The secret behind world-famous Crown Royal Harvest Rye whisky
Creating the ‘ world’s best’ whisky
When Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye was named “world whisky of the year” by connoisseur Jim Murray, it caught many scotch drinkers off guard.
But this whisky has a secret, and its uniquely Canadian provenance has a lot to do with what makes it such “a thing of beauty.”
Jim Murray flew into Toronto the other day from Northamptonshire, England, to promote his new book, Jim Murray’s Whiskey Bible 2016. His reputation preceded him; a few days earlier he had anointed Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye his 2016 World Whisky of the Year. The effect was immediate.
“We weren’t aware that this award was coming and it took us all by surprise,” says Alistair Kidd, marketing director for whisky at Diageo Canada. “We sold seven weeks of inventory in three days.”
( Those who get thirsty reading this article, take heart; Diageo promises more Northern Harvest Rye will be available to retailers before Christmas.)
In his “bible,” Murray, a purveyor of superlatives, links Northern Harvest Rye’s “natural beauty” to the tiny town on Lake Winnipeg where distillers brought the rye to life.
“Just a dozen miles from the remotest distillery of them all, Gimli, you can stand and listen to the ice crack with a clean, primeval crispness; a sound once heard by the very first hunters who ventured into these uncharted wastes,” he writes. “And hear a distant loon call its lonely, undulating, haunting song, its notes scudding for miles along the ice and vanishing into the snow which surrounds you.”
Diageo PLC, the spirits behemoth that bought the Crown Royal brand from Seagram 15 years ago, was tickled pink; Murray’s impending arrival sent the company scrambling to locate the person in its empire responsible for this remarkable liquid. Two days before Murray arrived, Kidd was still searching.
“The master blender is not back until tomorrow and his phone is off the hook,” he said.
Murray met a Financial Post j ournalist at Byblos, a Mediterranean restaurant near the CN Tower. By then Diageo had flown in the creator of Northern Harvest Rye. But it was not a “he,” nor did they come from Manitoba.
Northern Harvest Rye’s inventor turns out to be Joanna Zanin Scandella. Scandella graduated from Macdonald College, the agricultural school of McGill University, and stayed in Montreal; she has spent her whole career, more than 25 years, in blending and production planning at Diageo’s lab in Lasalle, southwest of the city’s downtown. The distillery in Gimli sends whisky samples to Lasalle, where blenders create Crown Royal.
The matchup was comical: Murray, the droll, erudite English gentleman in the German felt hat and handmade shoes, and Scandella, the unassuming woman in the demure blue jacket from the suburbs of Montreal. Still, they hit it off.
“Even though I work in the lab all the time, I am a people person,” says Scandella, as she sits next to Murray in a booth. “We just had an instant vibe. It was really good. We could probably go sit at the bar and have a drink together, no problem.”
Crown Royal has a proud tradition: Sam Bronfman, who founded Seagram, blended 12 cases for a visit by King George VI to Canada in 1939.
The brand took off; each year, Crown Royal sells about 650,000 cases in Canada, and over 5 million cases in the United States. But Murray argues in his chapter on Canadian whisky that Diageo let the brand falter when it closed distilleries in Lasalle and Beaupré, Que., and Waterloo, Ont.; Gimli, he writes, proved unable to match the “old, classic distilleries.”
“Canadian whisky is at a nadir, with far too many brands dependent on adding too many unacceptable things as accepted flavouring agents,” he writes. The trouble is simple, in his eyes: called “rye,” much Canadian whisky is now a blend with spirits distilled from barl ey, wheat and corn.
In comes Northern Harvest Rye, revolutionary in its simplicity: It’s made with 90 per cent rye.
“The innovation idea was to come out with something that’s very distinctively Canadian rye,” says Scandella. “Canadian whisky is also known as rye whisky. I’m very lucky, because at my disposal are millions of barrels that we can choose from. Yes, it’s spicy, it’s complex, but at the same time it’s also very smooth, and that’s from the layers, that’s from blending your whiskies.”
Even so, when she went to bed the night before the announcement, Scandella did not expect to wake up a whisky rock star.
“This is amazing,” she says. “It’s just great. This is just like, ‘ Wow.’ This is unbelievable. I don’t even have words. Normally I am very talkative.”
Murray more than makes up for her lack of words.
“The great whiskies, it’s like a sea. You get a wave of this, and then you get a wave of something else,” he says, making undulating motions with his hands. “And it hits the shore, and it just goes back. You can count the waves, and you can count the layers, and you realize, okay, this is the structure. You could say, ‘ Yeah, it’s got that sweetness, now I don’t want too much. … Good. It’s ended.’ There’s a story, you can see that someone has created that, and it’s stupendous.”
Davin de Kergommeaux of Ottawa, author of Canadian Whisky, the Portable Expert ( McClelland & Stewart, 2014) also loves Northern Harvest Rye. “It’s elegant. It grows in your mouth,” he says. But he plays down Murray’s dire words. “To say Canadian whisky has declined over the years is not an accurate statement. There has always been spectacular Canadian whisky.”
Murray likes to stoke controversy; last year he named Yamazaki Sherry Cask 2013, from Japan, his whisky of the year. Is he just trying to turn heads?
“Giving an award to a Canadian, people think there has to be some ulterior motive,” he says. “This is not random recognition. This had to kick a lot of fantastic whiskies out of the way to breast the tape. This is something where Canadians bow their heads and say, ‘We do that.’ ”
Scandella herself seems to be practicing a bit of a swagger. “The Canadians might throw their weight around a bit more now,” she says.