Whisky Saga Release #1 - part 2

Welcome to part the second of the saga of Whisky Saga Release #1. The plot thickens, the bottler must be selected. Or rather I must consider if I want to find a whisky to bottle through an independent bottler or directly from a distillery, and that will decide which importer to partner with for this bottling.

I check around for a bit. I ponder. I speak to friends and acquaintances in the whisky industry, I revisit my personal preferences, and I narrow down my mental list of candidates. Some of the candidates I hope to get back to at a later date, but for now – for this project – I decide to partner with the importer Daracha AS. They represent a number of independent bottlers and distilleries in the Norwegian market.

I decide on Daracha after seeing a very interesting list of close to 100 available casks from Tomatin Distillery in the Highland region of Scotland.

The next step is to arrange a conference call with Scott Adamson, Global Brands Ambassador at Tomatin Distillery. He’s in charge of brand education, cask selection and whisky creation, so the perfect man to speak to.

Scott started at the distillery back in 2012 as Sales Manager for the Western Europe region. Then he worked for a year at Whyte and Mackay before he came back to Tomatin as Brand Ambassador. He is now also shadowing Graham Eunson, Master Distiller at Tomatin since 2011.

Scott tells me that at Tomatin Distillery they have focused more and more on the brand over the past 15 years. As a result of this they have stopped selling casks to independent bottlers, and stopped selling new fill casks. Instead they have started a program, if you will, where they each year identify 80 – 100 casks as potential candidates for single cask bottlings. The list is sent out to their distributors around the world, Daracha AS in Norway being one of them. These candidate casks are offered to retailers, groups of bars etc. and about 35 - 40 of the casks will end up actually being bottled during the year. 

«Picking these candidate casks is a lot of fun for me and Graham. We have hundreds of samples to work through. There’s a lot of work to draw all the samples, then the there is the nosing. Typically we work through 10 samples in the morning and 10 in the afternoon.»

During the selection process they will be looking for parcels that are not used in the core range, and that offer something different.

The whole process starts in early October. The Sales Director states the number of casks and types and ages as parameters. 

«Then Graham and I will start looking. Seeing what options we have in the warehouses.»

Next they narrow down the selection by identifying what is interesting, especially something they haven’t released before and/or is not in the core range.

Ultimately these casks will have to be the best they have, as they will showcase Tomatin and what they produce in terms of quality single malt.

Part 3 will cover the cask selection itself in detail.

Sláinte!
- Thomas