Terroir-ism (Part 3)
Today, Gerry Tosh of Highland Park, does a stint as a guest writer to give his views terroir:
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Why do people feel the need to pin down definitions of whisky or get scarily scientific about its production?
Our Distillery manager refers to making whisky as a "black art". This is because we don't know all the answers to making whisky and long may it continue - as the mystique that surrounds Scotch whisky is half the fun.
For me, terroir is a very difficult term to steal from Wine or Coffee and land on Scotch Whisky.
Terroir has to do with ecology; from the grapevine to bottle. Covering aspects such as: micro climate, soil, geology, aspect, altitude, vineyard and vinifaction. We, in Scotch whisky, simply don't do this anymore. 200 years ago we would have had distilleries getting their Barley locally, malting at their own distillery and then maturing at the distillery. Although most of us will do some of these, very few of us will be able to own all of them.
The wine guys who have been doing this for a lot longer than us still can't agree on the true benefit of terroir. The historic Paris wine tasting of 1976 is a good example where the crème de la crème of French wine experts ranked a California wine as the best red wine and three of the four top whites were from California. These results and many more subsequent blind wine competitions around the world suggest that the importance of terroir can easily be overstated.
But for some distilleries this might work.
Take Highland Park as an example:
We don't use the barley we used in 1798 because we would have no chance to get the volume of alcohol out of that strain of Barley we need for today's demand. All our barley now comes from mainland Scotland.
We still do floor malting at the distillery. We have tried to replicate the flavour we get from doing this in big industrial machines but just get close.
We use locally grown peat to smoke the barley, the geology of which is unique as it is about 9000 years old, but more importantly it contains no wood. Thus creating a different aromatic flavour than any other whisky.
We use the same water source used in 1798 which is a "unusually hard water" and rises through Walliwall stone.
The Orcadian climate is unique. With maximum average temperatures of +10 C (about 50 F) and minimum averages of +2 C (about 35 F) therefore we have a wonderful, consistent, cool climate which means our "Angels" go a little more thirsty up here than at other distilleries.
The winds blow over 100 mph for about 80 hours a year - this carries the salty air across the island, killing all the trees, which changes our peat. It gets the salt into the barley, especially the floor malting. In fact it gets into every facet of the distillery.
Then we age it on the island.
So terroir, although redundant for most distilleries, may possibly have its exceptions.
Regards
Gerry
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Terroir-ism (Part 1)
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