Whisky’s golden age

Spoiler alert: the three editors responsible for this website get to choose their three whiskies of the year next week, and guess what? Three out of the nine drams in question aren’t Scotch.

That’s not deliberate. There’s no masterplan at work here, no purposeful attempt to put Scotch in its place and suggest that better and more imaginative whisky-making is being practised elsewhere.

We’re not using the increasingly diverse and dynamic world of ‘world whisky’ as a stick with which to beat Scotch (© Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible), but maybe the choices do say something about the changing face of whisky at the end of 2017.

It’s a big world and, practically speaking, there’s no logical reason why you can’t make whisky of a similar standard to Scotch in any country on Earth. Hey, we’ve known that for decades. There are simply more people succeeding in doing it now, putting their own, local twist on the whisky template, and rightly gaining more attention for doing so.

This changing world casts Scotch in the role of complacent incumbent; the flabby Roman Emperor doomed beneath the siege of the raw, but vital, Goths, Visigoths and Vandals. Has there been complacency? Yes. Is that the dominant mood today? No.

Apart from anything else, the same, iconoclastic tide of new wave distillers (let’s avoid the c-word) is as present in Scotland as in other whisky-making countries and, as this movement gains traction, laziness is not a safe option.

Global threat: Scotch whisky is responding to challenges from around the world

Single estate whisky; rye and other cereal grains; barley variety and provenance; yeast types; experimental fermentation and distillation regimes. And so on, and on, into as yet uncharted waters.

If it was just the niche start-ups – the conscious disrupters like Lone Wolf and InchDairnie – it might be just a diverting sideshow, but it’s more than that.

When a big-time distiller gets grumpy with a newcomer for bringing an innovative style of Scotch to the marketplace ahead of them (ask me afterwards), you know that there’s more to this than mere tinkering and half-hearted experimentation. This is real.

Look back at the rye question. Yes, InchDairnie’s doing it. Bruichladdich’s doing it. Lone Wolf is doing it. Arbikie, it turns out, was doing it two years ago (without telling anyone). But Diageo’s doing it too, and not just playing around with it at Leven, the company’s pilot plant, but at two of its established distilleries.

The liquid results of Diageo’s experimentation will end up, if the rumours are true, in a bottle labelled ‘Johnnie Walker’ – the Bobby Charlton/David Beckham/Leo Messi (delete as age-appropriate) of Scotch whisky, and surely the last haven for complacency, if complacency were the default option.

One of the problems is that established companies – Diageo, Chivas Brothers, William Grant, Edrington – have a position in the market that makes them wary of being seen to make mistakes. That means that such experiments tend to stay under wraps until they succeed.

Rye revival: But some experiments are kept under wraps until the time is right

That only matters in terms of perception. The reality is that we’re a few years into a period of unparalleled innovation and dynamism in whisky as a whole, and in Scotch in particular. Where will it lead us?

The new generation of start-up distillers (no, I still won’t use the c-word) tends to generate more heat than light, exciting a narrow audience of über-geeks and leaving the wider, more casual audience of whisky cold. A bit like the impact of the more outré creations of Paris Fashion Week – more academic than practical.

But, when the bigger companies begin to follow the example of the newcomers – even to lead the charge – everything changes. There’s some fantastic Scotch whisky on the market right now, and not all of it is sold for an astronomical price, but how about what is to come?

By all means wax nostalgic about the whiskies of half a century ago, and bemoan their passing, but I’d rather look forward, to the great whiskies being created today, and in the years ahead. I’ll say it: we’re entering a golden age for whisky, and Scotch is ready to play a full part in that.

A positive note on which to end 2017, and begin 2018. Happy Christmas, one and all.