruitier aspect: 1997s succulent layers of melon and banana, or 1979’s exotic notes of passion fruit, mango and frangipani blossom. Perhaps a firmer nuttier character is more up your street: 1990’s mix of toffee and jasmine, or 1978 where the flowers turn into lilies and the nuts go to Brazil, the sweetness concentrates and sticks and tropical fruits lurk in dried form. Even the idiosyncratic 1975 shows these core elements, but with more sherry there’s added varnish on top of the tamarind and galangal.

Accepting you know nothing is exciting!

Dave Broom