I’m told I should start every blog with Scotch, single malt, Glasgow’s, Whisky, Club to make sure the search engines pick up Still Life. It’s known as Search Engine Optimization and makes for a very dull intro. Still, for last week we could have Burns Supper, good food, good whiskies, good friends. We could have followed that up with Spirit of Speyside, and breakfast drams with Glenmorangie. That Was The Week That Was.
Tuesday was our second annual Burns Supper, held again in the Bon Accord, and again it was a superb evening, enlivened by the addition of a raffle. We had some old faces and some new faces and within a few round the barrel evenings, I’m sure we’ll all get to know each other’s names. Having three Gordons doesn’t really help, though! Good job treasurer Mr Black has worked out a mnemonic to help. Shame there were too many great drams floating around for me to remember it.
Wednesday was fairly quietish for those who tarried a bit overlong at the barrel, but Thursday saw your chairman and treasurer at the Scottish Parly as guests of the Spirit of Speyside festival. We’d been asked to act as judges – a dream job you may think, but you try “tasting” 56 drams without swallowing one. Half way through I was gasping for a pint!
Friday brought our first breakfast meeting – courtesy of those good folk at Glenmorangie. The Pot Still at 11am is a quite, peaceful place. It stayed that way until the flight of five fantastic Glenmos was finished. By the way, can someone, anyone, tell me why it’s called a flight of whiskies?
We had been invited by Corey, Martin and Annabel to taste the range, including for the first time, the new Sonnalta, described by Annabel as the missing link in the Glenmorangie family.
First up was the breakfast dram – the Original, full of dark coconut, vanilla, perfect for pouring over your porridge.
The La Santa was next, big on sherry having spent two years in a sherry cask after 10 in bourbon. It was juicy, nutty, spicy, with dry fruit and orange marmalade. The 18 shows the progression there is in every Glenmorangie expression. It is its own dram, but identifiably comes from the Glenmorangie house. It had a tropical backdrop, and was also refreshing and amazingly fruity.
Number four was the new Sonnalta and I urge you to get your mitts on this if you possibly can. Retailing at £65 or so, it’s an astonishing dram, sublime, superb and stellar. It has spent 10 years in bourbon with a further two in a Pedro Ximenez sherry. Sonnalta means generous in Gaelic (apparently) and this is a dram that just keeps on giving. It’s smooth, sweet, scrumptious and a very, very dangerous dram. One is not enough!
Last up was the Signet. A bit of an experiment, the barley used for this was highly roasted chocolate barley, fired at 250 degrees centigrade (whatever that means) and contained some very old whiskies from 1974.
The Glenmo Three generously left a handful of extras as they made their way onto another tasting, leaving five souls from the club to blink their way home.
*That Was The Week That Was will be remembered by some of our older members as a satirical TV programme from 1962 and 63.
