Waterford is about quality. They are not a shortcut outfit… Anything but.
no doubt the whiskey will be interesting and clean but there will be an element gimmickry away from the bottle, the passport aspect and the traceablilty of casks to specific fields and specific farmers.
this type of stuff will be lapped up by yanks and it will surely come at a premium. i doubt ill be seeing it in Tesco.
Would the quality be any less though?
I will lap it up too.
Well, true. Will definitely be higher end and some of their bottlings high end.
My sense – from totally outside the industry – is that the bottom end of the market in whiskey is real quality. Irish whiskey is different to Scotch is this regard. There is almost no undrinkable Irish whiskey. Can any newcomer compete with Black Bush, Crested and Powers? Hard to envisage. Jameson is the same but slightly different. To be fair, some of the Teeling bottlings are trying.
Midleton’s economies of scale are an advantage new distilleries can hardly overcome. Signature single pot still – which, alas, seems for the chop – is serious value. You could say the same about John’s Lane, Three Swallows, regular Redbreast and Green Spot.
Not many of the new distilleries have as yet released their own distillate. Dingle, Kilbeggan, Teeling and West Cork are the exceptions. Will be intriguing to see if anyone tries to take on the ‘bottom’ of the market. I doubt they will.
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Very much so.
Yes, I’m really looking forward to their bottlings as well.
Mark Reynier said he was aiming to make the best whisk(e)y in the world. He might get there – but we will be pensioners if and when he does.
so will I, one bottle anyway
I’ll take your word for it, I don’t see why though. It’s basically a spirit with wood extracts. I don’t understand the specific need to use wood barrels, other than legality etc
There are so many factors that maturation can be a kind of magic. There is a particular warehouse in Bowmore where the distillate stored appreciably becomes better than the distillate casked in neighbouring warehouses. Equally, Islay malt warehoused by the sea tastes different than Islay malt warehoused inland – even when it started off the exact same distillate.
More broadly, casks stored in a warehouse with an earthen floor mature into better whisky than casks stored in a warehouse with a concrete floor. There is a lot of empirical knowledge banked over the decades about whisk(e)y.
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The lovely Grace OReilly in that video says that the same type of barley grown in wexford is distinctly different when grown in say Kilkenny, and this will be noticed in waterfords bottling.
Itll probably cost 150e to find out if she is telling the truth.
Different mate, I think the word is different.
The likes of you would drink any auld liquor out of a shoe.
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Not everyone agrees with Mark Reynier/Grace O’Reilly. But it will be intriguing to see what offerings come from Waterford to back up this case.
An acre produces around three ton of barley. Each ton, distilled, produces around 400 litres of whiskey. So a ten acre field, small enough in tillage terms, could produce 12000 litres of distillate. This crop, after ten years of maturation, equates to approximately 11300 70cl bottles. Therefore even one field could produce a lot of bottles. The intriguing aspect would be to taste how the exact same distillate differed when casked in different woods.
As long as you’re buying
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Well, I take your point, which is a good one. But there are certain objective characteristics to whisky, such as viscosity. Some single malt whisky is just better than other examples. There is a category called ‘top dressing’, which is basically A grade whisky. Certain distilleries – examples include Benrinnes, Glen Elgin, Linkwood, Longmorn, Macallan and Mortlach – possess this status and blenders accordingly pay more for their product.
Warehouses with a concrete floor tend to produce whisky that is higher in strength but less ‘rounded’ than whisky matured in warehouses with an earthen floor.
I’d like to see a blind tasting. The concrete floor I could buy, as an earthen room would have a significantly different scent, and likely be damper.
The one warehouse theory sounds like an excuse to charge more.
Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence
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Bowmore’s Number 1 Vaults warehouse would be a marginal case, fair enough – although I believe them. And I am a refusenik of Bowmore made after the mid 1970s…
You can buy an expression based on this belief:
The best whisky – meaning: the most flavorful new distillate – is made off the still’s middle cut in the months of December and January. For distillation, the colder, the better. There is science here. The quantity of congeners, the element that gives whisky its distinct flavour, can be measured.
If Mortlach were blind tasted against Tullibardine, I doubt there is a person in the world who would prefer Tullibardine.
But, true for you: the area is dominated by the beautifully grey areas of taste.
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