Revisiting barley at Bruichladdich

It’s fair to say that Vic Cameron’s article for this website – Does barley variety affect whisky flavour? – provoked a reaction. Thanks to the dubious pleasures of (anti-)social media, that reaction was not always either elegantly expressed, or free of personal prejudice against Vic, and/or the company (Diageo) for which he used to work.

For the record, I’ve no reason to doubt Vic’s credentials or his honesty. Of course, that doesn’t mean he’s right, either – so let’s have the debate, but let’s keep it civilised. That ok with everyone?

Anyway, it seemed somewhat serendipitous, given the subject matter of Vic’s piece and the affiliations of many of those who spoke out against it, that I should happen to be visiting Bruichladdich on Islay last week.

If ever there were a place to explore the counterpoint to the Cameron view, this was it. Bere barley, organic barley, Scottish barley, Islay barley… never mind fermentation times or cut points, the raw materials themselves are the hot topic here.

So did I discover an answer to the questions raised by Vic’s piece and the reaction it sparked? You’ll have to wait a few weeks to find out in more detail, but here’s a suitably ambiguous teaser: yes and no.

The discussion at Bruichladdich was not so much about barley variety as barley origin: isolating and making whisky from batches of the same strain, but grown in different locations. The Black Isle, Aberdeenshire, Lothian.

Nosing new-make spirit from all three, then cask samples of them after one year in first-fill Bourbon, one thing was clear: they were different. Not vastly different – I’ve had vodka flights with more diversity – but different nonetheless.

Enigma variations: Bruichladdich has distillates sourced from barley grown in different regions

That variation answers one question, but prompts others, and one in particular. Why are they different? Is it, to borrow a French winemaking term much used at Bruichladdich, down to terroir? Is it just because the growing season in 2015 (or 2016) was a bit wetter in, say, Lothian than in Aberdeenshire?

We’ll need years more of experimentation, data-gathering and careful analysis before we can even begin to identify the character of Black Isle barley versus Lothian barley (assuming that there is one), leave alone the impact this might have on your glass of Classic Laddie years after that barley has been harvested.

(And, as the chief engineer of this parish has noted, it’d be nice to see the spirit go into some refill, rather than first-fill, casks, minimising the wood influence and allowing the grain to speak more clearly over time.)

Anyway, it’s potentially ground-breaking stuff. Potentially. Crucially for Bruichladdich, it plays well to the company’s audience: literate whisky lovers with a more than passing interest in the way their spirit of choice is put together.

For these Laddie-ites, it’d be great if, years down the line, they could do a horizontal tasting of a flight of ‘regional’ 10-year-old Bruichladdichs, noting every nuance along the way. But, even if that isn’t to be, the journey promises to be fascinating and, if nothing else, they’ll have a bit more information about the origin of the whisky in their glass.

A bit more transparency, if you will.