Traditionally, the season of lent starts with Ash Wednesday and ends with the celebration of Easter. Well, for us Christians at least, though many religions have some kind of “fasting season” where people exert moderation.
Some people here in Austria also go through a fasting season during Advent in preparation for Christmas. As a young lad I never really thought much of it and didn’t fast – after all, there were always way too many home-made cookies and delicacies during that time to feast on.
For those who want the TL/DR: This blog will go into hibernation mode with infrequent updates in the future for “whenever I feel like I have something to say”.
It’s been six years. Six years of putting out whisky related content on this blog on a more or less regular basis. Six years which has seen me undertake lots of superb trips to Scotland, make lots of new friends and enjoy some incredible whisky. I’ve been blessed to experience all of this and I’m thankful to each and every one I’ve met and shared a dram with along the way.
Imagine ordering two bottles of whisky. The vendor and the postman are doing their thing and the package arrives. You take a knife, open the parcel and… you feel nothing. You should feel excited because in the package there’s the latest edition of the Kilchoman Islay barley series to add to the previous ones. You should also feel excited because there’s a nice cask strength Springbank which many people have a hard time picking up. And yet you feel nothing. You acknowledge the arrival and stash them away.
That’s what happened to me last week. Where’s the joy I used to feel when I got a new delivery? The excitement? The anxious wait for the postman to show up? What’s going on here? What I was feeling that moment was the effect of the law of diminishing returns. In the beginning, when we are new to an activity or hobby everything is fun and exciting. The body is hard at work to release dopamine every time you get your retail therapy fix and you discover something new. However, the bar will rise higher and higher with every purchase and every experience. You need more and more and more to trigger a response and accompanied dopamine kick. You don’t even notice it, you’re just in the flow you don’t notice the constant “dopamine creep” until the day when a “normal” delivery gets acknowledged with a mere shrug and you notice feeling … nothing.
Why did I feel nothing? Probably because there was no hunt, no long waiting period, no ballot involved in getting these bottles. Just a bog standard order. No reward for being one of the “lucky ones” to win a ballot, finding an exclusive single cask, stumbling across something rare or sold out. No, just a bog standard order. Why are limited releases and queues and ballots and all the rest of these mechanisms so popular with marketing departments at booze producers everywhere? Because these mechanisms are all dopamine-inducing. And once you’re hooked on that substance, you need the next thrill and the next and the next… (Including all the ill-effects of (verbal) abuse against companies and their employees when dopamine addicts don’t get their fix)…
Maybe that’s a wake-up call. The mind crying out “Hey, you fool, you’ve already got enough. Enjoy what you have.” Something to think about. Anybody else out there with a similar experience? What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments!
This is an extended version of an experimental long-form post I pushed to my Instagram account. It will also be an experiment on my blog as I will not post links to it on my social channels to test whether people actually read the blog and discover the content via other sources. Feel free to share it on your social channels if you found it enlightening and share-worthy!
Apparently I didn’t write one of these articles last year. Lazy sod. So, let’s make the 2019 edition count! As some of you might have noticed, this blog wasn’t as active during 2019. This was due to many factors – all of which come down to that I tried to squeeze in more and different things in my spare time. I’ve taken up beekeeping again together with my family (which takes up a lot of time during spring and summer) and there were several other big projects. All of this meant that most of my whisky consumption was more of a “casual dramming” style than taking the time to sit down and actually write about a whisky. Such is life. At the same time I’m experiencing a bit of a “whisky fatigue”. I tried to deny it for months, but that’s what it is. I don’t really get much pleasure from spending countless hours perusing the web and social media to try to keep up with the latest news in the whisky world. Too many new releases, too many new distilleries, too many new armchair bottlers, too much hype and marketing to stay on top of the game. And, to be honest, to a point I actually don’t really care much at the moment. Chasing the latest and greatest and the ever one-upping “next big thing” has made me tired. I don’t actively go around and beg for samples and I’m not really the type for big and noisy whisky festivals, so I’ve been a bit out of touch. It seems that people are mostly interested in reviews of new releases (which I rarely provide) and repeating the same rants over and over again is also not a viable content strategy. This led to “quiet times” on the blog – and these will probably continue. My aspiration has never been to be a source for keeping everyone informed about the current affairs and releases in the whisky world. Well, this should come as no surprise to anyone.
Now, at the same time this should not become a “doom and gloom” type of post, so let’s look at noteworthy occurrences and tidbits that happened during 2019
Just the other day, a young lad sat next to me in my study, we were working on a movie project. On my table was a bottle of a single cask bottling I had received and “catalogued” that day – meaning the bottle got a hand-written neck tag with price, date of purchase and so on. “75€?” the young man asked me, seemingly in awe, as he inspected the bottle. To him, clearly used to buying spirits at a much lower price point, it looked like a very expensive bottle. To me it was just something I bought and would open at some point – rather casually too, having become used to whisky selling for triple figures, so that 75€ had become a rather ordinary price tag in my perception.
I had become so immersed in the whisky world that over the years my perspective had changed – and I didn’t even realize it until my friend pointed it out. While it did take that experience to really drive the point home, this moment was indicative of a change I had noticed myself during the past couple of months.
Who doesn’t like whisky samples? Okay, most would probably prefer full-size bottles, but for most of us mere mortal lovers of the amber nectar, samples are a great thing.
We collect samples at festivals, we bring back home unfinished drams from tastings, we swap them with friends, we get them for free or we stash a way hidden liquid treasures of times gone by. Some of us might even keep an archive – a liquid sample library of all the bottles we’ve ever opened. Is there a whisky lover out there who doesn’t have samples?
I am a sample hoarder. I have brought back samples from my Scotland trips, from tastings, festivals and meetings with friends. I also keep a liquid library. I even bought a huge archive of 6 cl samples from one entire year’s worth of entries into the Malt Maniacs Awards when they were sold by a friend for a good cause.
Needless to say, in total that’s a LOT of sample bottles kicking around, stashed away, waiting to be discovered “someday”. And so late last year I made the decision to do something about the “backlog” and start drinking and enjoying my samples. What I did not expect was how mixed my experiences would be.
Production Director Allan Logan and Head Distiller Adam Hannett inspect trial plots planted on Islay in 2016.(Picture: Bruichladdich)
This past weekend a press release by Bruichladdich appeared in my inbox. Getting press releases is nothing new when you’re covering any kind of topic and especially in a booming market like the current, bloggers like myself are often flooded with sometimes good and sometimes cringeworthy examples. I usually don’t bother covering the latest whiskies – others are better and quicker at covering the “business news” and I don’t even attempt to compete.
And yet this press release was different – confirming what had already been murmured behind the scenes: The Islay-based distillery has acquired the Shore House Croft with 30 acres of former farmland in the immediate vicinity of the distillery. Why would a distillery buy farmland? Well, no, they won’t use it to build another mega distillery or any other construction project, they plan to use it as – drumroll, please – farm land, plain and simple.
Bruichladdich identifies itself by the slogan “Progressive Hebridean Distillers”. Some might roll their eyes at the idea of being “progressive” in the production of booze or when someone mentions “terroir” in conjunction with brown spirits. Why is this? In a whisky world where mass is king and most of the whisky is produced by using high-yield malting barley and high-yield yeast in search of ever more efficiency (at the potential cost of losing flavours) attempting to do things differently and looking left and right of the highway are good things – at least in my book. Bruichladdich has never shied away from trying things – and trying is the key phrase with this latest project:
The land will be used to conduct soil surveys followed by farming trials to “test the viability of different barley varieties on Islay soil.” In doing so they will look at heritage barley varieties “outside of the ‘recommended list’.” Now that’s where it gets interesting. Personally, I tend to think that different barley varieties, especially old varieties, can bring variety in distilling and anyone who has tried one of Bruichladdich’s Bere Barley bottlings can taste the difference themselves. I’ve baked with beremeal and if you’ve tasted the raw ingredients you can nose and taste it in the finished whisky. Now, at first there will be trials and what will come of these is too early to tell but I wholeheartedly agree with looking left and right of the mainstream raw ingredients and experimenting – especially if the end results are a mighty fine dram.
The 30 acres are rather insignificant in size compared to the current 1000 acres farmed by 17 farmers on the Island for the distillery, but the research conducted there might very well benefit their partners due to varieties emerging successfully seeing more widespread planting.
Now, there’s only one key production step missing in making whisky and that is malting the Islay-grown barley on Islay instead of shipping and tankering it off to Inverness. But that’s something for another press release, maybe in a couple of years time…
On the 10th of April in the year 2014 the first article, aptly named “(Yet another) Whisky Blog” was published on this site, back then under a different domain name. Before reading these first ramblings again I thought they might be cringeworthy now that I’m more seasoned, more experienced and quite a bit older. Alas, what I wrote back in 2014 still holds true to this day, which makes me proud.
This blog was started to provide guidance in a whisky world that’s certainly grown a lot in complexity over the years and decades. In a way, the whisky world has changed that much in just four years, that I was on the brink of losing myself in it – and losing interest. Only earlier this week did I buy my first bottle of whisky in 2018 (and a grain whisky to boot!). There were days when I wasn’t sure whether I should really attend the Limburg Whisky Fair, out of the sheer perceived loss of interest.
Things were not going well in my own whisky world for a few months! There’s I reason I quoted the Obama campaign slogan in the title – to me it felt as if my term in the whisky world was coming to an end. I did not need an election – but I needed a big kick in my behind, catapulting me forward. Limburg represented that kick in the bottom, the experiences, the talks, the malt mate comradery – and a few drams that reminded me that whisky is indeed the best aged brown spirit this world produces.
Now I can honestly say “Happy birthday” to my wee little corner of the internet. Hey, this blog is now older than some of the no age statement bottom-shelf whisky on supermarket shelves! I consider that an accomplishment! Thanks to everybody for sticking with me for the ride, thanks for all the comments, the friendships – and the samples. This blog would be nothing without the people reading it and engaging with my “content”. I’m looking forward developing it further for and with you.
Ah yes, the good old tradition to look back at what was – and a gaze into the crystal ball. Well, actually, a crystal ball isn’t really needed – 2018 will be even crazier than before, so I guess you could just re-read what I wrote last year and exchange “2017” with “2018”.
Anyway, first things first:
2017 in review
2017 was a year with both ups and downs. Let’s start with the downs first so we can get them out of the way.
I can’t lie. I’ve been a bit silent these past weeks and months. As the whisky world is buzzing with more and more distilleries, more and more releases and more and more messaging put out there, there is less and less “for me” out there that truly excites me. In the course of this year, I have found less and less to buy and spending will have decreased considerably for the second year running. The more hyped up the whisky world gets, the farther it distances itself from me – or the other way round. With the closure of the Cadenhead’s shop in Salzburg at the end of the year, I’m losing my main source for affordable, interesting bottles, which “doesn’t help” either.
Anyway, this should only serve as an introduction. No, this will not be a blog post about whisky prices, I’ve written about that before. Today I want to talk about whisky, luxury and aspiration due to two things that happened just today: A discussion about whisky magazines and their content/target group in a Facebook group and listening to a podcast about luxury. That made things click for me and prompted me to write a few lines… Continue reading “more MORE M-O-R-E! Whisky and the aspiration trap”
