Return to Kirkwall

The Cabinet met a week ago to mark the first meeting of the year, Robbie Burns Night, and the  passing of a member designate. 

Ron had been a guest at The Cabinet on a couple of occasions and acquitted himself so well that we extended an invitation to join as us a permanent member. We are necessarily a small circle, so such invitations are rare and they are carefully considered. Tragically, not long after this, he passed away suddenly while hiking in the Rocky Mountains. Highland Park was his favourite distiller, so it was fitting that we returned to Kirkwall in the Orkney Islands for a virtual visit in his memory. We already had the cask strength and the Magnus in our stocks, so the flagship 12 year old was acquired to round out the tasting.

What can I tell you about Highland Park that you don't already know? I can tell you that the special bottlings with the viking names, such as the Magnus, are not worth bothering with unless you are a serious collector of the cylinders. They are slightly dumbed down versions of the low end of the standard range. A bit thinner, a bit duller, a bit less of the perfect balance that Highland Park is renowned for. Just get the 12 year old if you want a relative bargain, or the 18 year old if you're feeling flush. 

And where does the cask strength fit in? It is an entirely different beast, and not really comparable to the others. "Apples and oranges", as the saying goes. This is a whisky that would wake the dead. It is a full-on assault on the palate, the smallest sip setting off an artillery barrage in your mouth. If you like that sort of thing, which I do, it is the highlight of any evening. If it is "too much", then a few drops of water drags it back into the realm of comparison with the other Highland Parks, where I was told it more than holds it own.

And then, a delightful surprise! Our guest brought a bottle of cask strength Aberfeldy that he had filled himself, right from the cask at the distillery. As noted above, I am personally in favour of cask strength whiskies, so I viewed this as a very positive development. It was marvelous - a touch sweeter and a touch rounder than the Highland Park - but marvelous. 

As is our tradition for the first meeting of the year, some of us dressed in kilts, some wore jackets and ties, and some brought food. 

Ron would have been very pleased.

Slainte!

p.s. The guest is now a member. It is not because of the Aberfeldy as we are not susceptible to bribery (although it certainly didn't hurt), but because of that impossible to define attribute: "suitability".

Member's Choice 2025 (+ The Cabinet By The Numbers)

 I don't think of myself as a forgetful person, but I can have the occasional forgetful moment. 

Our annual "Member's Choice" meeting was held almost three weeks ago. For the first few days afterwards, I was too busy to write up the blog (or, at least I felt I was too busy). And then, once the busyness had passed, I forgot. I continued to forget until just now when it bubbled up from my subconscious with a pang akin to that of a forgotten birthday or anniversary. 

And that's not because it was a banal or forgettable meeting. It was a wonderful meeting. When the members are in charge, they always pick winners to sample. (Whereas I have to find ways to sneak the losers into some sort of sham 'theme'.) Great whisky flowed. Great conversation flowed. Great fellowship... flowed? Not quite right, but you get the idea. However, while the vibe was memorable, the specifics elude me at this point. Fortunately, we have Ivan's excellent photos to showcase what was sampled. And, in place of my usual blather, I present "The Cabinet By The Numbers".

Number of meetings held: 94

Number of different whiskies sampled: 108

Volume of whisky consumed: ~80 litres

Total expenditure: $11,240 (CAD)

Total number of members, active and retired: 9

Number of guests: 42

Most expensive bottle: Rosebank 21 $371.60

Top three bottles: Old Pulteney 21, Springbank 10, Highland Park 18 

Bottom three bottles: I won't say in case you, dear reader, are invited as a guest and are asked to taste one of these as a test of sorts. I might be joking, but I also might not be.

Slainte!

Perfect Days

Indulge me as I begin on a philosophical note. (Or don't. I won't know the difference.) At one point during our Cabinet Meeting two nights ago, I mentioned the movie, Perfect Days. If you haven't seen this 2023 Wim Wenders masterpiece, take it from me, you need to. It follows the everyday life of a Tokyo public toilet cleaner. On the surface, this may seem very far removed from the business of a scotch whisky tasting club, but it is not. It's about how reality is rarely perfect or as we hope it will be, but that, barring extremes of distress and suffering, it doesn't matter. There is abundant beauty and joy available in every ordinary imperfect moment. Before you begin to compose your hate mail regarding the unacceptable banality of these Hallmark sentiments, let me explain the relevance.

We usually drink marvelous whisky at The Cabinet. But sometimes we don't. Sometimes we drink whisky that is boring. And sometimes we drink whisky that is appalling. Yet... we never have a bad meeting. Sitting there that evening, contemplating an organisational error (I'll get to that shortly), sipping a disappointing dram, I thought of Perfect Days. The Cabinet shouldn't aspire to drink inferior scotch, but when it happens to, it should aspire to find "beauty and joy" regardless. And it does. 

What was this organisational error? I'm embarrassed to say this, but I left deciding on the theme to the last minute and had a mental lapse regarding independent bottlers, conflating them with blending houses. The former bottle the contents of individual casks that they have purchased from a specific distiller, whereas the latter, of course, do the opposite - they combine the contents of many casks from several distillers. Consequently I lined up the Scarrabus Islay Single Malt and Hepburn's Choice 9 y.o, Speyside with the Famous Grouse Smoky Black and a mystery house blend. Not a fair comparison. 

We began with a blind tasting of the house blend, which was deemed to be "acceptable" and, in fact, similar to specific regional variety of whisky. I'm not going to write any more about it because two members were absent and will sample it at the next meeting. This was followed by the Grouse which was also "acceptable", but considered dull and bland. The advertised smoke is on the nose, but not evident otherwise. An improvement on the regular Grouse, but that's a relatively low bar. 

Then the theme-busting leap to something completely different. The Hepburn was a carnival for the palate (in a good way, I know carnivals can be nasty too) and the Scarrabus was an almost perfect whisky - full flavoured, multi-layered, powerful, lingering, and, well, delicious.   

Would drinking Scarrabus all the time lead to even more perfect days? I don't think so. Even taking into account that I mean "all the time that I would be drinking scotch anyway" rather than truly "all the time". Not only is there the described ability to be happy regardless, but there is the fact that mediocre scotch also serves to highlight the excellence of the good stuff. Otherwise the baseline drifts up to the good stuff. This is called the hedonic treadmill, but that's a topic for a future Philosophy of Scotch Drinking post.

Until then, try to find a bottle of Scarrabus, watch Perfect Days, and look for something beautiful in the moment when someone insists you try a glass of their house blend.

Slainte!

 

Summer in the Highlands

 More than a week has passed since The Cabinet met in our Summer Headquarters on the banks of the Assiniboine River. That is enough time for my memory of the evening to have been burnished to a smooth warm glow. This is a good thing. I recommend having smooth warm glowing memories. However, that burnishing has also rubbed all the details away. Moreover, as the title and the name of the Headquarters imply, it is summer. And summer is the season of laziness. Or at least it should be. So I will be lazy and not attempt to reconstruct those details. I believe I am entitled to this laziness. And I believe you will get as much of a sense of the evening from Ivan and Cory's fine photographs as you could from my words. Mind you, you won't learn anything about how the Highland whiskies tasted, but that is, as the saying goes, "your problem". You'll have to go taste them yourself.

One further note to the title: summer in the Highlands and Manitoba shares one feature. For a clue, take note in the photos of the mesh that surrounds us.

Slainte!

Allan's Macallan

The Cabinet has a deep and colourful history. It even has a pre-history, which you can read about if you use the handy search box on this blog and enter "history of the cabinet". You should get four hits. Three nights ago we assembled to mark another great moment in modern Cabinet history: when the founders met, and, more importantly, when they first drank scotch together.

Back, deep in the proverbial mists of time, I built a patio in front of our house. I am not a handy person by anyone's standards, so I had a lot of help. Al and Michael, who I had just met the previous fall, were among the helpers. Al had received a bottle of Macallan 25 year old as a Christmas bonus the previous year and in an act of astonishing generosity, suggested we open it to christen the new patio. 

Macallan 25. 

Let that sink in.

That is currently a ~$3000 bottle of whisky. It was a little less then, but it was still a spectacular extravagance.

And here's an additional surprise: I was a scotch virgin then. I might have had a Dewars or Johnny Black in an airport bar sometime. Maybe. But that's it. So my first single malt was a Macallan 25.

We proceeded to drink the entire bottle. 

Michael had brought a Caol Ila, so we drank that too. All of it. 

It was a beautiful September evening. I made salmon canapes. I recited all three verses of "The Owl and The Pussycat" from memory. I was lit. Then it became night. Then everything became wobbly and blurry. Then I hurled hundreds of dollars worth of partially digested scotch whisky all over our bedroom carpet.

Did that put me off drinking scotch? No siree! In fact, it led indirectly to the three of us starting to meet as "The Cabinet". Controlled measured limited drinking is the key to sustainable enjoyable unobjectionable drinking. 

Al is no longer able to drink for unrelated health reasons, so he donated a Macallan gift box to The Cabinet. No, no 25 year old in there, but six little bottles of 10 and 12 year old. This became the basis of our 'Allan's Macallan' night. To which we added Caol Ila, of course. We also had an excellent guest, and as is our tradition, the guest chose the final pour from our stocks. He selected the Highland Park Magnus, which nicely bridged the gap between the smoothness and maltiness of the Macallans, and the iodine and smoke of the Caol Ila. 

It was wonderful. All of it. And nobody vomited. Not even close. A lesson had been learned. It might have been a hard lesson, but it sure was fun learning it (up to the last minute).

 

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: