Balvenie
Regional categorisation is a vexed issue in whisky: it may be a handy way of grouping distilleries together geographically, but it can be a tricky business identifying a stylistic continuity between all the whiskies in Perthshire or Speyside.
But if you can’t claim that there is a ‘Speyside style’, or isolate certain qualities which make Speyside the best whisky-making region on the mainland, how do you explain such a concentration of distilleries in the area – a part of the Highlands which was, in the early days of whisky, a pretty remote part of the world?
David Stewart, William Grant’s grandly-titled Malt Master, is happy to admit ignorance on this point. ‘All of the quality distilleries are here in this central part of Speyside,’ he says. That’s the mystique of Scotch, We’ve all got highly-sophisticated equipment, but we can’t tell what makes the difference’. He’s pretty sure what makes Balvenie such a dramatically different dram to Glenfiddich, even though they share the same site and use the same malt and water.
The character comes from the still. Glenfiddich...
To view and download this full PLR article, you must be logged in. Registration is completely free. Once you create your account, you will be able to browse, search & downlod from our PLR articles database of over "1,57,897+" on 1,000's of niches and 200+ categories without paying a penny. Click here to signup...
