Auchentoshan

Region: Lowland

Owner: Morrison Bowmore (Suntory)

Founded: 1823

The distillery is, at this moment in time the only Scottish distillery to continuously practice triple distillation and they also take a very narrow cut at 82% and finishing at 80%, which results in a very light, delicate spirit, which exhibits a very distinctive rose petal-like character when young.

As you would expect the fermentation of the wort is relatively short at 50 hours, which gives a cereal heavy character. As triple distillation will give you a very highly rectified spirit you wouldn’t want to start with a really estery wort as it could lead to a rather confected new make. The triple distillation carried out by the distillery is relatively complex, in that after the first distillation in the wash still, the spirit passes to an ‘intermediate’ still for its second distillation. The resulting spirit is separated into two during that distillation with the higher strength ‘heads’ being the only part of that run which passes on to the third still for its final distillation. The lower strength ‘tails’ are mixed in the low wines tank with the next distillation from the wash still and the process continues its cycle.

So, in my opinion this light and delicate spirit can be swamped by the oak fairly quickly and if it’s been aged in ex-Sherry butts then you can pretty much kiss any distillery character goodbye! A classic example was the 2 year old Oloroso matured bottling I tasted. I mean in just that short period of time all semblance of spirit character had gone, so what would you expect from a 10 or 12 year old Olososo matured bottling. Oh, and cutting out the use of caramel would be a good idea as well.

The best approach, in my humble opinion is to mature the spirit in refill American oak, that way the balance between the distillery character and oak should be spot on. See the ‘Classic’ and ‘American Oak’ bottlings. Possibly my favorite distillery release, was one that on paper, really shouldn’t have worked at all. The Virgin oak release in 2013 was a complete revelation and proved everything that I had said about a light spirit being swamped by new oak, completely wrong! Incidentally the owners Morrison Bowmore released a virgin oak matured bottling from one of their other distilleries, Glen Garioch, which, again on paper should have worked rather well, but perversely, in my opinion didn’t!

To get a bottling that has been matured in the correct way, you have to turn to the independents, and if you see such a bottle here on the website, I can guarantee that it’ll be ‘proper’ ‘toshan!

(Image Copyright James Mortimer Photography)