Last Night's Tipple

Another dram of Macallan 10 year old Fine Oak. The bottle is almost gone, and that's fine. This whisky is tasty, with lots of sherry, but it's really not anything special. I wouldn't exactly turn this down if someone offered it to me as a gift, but I doubt that I'll be buying it again. It's over $30 a bottle, and it's possible to find any number of Scotches that are more interesting than this one at a similar price point.

In the United States, Macallan's regular range begins with the 12 year old. Why did they decide to bottle a 10 year old when they came out with the Fine Oak line? My sense, just from viewing the Scotches that are and have been available, is that anything younger than 12 years old is a bit of a marketing challenge, at least for mass-market single malts, which Macallan unquestionably is. Laphroaig, Glenmorangie, and Balvenie all have 10 year old expressions; but the emphasis for Glenmorangie and Balvenie is and has been on the 12 year old expressions. I would imagine that Macallan is trying to do the same thing with the 10 year old Fine Oak that Balvenie does with the 10 year old Founder's Reserve and Glenmorangie does with their 10 year old expression: get something on the market at a slightly lower price point that can serve to pull consumers into the line, where they will spend more on the older bottlings. The standard 12 year old bottling is nearly $42 a fifth, while the 10 year old Fine Oak is around $32. Somebody who has never had Macallan before might hesitate less to spend $32 than $42; and once he spends the $32, he's more likely to move up to the $42 bottling. At least, that's the only thing that I can come up with.

Last Night's Tipple

One of the virtues of common Macallan bottlings like the 12 year old and the 10 year old Fine Oak (of which I had another pour last night) is that they are of high quality and they are ubiquitous. I will be first to say that the 10 year old Fine Oak is a bit one-dimensional and boring, but it is tasty and satisfying and can be purchased at just about any mediocre bar or liquor store: if you're looking for a tasty whisky but you're not someplace that caters to whisky nerds, you can look for Macallan and have a reasonable degree of assurance that where you are will have it.

I tried this again to provide a comparison to The Rich Spicy One. The Rich Spicy One aspires to be an aggressively-sherried whisky, and Macallan, whether with their regular bottlings or their Fine Oak line, is the most famous purveyor of aggressively-sherried whiskies. Well, it is true that the Macallan and The Rich Spicy One both have plenty of sherry in them, but they're not really much like one another. The Rich Spicy One is bigger, peatier, and Scotch-ier, if that makes sense. The Macallan is smoother and maltier and has more finesse. Which is better? I guess that that depends on what sort of mood the drinker is in.

Last Night's Tipple

Given that JMR's The Rich Spicy One that I bought on Saturday and wrote about on Sunday has the stated goal of being a rich, spicy malt like Macallan, I thought that it would be appropriate to have a pour of the one Macallan bottling that I currently own: The Macallan Fine Oak 10 year old. Recall that Macallan is known for aging all of its whisky in seasoned sherry barrels made to its specifications out of Quercus robur, or European oak. A few years ago, they decided to introduce the Fine Oak line, which, instead of being aged exclusively in ex-sherry Quercus robur casks, was aged in a combination of ex-sherry Quercus robur casks, ex-sherry Quercus alba (American oak) casks, and ex-Bourbon Quercus alba barrels. The result is a malt that has fewer sherry overtones than the standard Macallan but is still very sherry-influenced.

As I have written before, this is a pleasant whisky. I like it. I would never turn down the gift of a bottle. I would probably even buy it again. But it doesn't really bowl me over. To me, it's one dimensional -- light sherry, and that's it. It doesn't evolve in the glass. My perceptions of it don't change from sip to sip. It is what it appears to be, and that is all. It's also nothing like The Rich Spicy One. Not one bit. The Rich Spicy One is BIG and heavy and Scotch-y. The Macallan Fine Oak 10 is slim and elegant and demure. We'll repeat this experiment when I get around to buying another bottle of regular old Macallan 12.

Last Night's Tipple

One of the great divides in the world of Scotch is between those distilleries that age their whisky in used Bourbon barrels and those distilleries that age their whisky in used sherry butts. Used Bourbon barrels are more traditional (although the most traditional method probably would have been to put the fresh distillate in whatever container was available and to consume it as quickly as possible), and they impart the same vanilla and butterscotch flavors and aromas to Scotch as they do to Bourbon. Those flavors and aromas are much more muted in Scotch than Bourbon, of course, but they will still be there. Recently, however, more and more distilleries have been offering Scotches aged or finished (ie, aged for the last year or so) in used sherry butts. The sherry butts not surprisingly give the Scotch a sweet, grapey, nutty taste and flavor, not unlike the sweet sherries that Brits love.

Macallan is the prototype of a sherried Scotch. They take their used sherry butts very seriously, having them made to their specifications before they're filled with sherry. The arrangement strikes me as something of a rental agreement whereby Macallan owns the barrels and the sherry producers rent them for a few years, although I don't know if this is technically correct. Unlike many producers of sherried Scotch, Macallan doesn't age their whisky most of the way in ex-Bourbon barrels before transferring it to sherry butts for the last year or two: the entire aging process is conducted in sherry butts. That is, Macallan has done this until recently. Within the last two or three years, Macallan has introduced a range of whiskies they call Fine Oak. If you read their marketing fluff for the Fine Oak bottlings, you'll find that this whisky is aged in ex-Bourbon barrels, sherry butts made from American oak, and sherry butts made from European oak. The goal, I think, was to make a Scotch that was less overpoweringly sweet and winey than standard Macallan.

This isn't to say that Macallan Fine Oak Scotches don't have lots of sherry influence. They do. The 10 year old version is big-bodied, creamy, and has a big sherry nose, although not as big a sherry nose as the standard Macallan 12 year old. This was a pleasant and enjoyable whisky. The worst thing that I can say about it is that it was one-dimensional. One of the things that I really about fine spirits is the way the nose and the taste develops in the glass and changes every time one takes a sip or nose. That didn't happen with this whisky. Both the taste and the smell were the same throughout the pour. The one dimension was very good, but it was still just one dimension.