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Of Scotch Heritage and Heresy by Jack Bettridge Senior Features Editor, Cigar Aficionado

Posted March 26, 2001, 5 p.m. e.s.t.

"Please don't do this."

The gentleman was actually pleading.

Jim McEwan, then the master distiller of Bowmore, the distinguished Islay single-malt Scotch, had just finished describing his newest expressions to the hundred or so assembled spirits-industry people, drinks writers and just plain malt enthusiasts gathered at the tony New York bistro.

The line of products -- Voyage, Dusk and Darkest -- was defined, he'd explained, by extra aging in, respectively, Port, Claret and Sherry casks after the usual Bourbon barrel aging. Right then -- whisky untasted -- the gentleman at the table in the far right hand corner began imploring McEwan not to market the product.

His reasoning was traditionalist. Bowmore had always been aged in used Bourbon barrels and only Bourbon barrels. It didn't need maturation in foreign barrels. To start resting Bowmore in Port, Claret and Sherry casks was a travesty, an abomination. Change in the single-malt Scotch world, he seemed to be saying, was bad.

The gentleman was, and is, not without his supporters -- both at the luncheon and throughout the world of avid whisky drinkers. Single-malt Scotch is a purist's drink. The malt is strictly barley. The distillation is always by pot still. The result is never blended. Aging stretches to a quarter century or more. The process begs respect for history and tradition. We drink it and we think of kilt-clad Highlanders hundreds of years ago warming themselves by the hearth after a day's hunt with a glass of tawny whisky. That's a formula you don't mess with. You don't wait 10 or 12 or 25 years to drink the flavor of the month. Maybe the gentleman had a point, I thought.

Then we tasted the Scotch at hand. I, for one, found it pleasing. The special maturation made the Islay, which for me is among the most austere of single malts, more accessible. Was I a malt heretic?

I was fortunate enough to be seated at McEwan's table when lunch was served. I told him what I thought of the Scotch and wondered what he thought of the reaction of the gentleman at the table in the far right hand corner. Jim McEwan, an affable, solidly built Scotsman with a knack for cutting right to the heart of the matter, pointed out the flaw in the gentleman's argument: Bourbon barrels were unknown on Islay or anywhere in Scotland until the 1930s. That's when Prohibition ended in the United States and Kentuckians were again creating a steady supply of used barrels (by law they can use them only once) to sell to the Scots. Before that, Scotch was aged in whatever barrels were at hand, some of which presumably were Port, Claret and Sherry casks.

What McEwan didn't say was that single-malt Scotch was itself pretty much unknown outside of Scotland until the 1960s when it began to be marketed internationally. Before that, blended Scotches were the standard by which most of us knew the country's whiskies. Single malts were (and still are) for the most part created for mixing into the blends that took the whisky world by storm at the end of the nineteenth century. Add to that the fact that most of the oldest Scotch distilleries extant today date back only to the early nineteenth century and you might start getting the notion that the taste tradition that we associate with today's single malts is not as Robert-the-Bruce ancient as we might have thought. Sure, distilling has existed in Scotland for centuries, but it hasn't been until relatively recently that the great aged whiskies for which we know the country were consistently produced. The first Scotches were raw and completely unaged.

Is that a bad thing? No. It simply means that the spirit has evolved -- for the most part improved. The result of this evolution is the greatest age of single-malt Scotches, an age that is happening as we speak. Evolution is a good thing, rather, and to stop it by creating false standards by which Scotch should be aged is a bad thing.

Anyway, that was a long-winded way of saying that we considered the situation for a while after the above incident and thought, "Wouldn't it be a good idea to taste some new single-malt alongside some traditional malts and tell you what we thought about them?" So what follows is a totally arbitrary collection of whiskies we thought would be interesting. And, oh yeah, there were cigars as well.

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