DRINK ’EM WHILE YOU GOT ’EM
Stock up while you can — well-aged whiskies are disappearing from liquor store shelves across Canada.
There’s no question Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye was t he boozy holiday gift of Christmas 2015 — a Tickle Me Elmo for grown- ups with a penchant for whisky — and it’s probably still sold out at your local liquor store, thanks to a British critic putting it atop his list of last year’s best drams.
“Doubtless there will be many … eyebrows raised because rarely is Canada mentioned when it (comes) to the world’s top whiskies,” Jim Murray wrote in his official announcement, which coincided with the 2016 edition of Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible. That’s true enough: Canadian whisky is finally back on the cool kids’ lips after an absence of at least three decades. Crown Royal Northern Harvest has to be the most talked-about Canadian whisky since — well, ever.
The narrative that has spilled across the media and trickled into casual conversation is one of a particular Canadian whisky that made good. For the record, Crown Royal wasn’t “voted” anything. Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible is one man’s opinion; a dictatorship, not a democracy. Moreover, CRNH topped a list of “bests” that was almost exclusively made up of new products launched in 2015. So it was more like a “whisky of the year” trophy than a “best whisky ever.”
None of this is meant to knock Northern Harvest. I happen to agree that it's a truly fine whisky; a triumph, even. However, in all the frenzied attention over one product, let us not miss the fact that Canadian whisky is often great, despite having been (wrongly) derided as sophomorically light-bodied or simply passé.
More i mportant, most whisky nowadays is pretty great. Indeed, we’re probably living at the end of the golden age of whisky right now. Overall, the quality and selection are as good as they’ve ever been. And it’s doubtful this happy situation can last. The sands are already shifting beneath our feet; certain distillers are managing our expectations, warning that some of the most beloved whisky brands — which often take six or more years to mature for bourbon; double that for single malt scotch, Japanese or Irish whisky — are on the endangered list due to shrinking inventories in distillery warehouses, a victim of their own popular- ity. Some of the old favourites are already gone.
Whisky is just grain spirit aged in wood, and it once tasted awful. Prior to the late 19th century, distillers hadn’t yet worked out, or didn’t care, how important it was to mature it in oak barrels. For a little time travel, take a good slug of one of those unaged “rye spirits” or “moonshines” that have proliferated lately. Whisky requires maturation in wood to soften and pick up flavours like vanilla, caramel and spice, and these throwbacks to the distant past are reminders that we age whisky for a reason.
Whisky as a whole has only improved since single malt scotch whisky — sophisticated, challenging, nuanced; the John Coltrane to whisky's jazz as a whole — became a consumer product in the early 1960s. Glenfiddich, the originator of the category, has a product out called Glenfiddich The Original, which is supposed to be a pretty good mimic of the primordial 1960s single malts. In that case, whisky drinkers live in better times now. The modern, midpriced Glenfiddich 15-year-old (which costs $77 in Ontario to The Original's $ 120) strikes me as a far superior dram, exhibiting more grace, nuance and nutty-sweet depth.
By the 1980s, it looked like whisky was going to take a nosedive into obscurity in the face of challenges from easier-drinking products like wine and vodka. But it rallied, thanks to factors such as the rise of Japanese whisky, for one, which is similar in its craft and subtlety to scotch (and even pricier), and the revival and reinvention of Irish whiskey. Meanwhile, boutique premium bourbon — a more populist choice than single malt scotch, but no less refined in its highest expressions — didn't exist until the 1980s. (As for Canadian whisky, Davin de Kergommeaux, author of Canadian Whisky: The Portable Expert, tells me it was great all along but few noticed.)
Whisky’s sales started to bounce back somewhere around 2006, and haven't looked back. It's even gaining on vodka. Popularity has been a positive development overall. But the recent wave of quality whisky was built on an unsustainable foundation: The well-aged liquid that was left over from when it was out of style and harder to sell.
Distillers from Kentucky to Hokkaido are scratching their heads over the fact that they didn’t “lay down” suffi- cient liquid back in the 1980s through the 2000s because, again, they didn’t anticipate that so many people would now be clamouring for it. Now the supply of older stuff is running low, at least for most distilleries in Scotland, Japan and bourbon country. And these old stocks may never recover, because surging demand from places like China and Russia is raising the temptation to stretch it by diluting it with younger product, or demand top dollar for it. While economists argue about whether Peak Oil is a real phenomenon, Peak Speyside Single Malt may have passed us by.
In this country we see this problem most clearly when it comes to bourbon: plenty of beloved high- end brands — Eagle Rare, Four Roses Single Barrel and others — are becoming difficult or impossible to track down in Canada, only a few years after the craft bourbon wave that brought them here in the first place.
A consequent development is the appearance of “no age statement,” or NAS, whiskies, which coyly decline to tell the consumer how old they are. If you say a whisky is 12 years old, every drop has to be 12 years old or older, legally speaking. NAS means no promises, which means elevated flexibility for the distiller, who may now fill bottles with younger whisky in order to meet production targets. The Glenlivet’s once-flagship 12-year-old, to give one of several examples, is giving way to the new (and less interesting) Founder's Reserve, which promises nothing in terms of age beyond the British legal minimum of three years.
There are whisky drinkers who regard the disappearance of The Glenlivet 12 and The Macallan 18 Sherry Oak the way a jazz aficionado would react to a permanent ban on the standards. To them, these younger-whisky times sound like the catastrophe of overfishing. You can’t have swordfish anymore, so you’d better get used to mackerel. There’s another camp, however, who insist that younger (dare we say more sustainable?) whiskies can be well- made. Less nuanced, perhaps, but delicious and fun.
“Old scotch tastes different than younger scotch, but to say it is better is a value judgment,” de Kergommeaux says. But even admirers ( such as myself ) of certain younger whiskies have to concede that older drams can offer an irreplaceable depth and panache. My heart sank when Japanese distiller Nikka announced the pending doom of its single malt brand Yoichi. I will shed a tear for the 15- year- old especially, a sweetish symphony of salt and smoke. The world loses a little something when such a beautiful whisky dies.
Today we live at the time of peak whisky, poised between two eras. The age statements and old standbys remain relatively plentiful for now, while a new era of youth and product variety are dawning.
Tomorrow more well-aged brands will vanish, or stop being imported into Canada, or rise beyond an ordinary person’s financial reach. Whisky fiends will be forced to consider sustainable choices, to borrow a term from the world of seafood.
Relief will come in the form of oft-dismissed blended scotches, or Irish whiskies. And some of the mid-size and independent distillers have planned their way around the shortages that plague the big players. Representatives of Scotland’s William Grant and Sons ( Glenfiddich, The Balvenie) and Ian Mcleod ( Glengoyne, Tamdhu), and Canada’s Corby ( Wiser’s, Lot 40, Pike Creek), have all told me this month that they can put age statements on bottles for the foreseeable future. Drinkers may also join Jim Murray in noticing the beauty of Canadian whisky generally, which has always been relatively more reliant on blending technique, as opposed to advanced age, to assure quality. Our domestic industry has never quite fetishized the big number on the bottle to the same degree as elsewhere.
Crown Royal Northern Harvest might come off as lean or prickly to those who prefer a mellow sherry-and- Christmas-spice-scented old scotch, or an austerely woody bourbon. But in a future in which such well-seasoned whiskies are scarce, extinct, or ludicrously unaffordable, those people may be forced retry affordable blended whiskies, including Canadian ones. In the case of Northern Harvest they’ll find a floral and elegant bouquet, a nice vanilla-tinged sweetness, and the right hit of spice to fix a killer manhattan cocktail. Youthful blended whisky can offer plenty of brightness and charm, and this particular example only costs about $30. The drinker’s life after Peak Whisky won’t be all bad, just different.