Field Trips: Balblair and Old Pulteney
A taste of the angels’ share in Scotland
all photos by Mike Gerrard
Head east from the Scottish city of Inverness, the unofficial capital of the Highlands, and you’re in Speyside, the heart of whisky country. But if you head north instead, up the stunning coast that leads eventually to John O’Groats, there are other notable names, including two I visited on a recent drive up that coast, Pulteney and Balblair.
Balblair
If you’ve seen Ken Loach’s film The Angels’ Share, which won the Jury Prize at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, then you’ve seen Balblair. Distillery Manager John MacDonald tells me the story as we tour around.
“The Location Manager had visited 13-14 distilleries,” MacDonald says, “but he was only here for about twenty minutes and he said: ‘This is it.’ Ken Loach came out himself a week later and he said: ‘This is just what I imagined a distillery would look like.’ They only filmed here for a week, and at the end of the week it was Ken Loach’s 75th birthday, so I gave him a Vintage 75, which he seemed to appreciate.”
MacDonald has been making whisky all his life, first at Glenmorangie for 17 years, and then in August 2006 he moved the five miles here to Balblair. He proudly shows me the Porteus Mill that they use, like many Scottish whisky distillers.
Balblair Location Manager John MacDonald with the Porteous mill
‘It arrived here in 1981, and we were its second home. This is the company which was so successful they went out of business because their mills never break down so no-one ever bought a replacement. This is the oldest piece of equipment here, but also the most reliable. It’s British engineering at its best. I only wish my car was like that.’
MacDonald also explains that everything at Balblair is done manually, and although his bosses have often tried to persuade him to go digital, he resists. “Why should I?” he asks. “Everything works fine as it is. We take everything slowly at Balblair, because quality is everything.”
That’s evident after we finish touring and start tasting. We share several of the Balblair range, all made using water from the Allt Dearg burn, and matured using 95% ex-bourbon American oak barrels and 5% Spanish oak, in different variations.
After starting with a 12-Year-Old we move up to a 15-Year-Old then a 17-Year-Old, noting the subtle changes between them. Each whisky spends a little longer in ex-sherry casks. The slightly darker tones of their 17-Year-Old are entirely natural from spending more time in the casks, as Balblair uses no artificial coloring.
Russell Angus at Pulteney
Finally we taste what for me is the ultimate Balblair whisky, a 25-Year-Old that has spent a whole quarter-century quietly maturing in their dunnage warehouses. It’s a beautifully complex whisky that’s lush with aromas and flavors, with dried fruit, oak from the length of time in the barrels, sweetness, and spices. The sophisticated palate of John MacDonald picks up a hint of rotting pineapple, in a nice way, and yes, that’s in there too.
Pulteney
It takes patience to make good whisky, which is something I’d also discovered earlier that day 70 miles further up the coast at the Pulteney Distillery in the town of Wick. The location used to be one of the world’s leading herring ports, and the distillery is set down right in the middle of it, just a few hundred yards from the sea. Smelling the salty air makes me understand why they call it the “Maritime Malt”.
The distillery’s making the most of its location, relationship with the sea, and maritime conservation by producing a series of videos called “Rise with the Tide”. The first features the multi-award-winning nature cameraman, Doug Allan, who has won four EMMY awards for his work on series like Planet Earth and Frozen Planet. Allan compares the patience you need to get the perfect shot when you’re filming wildlife to the patience you need to mature and produce the perfect whisky. (See one of the episodes here.)
Assistant Distillery Manager Russell Angus has also had to be patient, as he worked his way up through Old Pulteney’s ranks to his present position. “When I came here in the 1990s,” he tells me, “the stills were all cleaned by hand and I had the pleasant task of climbing into the stills three times in my first week with rubber gloves and a bucket of caustic soda.”
The stills are no longer cleaned manually, and another advancement has been the use of dried yeast rather than fresh yeast. “With fresh yeast,” Angus says, “we needed a delivery every Monday morning. We’re 110 miles from Inverness and sometimes in winter the delivery couldn’t get through, and we’d have to close down. So we switched to dried yeast and only need a delivery once or twice a year. It’ll keep good for two, two-and-a-half years, with no noticeable effect on the taste.”
Angus then shows me their lovely old, red Porteus Mill. “It’s 90 years old,” he says, “and the shell will last indefinitely. It just needs to be stripped down periodically to have new bearings put in, that kind of thing.”
After visiting the fermentation tanks we head for one of the warehouses and the impressive sight of 10,000 barrels of whisky sitting there maturing. Old Pulteney uses a mix of bourbon barrels and sherry hogs, and Angus says that their barrel supplier of choice today is Buffalo Trace, though that wouldn’t have been the case 10-15-20 years ago when some of these casks were being filled.
As we leave Angus observes that the wind is unusually quiet. “Usually it’s blowing strongly as we’re on the sea and you can taste the salt in the air, which definitely affects our whisky.”
This is something we then test, as it’s time for a tiptoe through history by tasting whiskies of various ages. At Pulteney, they recently changed the numbers on their age statements, a change explained by Malcolm Waring, Pulteney’s Distillery Manager: “The existing range of whiskies served Old Pulteney very well. We are maintaining both the 12 and 25 Years Old expressions, but we wanted to create a stronger offering with our core collection and this move allows us to achieve this. The nature of whisky making is evolutionary, and we are also looking to keep things fresh.”
Balblair, too, changed its core range from what used to be vintages to age statements. Brand Manager Debbie Smith explains why: “Our four distinct age statements now allow us to offer a new level of consistency to our portfolio, which we were unable to do through our vintage only approach. We’ve spent years crafting this new collection and are confident that we can now offer a consistent core range that delivers an exceptional representation of our distillery character—we truly cannot wait to share it with Scotch whisky fans in the USA when it launches early 2020."
US fans of single-malt scotches will have to dig deeper into their pockets for their favourite drams, thanks to the 25% import tariff levied on the spirits by President Trump in October 2019. Karen Betts, the Chief Executive of the Scotch Whisky Association, estimated that exports to the USA could drop by up to 20% as a result of the tariffs, with smaller distillers being hit the hardest.
Having seen at first hand the care and work that goes into making single-malt scotches, and the constant tending of the barrels for 10, 15, 25 years or more, perhaps the extra few dollars is a price worth paying.