Wasting Away in Single-Maltville

An eager, buzzing crowd surged around the lavish Art Deco bar at Cicada restaurant in L.A. last month. It was the kind of snazzy assembly a major Scotch-tasting event can draw: mostly well-dressed men with a sprinkling of young and strikingly attractive women.

One Scotch they’d come for was Gran Reserva, a new bottling from the Macallan, one of the oldest licensed Scotch distilleries (which has recently changed hands). So why did a Scotch have a Spanish name? Because the Macallan ages its whiskeys in used Sherry casks, and some of them really show it.

Such as this particular Gran Reserva, which had been in barrel since 1979. It had the reddish-brown color and much the same aroma of an old Oloroso Sherry, combined with the fiery cantankerousness of Scotch. It was impressive, as was its $150 price tag.

But this was just dessert. The main course of the evening had already been served: the Macallan ‘46, 52 years in barrel.

It was an unusual Macallan in the first place, with the rank, smoky peat flavor for which Islay malts such as Laphroaig and Lagavulin are better known. The reason is simply that the distillery couldn’t toast its malted barley over coal as usual in 1946 because of Britain’s post-war coal shortage, so it used peat alone.

Nobody would expect a 1946 Scotch to be cheap. For one thing, three-quarters of every barrel has evaporated in 52 years’ time, and in this case there were only nine barrels to begin with. And everybody knows how expensive bragging rights are.

So the price of the ’46 is . . . $2,500 a bottle. Distillery director Peter Fairlie pointed out that a 50-year-old Macallan recently sold for $10,500 at a Christie’s auction, so that price tag is really a bargain, sort of.

Samples were passed out--tiny ones. “What you have in your glass is about $50 worth,” announced Fairlie, “lest anybody say the Scots are mean [stingy].” Actually, $50 worth of this whiskey would be about half a tablespoon, and the servings looked rather more generous than that.

So how did it taste? Not huge or exotic, but it had an undeniably rare sort of flavor. Naturally it was extremely smooth and delicate, despite the peat-smoke flavor.

That’s just a lay opinion, though, and most people seemed to feel out of their depth judging a 52-year-old single malt. Particularly when confronted with the printed tasting notes for the ‘46, which mentioned lemon, peat smoke, green apples, floral and perfume high notes, very light wood with hints of nutmeg, ginger and cloves, not to mention pleasant waxy oiliness in the mouth and a long lemon and peaty aftertaste.

“If you disagree at all,” said distiller David Robertson gallantly, “just shout out, because these are just my tasting notes.” None of us made a peep.

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Eight days later there was another major Scotch tasting, a much quieter one. Instead of surging around at Cicada, we were huddled over glasses (and food, such as fine Scottish venison and Scotch-flavored ice cream) on the patio of Schatzi in Santa Monica.

This one was all about an institution Americans aren’t very familiar with, the independent Scotch bottler. All the Scotches were from the firm of Murray McDavid, which specializes in buying whiskeys straight from distillers and bottling them just as they come from the barrel, without chill filtering or adding caramel for color.

As a result, most of the Scotches that night were their natural straw yellow color. The exception was a ’72 Macallan, which was dark amber, with a nose of spice and brown sugar.

Nearly all the world’s whiskey is chill-filtered, meaning that the distiller has removed certain volatile oils that give the liquor a hazy look on ice. Distillers don’t like to talk about this practice too much. Many drinkers do want their whiskey to stay clear in the glass, but whiskey makers privately admit the filtering removes flavor.

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What they particularly don’t want to talk about is exactly how much flavor chill filtering can remove. “Let’s taste them side by side,” said Murray McDavid director Gordon Wright, and he ran off to Schatzi’s bar to get a bottle of the regular 10-year-old bottling of Laphroaig to taste beside his own unfiltered 11-year-old.

The comparison was shocking. The regular Laphroaig is known as one of the hairiest-chested Scotches around, but beside the unfiltered version, it seemed flat and tired. The Murray McDavid Laphroaig, despite its wan yellow color, was startlingly vigorous. (For good or ill, you might say, depending on whether you like the rugged Islay style of Scotch.)

The real showoff of the meal’s six whiskeys was the ’69 Springbank. Gordon Wright’s family owns Springbank, the oldest family-run distillery in Scotland and last to do everything from floor malting to bottling at the same site. Needless to say, he had a fine Springbank. It was a riot of flavors: seaweed and salt, old Sherry, marshmallow and coconut.

Altogether, it was an interesting couple of nights on the Scotch-tasting scene. The Macallan tasting was a glamorous event. And the Murray McDavid was an education.