Blenders are the high priests of the whisky world. They take the fiery flame of raw distillate and, via secret ministrations, render it deliciously intelligible to the common drinker. They are the guardians of magic formulae; they know the secrets of stills, warehouses and casks. Thirty years ago, they had a quasi-monastic existence, cloistered in warehouse and nosing-room silence; now they are roving ambassadors and travelling showmen. Few wear the priestly robes with more panache than Richard Paterson of Whyte & Mackay.
Andrew Jefford on Richard Paterson’s blends: Six of the best
I tasted the following six against competitors from Johnnie Walker (Red, Black, Gold and Blue) and Chivas Regal (12-year-old, 18-year- old and 25-year-old). The strengths of Paterson’s now handsomely packaged blends are their wealth of detail, their sense of personality and their inner muscularity. If you like evidently old, cask-influenced whisky, the 30 Years Old and 40 Years Old blends are matchless: it takes great skill to keep whisky lively and unfatigued when it’s this old. But the range lacks the textured plushness and stylistic diversity of the Johnnie Walker range, or the Speyside-influenced finesse of the Chivas Regal range.
Whyte & Mackay Special
Aromatic, energetic and precise (ginger and celery mingling with vanilla), and lots of energy on the palate, with a shaving or two of chocolate on the finish (13.5/20).
Widely available: Waitrose £9.99, Thresher £10.99, Asda £11.22
Whyte & Mackay The Thirteen (13-year-old)
A thicker, more layered whisky than the Special, with notes of white chocolate, hazel and walnut, blended for both drive and refinement (14.5/20).
Thresher £18.69,
ww.thedrinkshop.com £20.09
Whyte & Mackay Old Luxury (19-year-old)
The nose is a synopsis of the scents of the whisky warehouse: beaten earth, hessian, raisins (from Oloroso sherry casks), briny air. The palate is dark, smoky-salty and muscular, tapering away to something a little sweeter and nuttier (16.5/20).
www.thedrinkshop.com £34.95,
www.thewhiskyexchange.com £40.99
Whyte & Mackay Supreme (22-year-old)
Suggestive of crystallised fruits and flowers. The palate is full, warm, and embracing, soft-textured and salty, with notes of roast almond and burnt raisin. Complete and harmonious, with a Cognac-like refinement on the finish. For me, the best-balanced of the range (17.5/20).
www.thewhiskyexchange.com or
www.thedrinkshop.com £48.59
Whyte & Mackay 30 Years Old
Plenty of wood notes, but handled with great subtlety to bring out coffee, mocha and tangerine peel. On the palate, a leap forward in concentration and depth: peach skins, salty caramel, a savoury finish (16/20).
Harrods £130,
www.thedrinkshop.com £162.89,
www.thewhiskyexchange.com
£169
Whyte & Mackay 40 Years Old
My score reflects the fact that I don’t relish deeply woody whisky, though it’s a magnificent example of the genre. The scents are hugely complex, hinting at everything from incense to boatyards. The palate has the intensity of ancient sherries and madeiras, conveying that sense of being made of liquefied antique furniture (16.5/20).
www.thewhiskyexchange.com £535,
www.thedrinkshop.com £549
Indeed, having read his recently published memoir (written jointly with the whisky journalist Gavin D Smith), it’s hard not to see him as a candidate for canonisation. Surely no blender has built his triumphs on a more unpromising career trajectory. He joined Whyte & Mackay in September 1970 as assistant blender, becoming chief blender five years later.
Whyte & Mackay was taken over in 1972 by Scottish & Universal Investment Trust (whose name made the ominous acronym “Suits”). It was the first of no fewer than eight forced marriages, often to those (like Lonrho and the Brent Walker Group) who had no long-term interest in whisky and even less understanding of it. The portfolio of malt distilleries acquired by the company over the years includes the little-liked Fettercairn and the lightest of all islanders, Jura, as well as the grain distillery Invergordon. If these constituted a bridge hand, you wouldn’t open the bidding.
Down the years, the Whyte & Mackay brand has flickered like a candle left by an open window, somehow surviving disastrous re-packaging initiatives and the wildly fluctuating fortunes of its holding company; at times, most of Paterson’s work has consisted of blending own-label whiskies for supermarkets. The latest owner, in a gratifying conclusion to Whyte & Mackay’s narrative of transitory ownership, is Vijay Mallya of India’s United Breweries group, the first of Paterson’s 14 bosses to wear gold bracelets and diamond-studded earrings. Improbable as it may at first seem, the embrace of the “king of good times” (whose Indian Bagpiper brand is the world’s biggest-selling whisky) may bring Whyte & Mackay the stability that has eluded it for so long.
The book’s subtitle promises us “the passionate revelations of a Scotch whisky master blender”. Those used to the salt lick of celebrity biographies may be in for a disappointment (Paterson admits to reading Hugh Johnson’s World Atlas of Wine in bed on his wedding night), and anyone looking for a settling of business scores will also find the narrative disappointingly gentlemanly. As a personal account of four decades of change in the Scotch whisky industry, though, it is full of the charm, gentle humour and whisky insight familiar to anyone who has seen Paterson in action in his masterclasses.
Only one chapter out of nine is actually devoted to blending work, so I probed him a little further on these matters when I met him recently in London. The most difficult part of his job, he says, is ensuring long-term consistency, since you need huge stocks: “without the stock, you can’t have a blend”. Supermarket customers are particularly irritating in this respect, since they are always chiselling away at cost and will switch suppliers capriciously – destroying the work spent in getting stocks in place.
The most important blending skill is not sensorial acuity itself, but what he calls “the sense of investigation ... the determination to nose 600 casks a day, climbing to the top of a racked warehouse when the temperature is -16°C and your hands are frozen”. Only if you know your raw materials intimately, he says, can you maximise their blending potential. (His greatest regret is the difficulties he faced in trying to acquire a professional education in the early years when the walls between companies were impregnable, when prisons had more visitors than distilleries did, and when discussing your blending work outside the company was a sackable offence.)
The Paterson blending hallmark, he says, is “silk and warmth and body and sensuality”, and the key to achieving that is “marrying time”: allowing a blend to rest in wood to integrate and smooth out its edges, once the actual mixing of the malt whiskies and the grain whiskies has been achieved. (The emphasis on extra marrying time is why the Whyte & Mackay whiskies are bottled with what seem like odd age statements.) He’s not fond of “lighter styles: I like to have more reward on my palate. Speysiders can be very beautiful, but if you have too much, they can be too floral.” He also remembers over-doing the peaty Islay in a blend once, though, and having to hold the whole lot back and re-adjust it later. Another nightmare moment was when a warehouseman tipped a single cask of four-year-old whisky into a 12-year-old blend by accident. The rules stipulate that a blend is only as old as its youngest component, so thousands of litres lost eight expensive years on that instant.
His favourite blending challenge is preparing rare and expensive whiskies such as Whyte & Mackay’s 40-year-old (see box) – but the main message of his ambassadorial work is to get consumers to savour rather than slug. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a 40-year-old or an eight-year-old, there are plenty of people who’ll just reach out, say ‘hello’ and over it goes. No, no, no: I don’t want you to do that, Mr Consumer. I want you to hold it in the mouth, on top of the tongue and underneath, roll it back into the middle, keep it there, and only then let it go down. Then you will really experience a great whisky. Like a great painting, there’s much more to discover than at first glance.”
Andrew Jefford is the author of ‘Peat, Smoke and Spirit: A Portrait of Islay and its Whiskies’, published by Headline (£7.99)
‘Goodness Nose: The Passionate Revelations of a Scotch Whisky Master Blender’ by Richard Paterson and Gavin D. Smith, illustrated by Jim Drysdale (Angel’s Share, £19.99)
