Tomintoul

As you know, the Tomintoul spirit is unpeated, but they do produce a peated spirit with a phenol specification of 55PPM. This peated spirit is often held up as a shining example of the classic phenolic/ dusty/ earthy mainland peat style spirit as opposed to the medicinal/ briny Islay style and I’m definitely not going to argue with that general assessment. So, you would have thought that the peat used to kiln the barley would come from the nearby Tomintoul basin peat bog called Faemussach and indeed it was, according to Master Distiller, Robert Fleming, who told me that when they decided to begin production of a peated spirit back in 2001, their commercial malster took the peat from that location.  However, with the closure of that peat bog and a change of malster it means that they now have to source peat from the St Fergus another basin bog in Aberdeenshire.

What exactly is peat? The Encyclopedia Britannica’s definition is that it is an organic fuel consisting of spongy material formed by the partial decomposition of organic matter, primarily plant material, in wetlands. This plant material is usually referred to as sphagnum moss (also called peat moss or bog moss). The taxonomy (the conception, naming, and classification of organism groups) of the sphagnum species remains controversial, with various botanists accepting quite different numbers of species, which can be anywhere between 150-300 different varieties of plants, however in layman’s terms it means low growing plants such as bog cotton, bog myrtle, bog bean, heather, sedges, grasses and rushes.

They concluded that the two mainland basin bogs of Tomintoul and St Fergus were found to be considerably different to the Island ones. Tomintoul contained a high amount of carbohydrates, as expected, but also a lot of sphagnum moss as well, although the phenol content was less than that found on Islay, which again could be down to the variety of sphagnum found in the East Highlands and the slightly different climatic conditions found there. St Fergus peat is rich in woody material and therefore contains a high degree of lignin derivatives, especially sringyl. Although it has less sphagnum moss than the peat from Tomintoul it does have a higher phenol content. It is possible that the closer proximity to the sea of the St Fergus bog might play some part in this because of differences in drainage and temperature stabilization.

Obviously, the question is, how does the location of where the peat come from impact upon the aromas and flavours of the spirit? Burnt sphagnum on its own releases relatively simple phenols, but when woody, carbohydrate derivatives are present it will produce a drier, earthier style of spirit like that found in the in the peated spirit from Benriach, Tomintoul and to certain extent in the spirit from the Springbank distillery. Whereas those from Islay and the Islands tend to have more medicinal, creosote, iodine and herbal-peat reek, which is down to the higher proportion of carbonyls and guaiacols present in the peat. Without these carbonyls and guaiacols the phenols can taste quite hard and ashy like in the Benriach Birnie Moss bottling but together they can produce a wonderful savoury, smoked meat character as in Ardmore. These observations are only a rule of thumb as distilleries can source their peated malt from several different malting’s and obviously when they vat together spirit produced from different batches of malted barley, they can resemble peated malts from other areas, but hey that’s half the fun of blind tasting peated malts!

Anyway, I bet that you weren’t expecting a botany lecture and an analysis of peat when you first started reading this chapter, but, hey, always expect the unexpected! But coming back to the juice. I love Tomintoul and their owners Angus Dundee. When I ever I deal with them I feel like they are an honest company, there is no pretentiousness, no delusions of grandeur, no overt, eye-rolling supplication to the dark arts of marketing and as I have mentioned earlier a pricing policy that doesn’t make you feel that you are being ripped off. So, in conclusion I have no problem with recommending their juice!