Last month saw Ronnie Cox — director for Speyside single malt Scotch whisky distillery The Glenrothes at London’s oldest wine and spirit merchant, Berry, Bros. & Rudd — pay a visit to the UAE to spread the word about the joys of single malt.
HME.com caught up with the whisky aficionado after a training session for bar professionals at MMI’s Dubai headquarters, to find out about the Glenrothes brand and the rise of single malt whisky in the Middle East
Glenrothes has been around for a while, but for those who don’t know about single malt whiskies, tell us a bit about the brand and its association with Berry, Brothers & Rudd.
Glenrothes is a very small brand. We’re never going to be huge because we simply don’t have the stocks to do it — plus we don’t want to be a major brand in terms of cheap prices and so on.
What we’re purveying is the quality; it’s the ethos of a company that is over 300 years old and has survived on quality for its entire existence.
The Berry, Bros. & Rudd name is the oldest wine merchants, one of the top two in London, and so it’s preserving that quality image — artisan ways are best, quality is paramount, less is more, all these wonderful mantras that we actually stick to. It’s an honest brand.
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So what have you been doing in Dubai?
We’ve held an amazing very exclusive dinner at a top hotel in Dubai — and we’re doing one in Abu Dhabi before I leave —where the chef produced three fantastic courses; and it was quite unbelievable how well he paired the food with the whisky.
A lot of people don’t understand how the whisky-food pairing works, but it’s quite simple really: when you think of the way whisky are broken down, they’re organic products, so you’re looking for things such as citrus, spices, vanillas. And if there is a common thread between the whisky and the food, that tends to mean they go quite well.
But then the textures are something completely different. So for example, if you have something like fois gras, which is greasy and oily, with these delicious flavours, you need something that’s going to cut through it. And whisky tends to dissipate that grease on your palette, so it feels magical.
Tell us about the training session you conducted for bar professionals.
Well we held a session on Glenrothes at MMI’s offices in Dubai, where they have the most wonderful training room. I was very impressed; they have probably one of the best training facilities I’ve ever seen.
Regarding the session itself, we wanted to do this because Dubai holds a huge amount of potential for single malts — and then of course for us — and if we can get people to understand a little bit about the nature of single malts then we can communicate that to others.
So obviously the key people we wanted to get involved were not consumers at this stage, but the trade, the people who run bars and who are communicating with the consumer the whole time.
A key factor in single malt education is creating a respect for single malts through the glass.
And when we go to bartenders, like in our MMI training session, then the number-one point we communicate is understanding the basic difference between drinking this spirit from a whisky glass compared to a glass that has a bulb or a tulip shape which will concentrate the aromas
With what is traditionally known as a whisky glass, in the style of an ‘old fashioned’, the sides actually go out, which is completely the opposite of what we want to do.
Because physically what happens is that the aroma falls out the side, so when you put your nose in you’re only nosing around one eighth or one tenth of what’s there.
So the respect for malt whiskies is that we’re not going to chug them down like blended whiskies or drink them with coke, as people do.
Malt whiskies need a certain amount of respect, so if you can tell bartenders this and teach them why, then we’ll separate that particular sector from the blended side. And the sector will consequently grow.
For the trade it’s important to understand these selling tools because actually, the profitability per bottle is higher on malt whisky than it is on blended whisky, which is a useful driver.
So I come at it from two angles: the first is the quality perspective, the second is the profitability perspective.
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During the seminar, you asked the attendees to put a few drops of whisky on the back of their hands, then smell it; why does this help in training sessions?
For people who don’t know about whisky, dropping some on the back of your hand does two things.
Firstly, it demonstrates if a whisky is mature or not, because if it’s not mature you’ll get this greenness, or grassiness — a plant-like effect on the back of your hand. And that indicates that the whisky is definitely not mature.
So by testing it on your hand, even before you’ve actually tried the whisky, you’re going to anticipate something that’s green and pretty harsh, which hasn’t been matured as it should have been matured.
But that’s rare to happen in Scotch whisky. More often you will get what is the total flavour on your hand, so without alcohol and without water, which is 99.99% of the actual content of a bottle of whisky — it’s the 0.02% that is all flavour.
So when you put a bit on the back of your hand, what you’re revealing is the actual flavour, the solids within the liquid.
You wait until the water and alcohol evaporates and what you’ve got left is a thin skin of flavour; then if you like those flavours, then you’re going to love the whisky.
With the older whiskies you get a lot of that very spicy, Christmas-cake smell, and with the younger ones you get this wonderful, uplifting citrus.
We’ve gone into this quite scientifically and analysed the chemical compounds and you do get lots of citrus and lots of floral notes in certain whiskies.
These scents are very much ‘uppers’ in terms of psychological boost, which is why people where perfumes and aftershaves based on these kinds of aromas. They smell nice and make you feel good and uplifted.
And with a perfume or aftershave, if you wanted to go for something more relaxing you might choose a more leatherish or spicy scent — and the same thing happens in whiskies.
If you get spicy, woody notes they tend to be the relaxers, which will put you to sleep.
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It sounds like there’s a whisky for every mood…
That’s exactly it — we’re brought up to believe that if you’re happy you dink champagne; if you’re having great conversations you drink red or white wine; if you then want to relax after dinner and go to sleep then you might have a cognac. That’s the ‘norm’, but in fact you can do all that without having a headache the next morning.
So the way I do it is to just have a whisky before dinner, during dinner and after dinner. And they’re all different tones, but you’re not mixing grain and grape.
So for example an ‘upper’ whisky could replace the champagne — and we actually develop whiskies specifically for that reason, such as the Select Reserve and 1994.
Then there are the ‘conversation drinks’, like the 1991 and the 1994, and also the relaxers like the 1985.
Then after dinner the big cigar-smoking, rich malt whisky, like the 1978 Glenrothes.
And that’s actually what we’re trying to do — show people that there is a whisky suitable for every occasion.
People might have a resistance to the idea of whisky as a drink for all occasions because of its strength; I mean, wine is 13-14% and whisky is 40%.
But the thing to do is to add water to it, or certainly at least have a glass of water on the side. And the joy for me is not drinking great quantities, but rather sipping. You get the concentrated flavours in stronger alcohol if you sip it as it is, rather than adding water to it.
And if you’ve got strong flavours in food, then it’s much easier to match if you’ve got neat whisky rather than watered whisky.
But sometimes you need to add a few drops of water to open whiskies up, to make them animated and reveal their inner personality. Other times you get whiskies that are very open already; you have to read them.
You mentioned having whisky with a cigar; cigar lounges are a popular concept in this part of the world. Honestly, do they go together?
Tobacco is a plant so if you talk to a tobacco specialist he will have an aroma chart that’s very similar to mine, so he will talk about spices and he’ll talk about citrus fruits and leather, so you can then match them quite quickly.
You’ve got to be careful — a lot of people don’t like big cigars. Personally I love big cigars, the bigger the better, because the draw is so much easier. And if you have an easy draw, you get this lovely spiciness and the smoke isn’t so hot.
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