A Journey to the Isles

 Ah, the isles. Who does not love the isles? The very word "isle", as opposed to "island", conjures images of green and blue, and breeze and sand, and, in our case, whisky. So much whisky. Barrels and barrels and barrels of whisky. Amber ambrosia flowing from gleaming spouts directly into our lolling mouths. For I am not talking about isles of the South Seas. No. I am talking about the equally beguiling isles of the Northwest Seas. North and west of Scotland to be specific. Orkney, Skye, and Raasay to be more specific. 

According to the Scotch Whisky Association, the isles are part of the vast "Highland region", one of five of their officially designated regions. But we know that they are wrong. The isles make up their own distinctive region. And a journey to this region is one of the greatest pleasures a dedicated scotch whisky drinker can indulge in. As physical travel can be inconvenient (for the dedicated scotch whisky drinker is also, by definition, an accomplished individual with such a profusion of interests that their schedules are brimful), the Cabinet is pleased to provide a virtual visit. 

Our journey begins on the Isle of Skye, on the wild shore of Loch Harport, a sea loch on the western side of Skye. There we partake in their Distiller's Edition scotch. And we are pleased. We step outside and look about us at the moors, glens, hills, and silvery burns, and we know that we are tasting what we see. We taste the peat, the water, the malt. (Although the malt comes from Glen Ord near Inverness, but nevermind). We are so very pleased.

Then we are blindfolded and driven away at high speed, for the next destination is a secret. It is a new distillery previously unknown to any of our members, learned though they may be. The drive is only twenty minutes, but after the van stops we still feel motion. A swaying, undulating motion. We are on a ferry. Soon, the engine starts up again and we drive forward, but only for two minutes. We are there. Blindfolds off, and we find ourselves standing in front of the Isle of Raasay distillery. We are amazed. We had no idea there was a distillery on Raasay, which is a small isle tucked into the northeast angle of Skye, like a baby in the crook of its mother's arm. We are served their flagship single malt from an amusing rectangular bottle made of textured glass. Any suspicions generated by the effort they put into the packaging are dispelled immediately. This is an excellent whisky. Not just excellent, but in surprising ways. It's light straw colour belies a complex feinty taste, followed by an unexpectedly sweet finish. There is much to explore here. We eye the other bottles, and we note with interest that they offer accommodations right in the distillery. Very nice looking accommodations, it must be said (https://raasaydistillery.com/luxury-raasay-accommodation/). But alas, we are told to duck as a helicopter lands. Cabinet meetings are only two hours long and we have another stop, 400 km away.

The helicopter takes us to the airfield outside Portree, Skye, where a small jet awaits, door open, engines idling. (Remember, dedicated scotch whisky drinkers are by definition accomplished individuals.) Forty minutes later, we touch down in Kirkwall, and are on our way by Land Rover convoy to the Highland Park distillery at the edge of town. Here they have a treat for us, their new Cask Strength bottling. No superlative suffices. This is joy in its most pure concentrated form. 

All too soon, it is time to leave again. Fortunately there's one last surprise for us when we get to Glasgow, as we board our commercial flight back to Canada. As we step aboard, the pilot greets each of us with a firm handshake and a hearty congratulations on isles well tasted. A flight attendant is next to him, pouring three fingers of King's Inch for each of us. It's a local Glasgow whisky, named after an isle that used to exist in the Clyde, before it joined the mainland. Symbolic, that.

Slainte!

 

Roots and Lore

On January 15, 2010, three of us met in a Winnipeg basement to try out an idea for a new kind of scotch club. The existing ones we were aware of were either permeated with pretension  and unearned snobbery, or they were thinly disguised excuses to get shitfaced. There are times for pretension and there are times for shitfacedness, but we didn't want our scotch club to be the venue for either of those. We wanted a scotch club where the scotch would be the focus, but where we would just give our honest impressions. Did we like or not? No, "essence of late season Cornish blackberry with overtones of grated possum fetus". We wanted a scotch club that was convivial and warm and SFW. As people's weekends are typically busy, the meetings were going to be on weeknights, so we needed to make sure our members were going to be in good shape for going to work the next morning. This meant that we needed rules. And it is on these rules, and the abundant and consistent goodwill of our members, that the success of The Cabinet rests.

And what are these rules? We start at 8:00 and we finish at 10:00. During those two hours there are four 1 oz pours by the Sergeant at Arms. No free pouring or helping yourself. For the first few meetings we used a breathalyzer as well to make sure we were onside, but that proved to be unnecessary in the long run. Dues are collected annually by the Secretary who also looks after the buying and the secure storage of the whiskies. This may all sound fusty and rigid, but it doesn't feel that way. The faux-pomp is fun, but it is also a bit of an iron fist in a velvet glove scenario.

Over the last fifteen years we have developed our own rhythms, rituals, and lore. There is the music. There are the rough Highland oatcakes. There are the guests. There is the museum wall of cylinders. There are the frequent references to the Urban Dictionary. There is the strange affinity with Antarctic exploration. There is the posited deep history of The Cabinet (search "history of the cabinet" on the blog for the three posts on this). And there is the Amrut.

I don't expect the casual reader to understand much of that, and I won't explain, but I should at least explain the origin of the name. We borrowed the name from a Saskatoon scotch club the Secretary was acquainted with. We loved the idea of holding "cabinet meetings", and the whisky itself does indeed reside in a wooden cabinet. The Saskatoon Cabinet sadly dissolved shortly after ours started.

To mark the 15th anniversary, as well as Robbie Burns night (10 days away, but it's the closest we could book), we met last night and tried to drink whiskies we had sampled during the first meetings. I say "tried" because many are no longer available here, and some have rocketed up in price to the point of unreason. But we were able to have the Arran Cognac Cask from the same bottle first served in 2010, a new Old Pulteney Huddart to stand in for 21 year old we had then, and Lagavulin 16 (new bottle). We also pulled out a Lagavulin 8 to round out the four pours. Each was delightful in its own way. Not a single disappointment. And we were fully prepared to be disappointed by the Arran after sitting for a decade and a half under a dome of oxygen, but it's 60% cask strength fought back against any attempt by the atmosphere to interfere with its excellence.

Slainte! To the next fifteen and beyond!

I'll leave you with our Official Photographer's excellent work:

Member's Choice, 2024

The annual Member's Choice meeting of The Cabinet took place two weeks ago. Two weeks ago and I'm only now updating the blog? You are outraged. I understand. But I beg forgiveness as the intervening two weeks were exceptionally lively, especially with Christmas and the arrival of a new puppy a couple days later. Excuses, excuses. Those are mine. I'm sure you have yours for your own multiple failings.

It was an unusual Member's Choice night for two reasons. The first was that one of the members scheduled to make a choice became unavailable. The other reason was that we had three guests, which is a record number. The second reason compensated for the first to some extent as one of the guests brought a bottle. This is never expected of guests, but if it happens occasionally, we will not refuse. We are discerning, but in all honesty, not that discerning. The full extent of this weak discernment will become evident by the end of this post.

To the choices and the tasting then. 

The first was a surprise. The member was at pains to emphasize that it was not his "choice" within the context of Member's Choice, but rather just a bottle that he had been given by a neighbour and wanted to donate to The Cabinet. The bottle in question was a never before seen (or even heard of) "Rampur Double Cask" from India. It was simultaneously terrible and terrific. It was terrible because it tasted terrible, but terrific, because the label was terrifically entertaining. You can see it below, but the key part is the red stamp stating "Possession by persons other than Defence personnel is strictly prohibited. For Defence Services only canteen Services. For sale in Himachal Pradesh only." Clearly, the member will have questions for his neighbour. In case you are unaware, Himachal Pradesh is a state in the Indian Himalayas, whose border is disputed by China. Armed skirmishes have occurred. So we were drinking serious stuff from a serious place. Too bad it wasn't tastier. But I suppose that's a secondary consideration when you are being sent to your death on a glacier.

Next up was the Auchentoshan 12. It is a highly inoffensive whisky. If this be faint praise and that constitute damnation, then so be it. Regardless, it was nice to see that an aggressively middle brow scotch blows the Rampur away. Good thing the Indian Army isn't facing the Scots across the Line of Control.

Third was a long-standing favourite, the Oban 14. I believe that every time this member has the option, he chooses the Oban. And everyone could see why. It has been extensively described elsewhere in this blog, and is familiar to most scotch drinkers, so I won't go on about it. Besides, I'm already two weeks late.

Fourth, and sort of finally, we had the guest's Glendronach 2011. Here's where the two week interval of feasting, drinking, and puppy poop really makes itself felt: I don't remember a thing about the Glendronach. Not a thing. This means it wasn't hideous enough to make an impression, but sadly also not delightful enough. So. Somewhere between hideous and delightful. I'll be generous and say, probably closer to delightful. 

What followed was hideous though. For amusement purposes, the same guest also brought a Hungarian aperitif that tasted like cough medicine. Buckley's, to be specific. I suppose we were amused, but we couldn't finish the year with that lingering on our palates, so we enjoyed quarter pours of the Ardbeg Wee Beastie. This is an almost universal antidote.

Slainte!

p.s. Looking through the photos, you will note that one of the guests is an artist. This is what is called a blind contour drawing.

Bonus Meeting

 The Cabinet met for a bonus meeting two nights ago. We have always met six times a year, which works very well. Not only does absence truly make the heart grow fonder, but the budget works out perfectly this way. More frequent meetings would prompt higher annual dues. This year, however, we found ourselves in a surplus situation, with a reasonable amount left unspent. I wish I could say that it was entirely due to careful planning on the part of the Cabinet Treasury, but in fact, it was more a result of several meetings that featured clearing out the dregs of old bottles that had clogged up our stocks.

The unspent money could have been rolled over into next year's budget, but we are no different than most governments and find that idea confusing. Instead we bought a bottle of Hepburn's Choice 9 year old Speyside to further our exploration of independent bottlers.

As this was a bonus meeting and as I am off to Bavaria tomorrow, I will not be writing a full blog post. Instead, I will simply report that the Hepburn's Choice was excellent before turning you over to Ivan, head of our Photography Department:

Slainte!

Ach, the Highlands

 Ach, the Highlands. You want to love them, don't you? I mean the Highland whiskies. If you've been to the geographical feature, I will assume you genuinely love that. If you don't love the glens and mountains of the Scottish Highlands, you should ask yourself some hard questions about your values, choices, and tastes. But the whiskies are harder to love, which is a shame because it would be lovely to pair a magnificent product with the magnificent landscape.

Why are they harder to love? First, let me back up a little and clarify something. The official division of Scotland into five whisky regions - Highlands, Lowlands, Speyside, Islay, and Campbelltown - is a bit daft. The so-called Highlands region is a grabbag covering an enormous and highly diverse area - basically any part of Scotland that is not in one of the other smaller, more coherent and homogenous regions. Consequently, many of our favourite whiskies, such as Oban, Highland Park, and Old Pulteney are technically Highland whiskies. So yes, we do "love the Highlands", but mostly just the coastal and island bits. At the Cabinet we consider this to be a separate region and intend to lobby the Scotch Whisky Association to correct their classification of regions. 

The "Highlands" that we don't typically love are the whiskies from the actual hilly bits inland from the coast. This includes most Speysides, a region that was carved out of the Highland region in 1909 by the Report of the Royal Commission on Whisky and Other Potable Spirits. (I'm not making this up. There was an actual Royal Commission on whisky. God bless King Edward VII, who was by all accounts an enthusiastic imbiber.) When I write that we typically don't love them, I don't mean that we don't like them. We like many of them well enough. But there's a distance between love and like. And when you're spending upwards of a hundred dollars a bottle, you want to love what you're spending it on.

That's three full paragraphs to get me to the point where I tell the patient reader (thank you) that The Cabinet met last Thursday evening to take another look at the actual Highland whiskies in our stocks. This was prompted by my own recent journey to Scotland and tour of the Blair Athol distillery in Pitlochry. I truly enjoyed the tasting I did there. "Truly enjoyed" being somewhere between like and love. 

With this in mind, we blew the dust off our Cardhu 12, Deveron 12, and Aberfeldy 12 (night of the 12 year olds!). We were disappointed. The Cardhu didn't even clear the "like" bar. The Deveron was acceptable, but just barely so. Only the Aberfeldy was liked. Then, with some trepidation, we opened the Blair Athol (another 12 year old...). We liked it a lot! This was a full-flavoured whisky with an enjoyable density and mouthfeel. I don't normally describe specific flavours because they are so subjective and often bullshitty, but perhaps there was some black pepper there. Anyway, a good solid whisky. Whew. So, what gives? On reflection, the key may be in the statement, "we blew the dust off". It's reasonable to assume that oxidation did no favours to these malts. Non-peated whiskies are more delicate and likely suffer more sitting half-empty for years. 

Before I leave you to enjoy Ivan's photography, a quick note on whisky drinking in Scotland. I was in numerous bars, pubs, and other whisky serving establishments, and it was always presented neat in a Cairngorm glass. As the guide at Blair Athol said, putting ice in your whisky is like putting your bacon in the freezer before eating it.

Slainte!

Scarabus!

  Kapow!

Sometimes when we are tasting a new scotch, whatever conversation had been going on continues. There'll be a few murmurs of appreciation for what we are tasting. Someone might remark on an element of its mouthfeel or taste. Someone else might note that they don't like it as much as what we had before. And then someone will say something unrelated about Donald Trump.

But sometimes when we are tasting a new scotch, all conversation ceases and we look at each other, eyes wide. "Wow!" "Holy crap!" "Kapow!"

Scarabus was the latter. One sip, and our mouths were filled with such an intensity of flavour that we were all taken aback. This is a whisky you taste not only on your tongue, but on the roof of your mouth, the insides of your cheeks, and the back of your throat. And you keep on tasting it for five, ten, maybe fifteen minutes after. 

We loved it. The irony was that we approached it with a higher than normal level of skepticism and cynicism, which is saying a lot for us (we can be a crusty bunch). This is because it is labeled as Islay, but it's an independent bottling by Hunter Laing, who refuses to divulge which of the nine Islay distilleries they sourced it from. In fact, they take pride in the "mystery" element. Scotch reviewers have variously guessed Caol Isla, Bunnahabhain Toiteach A Dha, and Bruichladdich Port Charlotte 10. We happen to have the latter two in our stocks, so the idea was to line them up and unmask Hunter Laing's silly deception. Silly us. There was no way to make a rational comparison. Maybe the Bunnahabhain, but only maybe? This is a completely different beast. At first we thought that perhaps the hefty 57% abv was distorting the picture, but even watered down, the Scarabus retained an intensity that the others, albeit lovely whiskies in their own right, did not have.

Oh well. When it's good, it's good, so we're happy to set our prejudices aside. It's perhaps interesting to note that the other whisky that made a similarly big impression this year was also an independent bottling, the Chorlton Ardmore 12 year old. Two doesn't make a trend, but it is at the very least a happy coincidence. A very happy coincidence.

Slainte!