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Balvenie

Regional categorisation is a vexed situation in whisky: it could be a handy way of grouping distilleries together geographically, but it can be a tricky organization identifying a stylistic continuity between all the whiskies in Perthshire or Speyside.

But if you can't claim that there is a 'Speyside style', or isolate specific qualities which make Speyside the best whisky-creating area on the mainland, how do you clarify such a concentration of distilleries in the location - a part of the Highlands which was, in the early days of whisky, a fairly remote component of the planet?

David Stewart, William Grant's grandly-titled Malt Master, is content to admit ignorance on this point. 'All of the quality distilleries are here in this central portion of Speyside,' he says. That is the mystique of Scotch, We've all got very-sophisticated gear, but we can not inform what tends to make the difference'. He's fairly positive what tends to make Balvenie such a dramatically distinct dram to Glenfiddich, even though they share the exact same website and use the very same malt and water.

The character comes from the nonetheless. Glenfiddich is coal fired, Balvenie is gas fired. The shape of the stills is different: Balvenie has larger stills with shorter necks and that's exactly where the flavours alter. Possibly the ten per cent of floor-malted barley assists, but I assume it is the stills.'

Other influential factors contain fantastic wood management and the use of old dunnage warehouses. 'It'i not just age thii makes whiiky excellent,' says David. 'It's age and wood.' This underpins his choice to make life intriguing (or hard) for himself by generating a Balvenie range in which every malt shows a subtly different wood influence.

If we have been just to age the Founder's Reserve and do it as a 12-year-old or a 15-year-old, we wouldn't see a lot distinction among them. We had to take a different route, so we produced Double Wood, [where the malt is aged for 10 years in ex-Bourbon barrels and completed in sherry butts]. Then we started carrying out Single Barrel, and at a larger strength with no chill filtering then Port Wood and now vintage casks.'

This freedom to experiment is one particular of the positive aspects of Grant's family-owned status. 'We can do things rapidly. The family is steeped in whisky, but we are encouraged to be modern, we can go against the trend -with the Balvenie range, or with Black Barrel, where we were determined to make the only single grain whisky that really functions.'

If the William Grant portfolio was The Byrds, then Glenfiddich would be Roger McGuinn and Balvenie would be Gene Clark, the underrated genius. David, as Grant's master blender, is in charge of the entire range, from malts to blends to single grain and whisky liqueur, and his particular affection for Balvenie is apparent. 'I've been at Grant's for 35 years,' he says. 'It's been my only job worth reading