Whisky from the future?
This week I’m going to defy the laws of physics! I’m going to sample whisky from a distillery that hasn’t even been built yet.
R & B Distillers are in the process of creating two completely new distilleries. The first is on the Isle of Raasay, the second in the Scottish Borders (R & B = Raasay & Borders). You might wonder what connects these two very different areas and the answer would be very little, if not for the ancestry of company co-founder Alasdair Day.
Day’s family tree includes a great-grandfather of Hebridean descent while another great-grandfather, one Richard Day, once blended whisky in the Borders town of Coldstream.
Richard started work as an office boy at J & A Davidson in 1895 but soon learnt the skills of the blender, eventually taking over the business in 1923. Over his many years in the trade he scribbled copious notes in an accounts ledger that became known as ‘the Cellar Book’ an item later inherited by Alasdair.
In 2015, R&B ran a campaign asking for members of the public to vote for the town they would like to see the distillery placed in. Peebles came out on top and building work is scheduled to begin after work is completed on the sister distillery in Raasay.*
Naturally, building a distillery is a slow process, so R&B decided to work with an undisclosed Highland distillery to create something that would emulate the intended style of their Borders spirit. The resulting dram is a single grain whisky which has been finished in Oloroso Sherry Casks before bottling at a whopping 57% abv.
Borders Single Grain Scotch Whisky
Smell: It’s a really interesting nose with vanilla, coconut, prune and figs. Chocolate biscuits, orange creams and even some apple juice.
Taste: A lovely silky texture with vanilla cream, chocolate orange, fruit crumble, cherries, raisins and some coconut.
Thoughts: This whisky is on the market for around £45 – £50 which is quite a fair price for an interesting dram at higher strength. I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that most of the grain whisky on the market has undergone a straightforward maturation in American Oak casks, but this is something altogether different. You still get that creamy grain character but it works well with some dried fruit / sherry notes. Certainly, there’s as much flavour and character here as in many single malts. It’s helped, no doubt, by the decision to bottle at cask strength. Whisky from this new distillery may be a long, long way off but if this dram truly reflects the quality we can expect from the completed project, it will be worth the wait.
*Some time after this review was published, R&B Distillers announced that plans for the Borders Distillery had been shelved.
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