Hey, welcome back to Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm Pat from the Whisky Hotline. We're upstairs in Lincoln Park again, which means it's a Whisky Hotline episode. Welcome back, Brett. Glad to be back, Pat. Love to have you. Roger, hello. Glad to be here. Roger works in beer. I do, I work in beer. But we're gonna try rum today. I'm a big fan of rum, so that was a pleasant surprise. And terroir. We have a special guest with us today, Mark Reynier. Welcome to Barrel to Bottle. Well, hello, thank you very much for having me. Yeah, thanks for flying in for this. It is our honor. So listeners, Mark, known for several distilleries now and a long career in the beverage alcohol business. You want to give us a little brief of how you got from A to G here? Yeah, well, I'm a wine guy at heart. That's my family businesses were wine importation. So I spent the 80s and 90s in the vineyards of France and learning about sort of terroir and modern wine making and agronomics and organics, bar dynamics, et cetera. I got into whiskey during that similar, that sort of ran in parallel, the the naysence of single malt whiskey from sort of 85 onwards. And I got into that bit by bit increasingly. And then it sort of dawned on me that actually I'd quite like to distill something myself and use what I've learned in the vineyards of France into agriculture and barley. Very different approach than Scotch whisky was taking at the time, certainly. Yeah, exactly. After quite a long time, I got the chance to buy Bruichladdich Distillery on Islet. It took me 10 years to do it, but we got there in the end. And that's when we started, I started applying some of these ideas. The principle that it's about where you start. It's about the, for wine, it's about grapes, it's about the vineyard, it's about terroir. And why not with whisky? You know, the most flavorsome cereal in the world. Surely to goodness, you know, it's important about how and where that's grown, because that's the source of whisky's flavor. And it's important, listeners, to distinguish that really nobody else was looking at it that way. And still really not a lot of people look at it that way. It's purely a accounting-driven thing with, you're going to switch barley strains based on yield of, per what, hectare of barley or bushel of barley, however they're going to measure it. Conventionally, either an island or that one of an environment wouldn't be a place where you would want to grow barley. Well, they hadn't grown barley there since, well, for simple reason, the First World War, a lot of the young farmers didn't get back. So it stopped then, so 1960, 1918. So convincing farmers to grow barley again was a little bit of a risk, took a lot of persuasion. But having done so, I never realized at the time just how difficult it was to grow on Ida because of the climate. You've got very peat-driven, humid soils, a lot of rain. So harvesting or rather sowing doesn't occur until very late in the spring, quite often May. Then of course, you've got a backstop where you've got to have harvested by before the autumn gales come in off the Atlantic and would flatten everything. And worse, the arrival of the geese from Greenland that hoover everything up. Yeah, well, they're a plague here too. Yeah, we hate geese here as well. So it makes for a pretty difficult growing season. On the plus side, you've got the luminosity because you're that far north and west, so you've got extra daylight hours. But the thing we never had was the logistics that you need to do it really, really well. And that's what I was able to do at Waterford, is have those logistics to make it all separable and traceable and transparent. So important transition there. When was Bruichladdich sold? Well, that was in 2012. And I was not that happy at the time. I had more things to do. So in a sort of high-dugion, I sort of up sticks and followed the barley. I went south, where it's easier to grow. So 240 miles south of Islay, you come to Waterford, you get your feet wet, but warmer, it's sunnier, glacial soils, maritime climate, emmelerated by the Gulf Stream. What year did Waterford then start distilling? When Diageo had shut down a brewery that they had built in 2004, 40 million euros of stainless steel and technological. Brand new equipment. It's a Willy Wonka, unbelievable stuff. It's the sort of things you find in wineries, but obviously much, much bigger. And it's everything that I sort of wanted because it's about brewing, or mashing as we call it. That's where you liberate that flavor. The distilling bit is easy. We tell everybody it's alchemy and it's sort of master distiller this, master distiller that, but actually the distilling bit is easy. It's much more difficult the provisioning of barley and the logistics and the extraction of those flavors. And that's, for want of a better word, brewing. So a brewery is what I wanted. And there was one all sparkly, shiny on the banks of the River Sher available. So then I brought the stills with me. We'd already stolen them from Inverleaven on the River Clyde. And we'd taken them to Bruichladdich. They sat outside Bruichladdich. They sat in the yard forever. I remember the first few times I went to Bruichladdich, they were always in the yard. Well, that was it. And I stole them again. So we had that Lohmann still, and we were sitting there wondering what to do with it. My wife is not a great whiskey drinker at the best of the times. And so it was, you know, let's, why not make some gin? I found this old recipe from 1695, which talked about, you know, Hebridean distilling. You know, remember at the time, this is, they weren't farm distilleries. It was every man for himself. It was personal distilling. And this is quite relevant to what we're going to talk about because, you know, I can object that, that, you know, whiskey started out as a terroir based spirit, whether you like it or not, that it was, you know, the guy growing his own barley and, you know, the guys that could grow barley well, other guys that up their game when the laws were changed and you had to go legit and buy licenses. The guys that bought the licenses were the guys that could grow the barley. It would be pretty damn stupid building a distillery with no barley. So, you know, that's my conjecture is it was always about barley. And we've just forgotten it. Looking through this old manuscript, and it talks about people distilling away and basically adding, you know, whatever they could that was lying around on the hillside to make it taste better, because of course they weren't, you know, they didn't have all the ability to separate, you know, that methanol from the ethanol, etc. It was to improve the flavors. They were adding, you know, juniper, gorse flowers, heather flowers, bog myrtle, all these things that were basically lying around to try and make it taste better. And I remember showing this to my colleagues and saying, look, this, if you look at it, looks more like gin to me. So let's give it a go. So it was really a homage to, I suppose, you know, to the origins of whisky. So you bought this old Diageo brewery, this one? No, not an old one. A new one, a new one. A shiny brand. Out of curiosity, what was the brewery originally? Guinness. Guinness. It was, well, originally it was called Strangmans. The other piece, Roger, which you love, amongst other things, they have the most incredible bash filter, which is unusual for it. But it was also, which is little known, it's where they made Guinness extract. What's Guinness extract? The infamous, yeah, the essence. That's where they made all the extract, which was basically, was the flavoring agent for all Guinness made all over the world, except for what comes out of St. James Gate. Yeah. Is the other place where it's at. And then it would get reconstituted elsewhere. Yeah. It's a pretty funky place. More stainless steel that you can shake a stick at. But, you know, forget all that, and forget the excess of stainless steel tanks. In amongst it is this brewing set up, which is, yes, we call it the Holy Trinity. It's turning the whole mashing thing upside down. And this is the bit I wasn't sure about at the beginning, which is the world's only hydromill is there. It's a pretty innocuous looking thing. It's a sort of titanium, two titanium plates that mill against each other. But it's fed with barley, sure, but water at the same time. So it's an anaerobic milling. Now, what that means is we don't need grist. Grist being that mixture of flour, solids, and husks in a very precise proportion, because you're going to percolate hot water through that. That's the traditional mashing method. By gravity, by gravity, the hot water is going to percolate through. And you need the husk to set up a stable grain bed so the hot water rinses all your sugars out. Yeah, or else you end up with glue, exactly, quite. And then through the slotted floor, it then percolates away and you ferment that. You know, that's called wood. But here, the principle is the other way around. Ultimately, we're going to pneumatically press every last drop out. So forget gravity, this is pneumatic pressing. But before we get there, the water and the barley together pass through the mill. So we don't need grist. We can mill to 99%. And that barley water, barley residue is going to go into the mash tunt. And instead of trying to get... And it's grinding everything up. It's not leaving husk. It's just more powdery. The whole lot, the whole shooting match. And so then you've got that sort of porridge-like, but quite watery mix, which we then, like a saucepan on a stove, we heat the whole thing up, not trying to guess four consecutive water temperatures and hoping that somewhere in there, you get that conversion of the sugar enzymes, sucrase, fructose, maltase, and activated to do that final conversion of presugars into sugars. In this instance, we're warming the whole thing up like a saucepan. So we're finding those activations wherever they are. Now, of course, you think, well, okay, for standard barley, you know, surely you know where that is. But remember, we're not. We're doing 35 different barley origins every year. So, I mean, normally with brewing, I know the Fahrenheit, I don't know the Celsius, but you're heating it really no higher than like 152 Fahrenheit. And that's how you're extracting everything you need out of a normal malted barley brew without scorching the barley or pulling out kind of those elements out of the husks that you wouldn't want. Which should we try first? I've got Cuvee, Argo, and a couple single farms here. Obviously, not Pete at first. Do you want to do a terroir play? Two single farms. These two farms, Dunmore and Dunbell, these are both names of fortresses, Dunmore being the big fort. So they were built as protection against Viking invasion. And so this barley grows around those two forts. Both these farms are north of Waterford in Carlo, County Carlo. They are both from the Elton soil series. So we're talking about glacial soils. So the only difference here really is the localized nature of where they are. This sort of word that seems to cause such controversy, terroir, it's only because we don't really have an English translation for it that really encapsulates what it stands for. We have regions which claim a terroir, and so it's used as a noun in that respect. But really, the origins of terroir is more about the interaction between the microclimate, the soil, the topography on the nourishment of a plant. That's the pure form of what terroir is. It's not a person, it's not a thing, it's not a distillery. It's what happens to the plant, the microclimate, the soil and the nourishment. So what you have is this grain, the cereal, which we know, by law, we have to use it for single malt. Single malt, malted barley, that's the clues in the name. And this little package, we know that single malt is the most flavor complex spirit of all. I mean, that's been recognized for a long time. The reason is because of the barley, because in that little package of delight, there are 2,000 flavor compounds. 2,000. Now, put that in perspective, cheese has about 10, wine about 500. And here- Yeah, take that wine. Here we've got 2,000. Now, why is that? Because barley as a plant has a tendency to mutate easily. So, therefore, the 10,000 years since it first arrived, it first appeared, it's done quite a lot of mutating. And that's why we have that concentration of flavor compounds. It's susceptibility to mutate. Now, to bring that back to the hydro mill, you're running these barley Colonel Sue there, and it's getting hot strike water as it's hitting the mill, and then being just completely pulverized. It's cool. It is cool water then, and it's getting cooked then as more of a porridge, less of a mash, and instead of then- Incrementally, incrementally heated. It's called an incremental mash converter. So you don't have a strike conversion for an alloys? No. No. It's incremental mash conversion. So this is the saucepan on the stove gradually increasing in temperature, which when you're dealing with 35 different farm origins, you couldn't make a better system because wherever those strike points are, no single barley origin is going to be the And you're working with 35 different single-origin barley. For the reasons we just described, the variability is huge. So this system designed for this brewery uniquely has turned out to be, for me, the ultimate terroir extractor. You couldn't design it better. The efficacy of this system, which of course is what these big guys are all about, efficacy. You don't have to empty the mash tun, for example. Yeah. Because we're going to press the f**k out of this. Yeah. You heat it and then it moves to the press. The control factor is the process and whatever is in each individual strain of barley from a particular place. And then we're going to squeeze the bugger out of it. Gets freed and that's what they're doing. So we get every last flavor aspect, terroir aspect, out of the barley. Again, you couldn't design this better. With the added bonus that it's more efficient than any other method of doing this. But that was the reason for it. Efficacy, it's this trilogy, this combination of the incremental mash conversion, the hydromill anaerobic milling, which is where we get the barley aroma from. And then the terroir extraction through the mash filter. The first one we're trying is Dunbell. I like on the bottle here, so you mentioned the farmer. What is, is this a single type of barley then that he's growing? Yes. You've just another can of worms. You've just started. First of all, you've got two here. Are they the same or are they different? They are different. Yeah, yeah. So the only difference in this process here, we deliberately kept it the same because we wanted to show people terroir in action. And by keeping it same, you're talking same barrel treatment, same age, same bottling proof, same distillation, everything. Yeah, yeah. And that's all verifiable by the terroir code on the back of the label. Mark mentioned his website earlier, listeners. It is arguably no more transparent website exists in the spirits business. On the back of each of these waterfords, there's a terroir code. You can enter it on the website and it will tell you everything. The farm that was going on, the weather for that growing season, the harvest yield, all this, what the farmer had for lunch the day of harvest, literally everything that you could want to know about this barley is available on that website. Which is a verification, a validation of what we're talking about and also the traceability. So it's all very well talking about the terroir and what our industry is like. There's an awful lot of tittle tattle. So this is about proving that this terroir exists. We've forgotten that it started with the barley. And this is what I'm trying to show here is, it's not about a finish, it's about the beginning. It's about barley. You don't go to a chateau in France or Napa and then talk about finishes, do you? You talk about the vineyard and where that flavor originated. Here we've got 2,000 flavor compounds and nobody seems to want to talk about it. And all we care about is what kind of, what type of sherry it was. How you can alter the natural flavor. Which is just altering the natural flavor. Taking it back to the beginning, taking it back right back to the beginning. We did, I mean, at Bruichladdich, I was criticized by many people, many of the whiskey industry talking heads about using French oak, how dare you, and terroir, that's poppycock, folklore, there's no scientific evidence to prove that terroir exists. And sort of, unfortunately, on that front, they were right. There was no scientific evidence because nobody had bothered to do it. So I did it with a lovely guy called Dr. Dustin Herb from Oregon, Oregon State University. Part of the problem we discovered was that the variety didn't matter. And that was a bit of a surprise because you'd think the variety surely, to goodness, that would make a difference. But no, it didn't make any difference at all. So what's being used here on these Dunbell and Dunmore? I don't care. It doesn't make any difference. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I think Concerto and Propino and Irina. I've been transfixed by this website, so I happened to have looked up the first one. It's Irina. Irina. Roger, what did you think of those first two whiskies? And have you had any of these before? I don't believe so. Maybe you had me try one once. But one of the things that I found amazing with this is how the Barley character comes through, and I would imagine that had to have been a real challenge of these projects is to do all this work, which the website is mind-boggling how much info you have here. It's really, everyone needs to check this out. I would imagine at some point you were concerned that the barrel could take over and you'd lose the Barley character. Well, and this is a very interesting, this is a fundamental, yeah, it is. It's a fundamental relevance here, which is where does whisky's flavor come from? Where does it come from? Now, you know, there'll be people, I've heard it many times, you've done to 70%, 80%. The standard, every distillery tour in the world, 70% of those whisky's flavor comes from the barrel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, it's the grain, it's the cereal. This is why we use Barley, because it's got these 2000 flavor compounds. Now, the funny thing is these flavor compounds, they're immutable. They're undestorable. They're there and they ain't going anywhere. So you can cook it, do what you like to it, peat it, everything. They're not going anywhere. So they're in the grain and they're in the new spirit. And they're in the mature spirit. The exact same flavor compounds. Now, you're going to say, well, hold a second, if it's in the new spirit and in the mature spirit, and they're the same compounds, how come the two taste different? Because one tastes mature and one doesn't. Gets new spirit. Now, good point, good question. So what's going on? What is maturation? And we've got a paper on this too coming out of here. Because we are curious. We want to know. Seemingly though, like with everything, there's so many other additional layers here. So then you had to choose what type of barrels to use. So I noticed on this, there's a combination of those as well. So the barrels are important. Don't get me wrong. They're not merely a container. You've got this living sort of exchange going on. Now, what is relevant is that the grain of the oak is at play here. Now, we know that trees growing at altitude grow more slowly because it's colder. Whereas trees growing at sea level, the Limousin forest, for example, is warmer. They grow faster. So the grain is either larger or smaller depending where those trees grow. Now, we also know it's a bit like a sieve. When you fill up a sieve in your garden with soil and you start shaking it and fine soil comes through and falls away, and then as you shake more and more, the rate slows down and you're shaking harder and harder and harder and less is coming through. Because although the grid has got blocked up, that's what happens with oak. The more you use the barrel, the longer it's used, the more times it's used, that it gets blocked up. So that micro-oxygenation is slowed down. And ultimately, it stops altogether if you use it too much. And that is the problem, I think it's an existential problem of our industry, that search for the cheapest liter of alcohol possible since the early 70s. And I put it back very simply to this change from what I call the Age of Innocence. You know, everything up until, you know, 73, the OPEC oil crisis of 73. That's when things change. That's when the industrial era commenced, in my book, simplistically. So you went from smaller distilleries, artisanal, more regional, slower distillation, better wood, better barley. Now, we know that better barley, because we've just proved the point. But we also know the wood was better. How so? Well, because up until the 70s, now, this is disconnected. This is just a coincidental issue, but has a very, very big bearing on what we're talking about. Up until 73, that early part of the 70s, every wine coming to the UK and Ireland came in a barrel. Everything, champagne, Bordeaux, Burgundy, Rhone, Sherry, Port Madeira, it came in a barrel and they were bottled at the ports. Bristol, London, Glasgow, Leith, Waterford, Dublin, and the barrels were sent free of charge to the distilleries to get rid of them. So if you think about it, every whiskey that was produced in Scotland and Ireland up until the 70s was practically three-quarters, at least half, in French oak, a diversity of origin unparalleled. Absolutely fantastic. Now, let's wind the clock forward. Well, in the case of Port and Sherry too, which is why we get the question all the time, when is McCallum going to start tasting like old McCallum again? Never. Because you'll never have transit casks. Transit casks. And then you get in a transit cask. Since 1988. So there's been no transport casks since 1988. And the Solera doesn't move. It stays put. During the 70s, and this was not the industry's fault, this was a coincidence. But that huge advantage of having this diverse wood profile stopped in that decade. 1988, by the way, was when the Sherry stopped being shipped in bulk. So that's when the recycling of barrels, use them once, bottle it, and then use them again, and then bottle it, and then use them again, and again and again and again. But each time, that poor barrel is being leached of any relevance. So it becomes a sort of, it might as well be plastic. It's just literally a container. To bring it back to Waterford, then, on these terroir focused single farm origin bottlings, what kind of oak are you using now? Well, that pre, you know, that age of innocence portfolio. In other words, roughly half French, half American. Okay. And we split it into virgin oak. Now, you'll be familiar with that with bourbon. It gives you those very dark colors. Well, we're not making bourbon here, so we don't want too much vanilla. But that's where the color comes from. We use virgin French and virgin American for color, right? We then use ubiquitous American first fills. In other words, they've been used in bourbon. They've been sent to Scotland because they were unusable again. In bourbon, yeah. So that's a huge economic relevance to the Scotch whiskey industry. So that gives you a sort of vanilla-y creme brulee impact, or at least used to. Then first fill French, which I tend to get from Bordeaux, which gives you a spicy sort of pain gruyere, buttered toast sort of profile. Then a fifth, which is what I call VDN, VDN, vin du naturel, which is a French term for fortified sweet wines. Yeah. Like sherry, like port, but little villages of Bannuels, Moray, Reef Salt. Then of course, further afield, Masala, wherever, sweet wines, and that's really not- You're on a known Reef Salt loving podcast for the record. Yeah. But that's where you get- and of course, remember, those villages never used to use hogsheads. They used to use foudre, the big wooden storage tanks. Of course, it's only more recently they've started using hogsheads, and it's hogsheads that we want. That gives sucrosity. The profile is Virgin Oak for color, French for spice, American for vanilla, and VDNs for sucrosity. You know the terroir code on the Argo, Roger? Wild child? Yeah. We saw that, yeah. It's got a little bit of peat in there, a little bit of Irish peat. So we tasted the Single Farm Origin, and how does that differ from the Argo and Cuvee? Ah, right. The Waterford Cuvee. Now, great wines are about this balance, this harmony. How do the great Chateaus of Bordeaux, the Latours and the Lafites, what they do is they grow the different varieties on different terroirs around the estate, and then two years later, they assemble them together to create the terroir-derived That's what we have in Cuvee. That's the inspiration, because that's what we're doing. We are taking terroir-defined components. That's what those single farms are. They're terroir-defined, and we're putting them together. Ned, our head distiller, is putting them together to create mine-f***ery. That's the whole point of the Cuvee concept. It's how can you make the most profound, the most compelling, flavor, cerebral, spirit, possible? So hands up, I've stolen the idea from the French. I don't deny it. This Cuvee is so good. Yeah. It's multi-layered. So really, this is a multi-single malt. It's Waterford. Each of those single farms is a single, single malt. When you sit there with it in your glass, you know, a nice rounded bottom glass that sits in the palm of your hand. So the warmth of your hand is going to open up those flavor compounds. The air in the glass is going to react with those flavor compounds. The water that you're going to add to that glass is going to react with those flavor compounds. The time that it's in that glass is going to give you more and more pleasure. Think of it like a giant strip tease, that those flavors are going to reveal themselves layer by layer, the longer you leave it in the glass. This isn't whiskey for slamming. This is whiskey for sitting back and enjoying the show. These are the spices. This is the entree. Correct. We want those flavors. We want to see those flavors. We want that to happen in the glass, with the air, with that water. And remember, we're doing this at 50% alcohol. We bottle everything at 100% proof because we want you to add water. So we distilled it at 70%. We filled the barrels at 70%. We didn't dilute them prior to filling. And so we reduced them to 50 so that you can add the regulation of water in your glass. So we want you to add water to it. Now, the minimum is a teardrop. That's what you have to add to activate the aldehyde group. So you've bought it, you've paid for it, you want the full impact. Add a teardrop, the very minimum. Otherwise, it's regulating that strength. Now, because these are so natural and well integrated and they've been married together over several months, you will not destroy either the flavor or the texture by adding water. It's almost miraculous. You can drown it. I add 50% personally, 50%. I take water from the fridge, nice and cool, and I put 50%, roughly 50%, because I don't want to drink at 50%. That's me personally. Perhaps late at night. Yeah, fine, I'll have it stronger. But it's a personal thing. Can we talk a little bit about the cuvee? I think we've been so- The background in all these is so fascinating. I feel like we're probably not doing justice to the whiskeys to describe them a little bit. And for the point of that you should take time with these, again, maybe this just really resonates with me because I love to geek out on stuff and detail-oriented. But for this cuvee, I pulled it up here. I'm just so fascinated by you have every single cask listed here. There's casks from Heaven Hill, Jack Daniels, Maker's Mark, all the way to Chateau Lafitte. It's unbelievable. And then it's comprised of 73 different. The composition is 38% first, 19% new, 19% French, and then 24 VDN. And then barley-wise, four different barley varieties incorporated. But as we said, that makes no difference. Doesn't matter. It's still fascinating. I mean, to know the effort that went into this and you list every farmer that was involved. Agricultural produce, remember? Yeah. It's on the front label. What we're doing is going back to how it was. Better wood, better barley. When single malts first took off, that sort of liberation of those old stocks that we all got so excited about back in the mid-80s, early 90s, well, what were they? What was it that we were drinking? We were drinking whiskeys from the age of innocence. The whisky that really made me, I went through all the phases, my epiphany whisky was Springbank 21. Bear in mind, but Springbank 21 and not because now people are like only because the Springbank 21 is this unicorn. The white label. Yes, the white label. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was an $80 retail bottle, so it wasn't expensive, but it wasn't cheap. You know, at the time that was, it wasn't cheap, but it also wasn't expensive. We didn't know it at the time. I can remember, my sort of introduction was with a guy you know, Gordon Wright, who was running Springbank at the time. And so he was the guy that sort of showed me. If we don't talk about some Waterford whisky, I'm going to have to cut us off though. So to bring this back around. That's what the producer is for. Before you take us away, that age of innocence, because I think you know a guy called Serge Valentin. Oh, yeah. Marvelous, marvelous man. I rate him as the best whisky taster, rum taster, because he's got the most extraordinary collection. And I was talking to him about how I was going, thinking, well, you know what, I think things were better. You know, people say that, you know, I'll criticize, say, everything was better in the past. You know, everything was better in the past. And I'm not saying that from a grumpy old git point of view, but because I'm coming to that conclusion that things were, and I know it physically because of the barley, and I'm pretty sure because of the wood, the way I've described it. If anybody's ever had the opportunity to try even a big, high volume blended whisky that was bottled in the 40s, 50s, 60s versus something that's been bottled in the 90s on, Johnny Walker Black, I've had the opportunity to try Johnny Walker Black Because the malt element, the malted element, the whisky essence element was, as we've just discussed, was better, and the barrels were better. Which is why for blending, why can't more things be like cuvee? Because cuvee is a blend. I don't like the term, because a blend is, as we all know, is a style of whisky. A blended whisky is an appellation. It's a column still spirit. But column still, what the Irish would call silent whisky. Like that, that's perfect. With single malts added to it, to give it more, you know, its whisky flavor. So column still being made with corn or maize, whatever you want to call it. And then single malts with malted barley, where all that flavor is. And perhaps at the outset, it was a way of stretching the single malts. And people say, oh yeah, but every distillery is a cuvee. Well, no, because Glenmoor, Sporren, Glenmoor, whatever it is, a bottling of that is going to be from generic barley, you know, Ukrainian, Australian, wherever it is, made the same way and then assembled for bottling. So there's no terroir impact. So that's the fundamental difference. You know, so we use the term cuvee because I know, partly because of Remy, Remy Crew and partly to differentiate it, you know, that it from a blend or a vatting, that it's a bringing together creatively of those terroir flavors. And it was such a good whiskey. Now, that was the cuvee that we tried, and this is going to vary by batch, essentially? No. Of course, we're growing, aging, maturing. So, you know, this is sort of all working with us in time. The next version of the cuvee is called Cuvee Coffee, a Parisian painter. So it has a different funky label, which you'll get to see, because we're following the age as it goes up. So the idea is these cuvees, the cuvee will last for around about 18 months, two years, and then we'll up to the next stage, and then the next one above it. And the big difference then with our newest Waterford Whisky is the cuvee Argo. Argo, which is slang. It's a French word for slang. It's a sort of underground language. It's a little bit of a sort of punk version. It's got a little bit of peat in there, but I think it's about 50%. And it's also the only one below 100 proof. Yeah, it's to try and get that price point down to a level which provides an entry level to our Waterford project. Okay, so a little bit of peat, younger whiskey. This is really good though. That little bit of peat goes a long way. This is my first time trying it. Irish peat, remember? Now, there's essentially there's three types of peat. And one extreme is very heavily decomposed peat. Where it's black as this tablecloth. And it's the texture of chocolate mousse. And that's what you find on Islay. And it's called sapric, sapric peat. And it's very petroleum, very, very medicinal. And with a little bit of geological compression, you'd end up with coal. And that's one extreme. The other extreme is what we have in Ireland, which is from a raised peat bog. In other words, the peat bog has grown up out of the boggy conditions. And so the decomposition is much less. It's brown. It's fibrous. It's full of roots, heather roots and stuff. It's not petroleum at all. It's not medicinal at all. And that's called fibric peat. So it's a completely different thing. That's what we have here. So you've got a fruitiness, which, well, in this one here, this peated one there, it gives you a much fruitier flavor. No petroleum, no medicinal thing at all. So very, very different. And no one's seen that since 1916, which was sort of Irish War of Independence, when a lot of the industry collapsed, the whiskey industry collapsed, and therefore the maltings collapsed. And so no one's seen genuine Irish barley with Irish peat for 100 years. And that is the flavor of rural Irish whiskey. Urban would have been with coal and very minimal peat effect. But rural, what those guys in the country, those guys distilling for themselves, would have had, would be something more akin to this. This fruity, smoky, aromatic flavor, which I think, having done Octomore, as you know, I mean, that was with the middle variety of peat. That's East Coast, Scotland peat, which is sort of halfway between the sapric and the fibric. OK. Yeah, this bottle we're talking about is the peated Fennis Court bottling from Waterford. We have few bottles left here and there in the chain. Well, grab them. So what we've done, of course, going forward is the next step of our wacky journey is, yeah, we've shown you the single farms. We've shown you the single farms, peated. So four of them, Fennis Court, Bally Bannon, Lacken, and Woodbrook. Woodbrook, same PPM as, more or less, as the initial Octomore. As a comparison, which is quite interesting. But when we bring them together on Cuvee, now you're on to a different level. Because if you think about it, if each flavor, each terroir-derived flavor, gives you a sort of handprint, if you put another one on top, they don't overlap precisely. You get a sort of mosaic effect. And so the more you stack on, the more complete the flavor profile is. And that's where we're getting to with the peated. So we'll see a peated cuvee? Yeah. Oh, nice. It's called Fumo. As a control, are you trying to use the same maltster for everything, or it doesn't matter? Maltster, well, that's another part of the serendipity, is the fact that we had the... We've got our own dedicated malting facility that was mothballed when we turned up. We were able to persuade the owner to un-mothball it. So that's part of our... So is that a floor malting or a saladin? Oh, a saladin. We built the cathedral to store the barley in, so where every farm has its own bay, dried, stored, and then we can call on it with our malting. So we're in control of the whole... This is what I said about logistics. This happens because a whole load of logistics are put in place. Yeah, the cathedral is something, Pat and I had the opportunity to travel there about a year and a half ago. And it's one more piece when you have in your mind's eye the picture of the labels. And then you walk in and you see those same people and then other farms that I was familiar with because of their own distillate, which were also in queue to eventually come through and be a cuvee at Waterford. And that's where we're going. We're going to this sort of diamond of cuvees. So the Waterford cuvee, Argo is the entry level. The 13 single farms that grow organically, they're now going to be a cuvee. And the peated equally a cuvee. So we've got four cuvees as the peated, organic, Argo, Wild Child and the cuvee. And the organic right now is Gaia. Yeah, and it will be cuvee Gaia. Which has come out, we've got a couple of cuvee Gaia's. Roger, I know, what do you think of this peated Fennis court? I know you kind of, we can go back and forth a bit with Roger on peat. Sometimes I give him a peated whiskey and he loves it. And sometimes he says all kinds of derogatory things about it. Yeah, there's a bit of a burnt asparagus note that I'm struggling to get past, but. Oh, you think so? Yeah. See, this is the one, because I think this is absolutely. I love it. Oh, you guys love peat. I'm like you, I'm not a peat freak. I'm not a peat fan, but. But that's the guy who made Octomore. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, that was a Friday evening in the pub, a late night. I can see that. I dare. How far could you push it? You know, would an ashtray work? You know, the other side of that is when we were malting this year's peated farms, we actually burnt down the kiln. I'd hate to think what that PPM would be. Oh, that's funny. No, I mean, and I think that's what's great to have a varied portfolio like you have is that the very first one we tried this Dunbell, I just report some because that honeyed barley character, and then when I was looking at the barrels, I noticed there was some soturn barrels used. I mean, that's more my speed and I just keep, I was nosing this glass for like 15 minutes. That's the point. That's the thing. It's just so unbelievable. Even when it's empty and you smell it, that's the persistence. That's, you know, it goes for two, three, four minutes. It's extraordinary that that length, that mirror of flavor that's imprinted on your brain, those trains of flavor arriving at the terminus. You know, that's what it's all about. But that's why, you know, the Argo using a little bit of peat in there, just a whiff of peat. Yeah. Was it Napoleon, instead of a whiff of cordite? You know, yeah. So you can use peat different ways. Oh, the smell of peat. Yes. Yeah. It smells like vitriol. Well, there you go. But this is honest. What I'm trying to get at here is, you know, we have the trace of it. We can show everybody. If you want to follow this journey, it's a journey of discovery. We're discovering things. We've got, you know, all sorts of projects. We're doing here in one of maturation at different, you know, what happens in that barrel. We're doing it here. It's in Oregon with Dr. Dustin, because we are curious. We'd like to understand. We'd like to know. And if you want to share with us, come with us on this journey. It's a decadently sort of fun voyage of discovery. If you've got whisky questions, Mark's going to try to give you whisky answers. It just might take a while. You probably get a lot of time for your interview. It's like, well, weren't you taking a big risk thinking that this was going to work? The thought crossed my mind that there was zero risk whatsoever taken in this whole venture. Well, there was no risk taken because every single thing was tailored to quality. And as long as it remains tailored to quality, you're not going to get something that's crap that's going to come out of it. I'd also say it's sort of tested some of it. So Bruichladdich, I mean, the first time, the first Christmas, I remember inviting down the farmers. You know, the first, I think it was 10 farmers. I gave each of them a glass of the spirit that they'd grown, you know, the barley that they'd grown. You know, these are big, big farmers and they're quite proud guys and giving them a glass and they got very, very timid and very, very shy and they sort of bent over double, sort of nosing the glass, you know. And then bit by bit as they realized that it actually was quite good, you could see the pride swell as the chest got puffed out, you know, as they stood up proud and tall, like a peacock going and strutting around, going, you know, look at me, look at me. And then, and then, and then it was this extraordinary thing happened. They started to compare with each other and then they started arguing. And then I thought, Christ, we're going to have a fight here. And then it was like, well, how come yours is different to mine? You know, we sowed on the same day, you know, your neighbors, you know, well, perhaps it's because your soil is sandier, perhaps where I am, it's more, and you had these guys rationalizing terroir, this fancy French word, they'd never heard of before, but they were rationalizing terroir. And that's when I knew that, you know, okay, this works, you know, this work, this really works. This is with, you know, new spirit, guys that had no idea about the concept, and yet here they were arguing about whose was better and why. And I think that's, you know, so to go back to your point, Brett, you know, I knew these things were going to work, you know, but, you know, at the end of the day, when Ned came to me the first time he put the bottling together and he said, look, you know, what are we trying to do here? You know, what's, what's, what is Waterford? And I said, well, it is what it is, you know, there's, we're not trying to make it into something. It is what it is. The barley aroma comes from that anaerobic milling, the oily rich, you know, the fattiness, the unctuousness comes from the fact that we distill it very slowly, trickle distillation. You know, the intensity of the terroir because of that mash filter. You know, the fermentation for eight days, the longest fermentation in the industry, we actually have a malolactic fermentation. No one does that. That's where that creamy middle is coming from. You know, the conversion of harsh malic acid into soft elactic acid is a secondary fermentation that happens after the alcoholic one. If you are able to extend it, which we can, thanks to Messrs. Diageo, and there's wonderful sort of temperature control. So we get that creamy middle, and then you get that persistence because of the assemblage of those tewa compounds. And then the harmony, the balance, because we go to the lengths of having the, I think, quite possibly the most comprehensive wood policy, or good wood, as we call it. And that's where all those bits come together. That is what, it's not what we've made it, that's what happens when you do those things. Well, you say Waterford is what it is, I'd say what it is is really outstanding whiskey, and something that's, any serious whiskey nerd aficionado, however you want to fashion yourself, if you haven't checked these out, these are whiskeys worth exploring and savoring and really discovering, and like Roger was saying earlier, he just spent 15, 20 minutes just nosing a glass. Granted, he was waiting for us to finish telling a story or something, but unbelievable quality whiskeys. One question I would ask for listeners here is that if they fall in love with one of these, are they all essentially single experiments or are certain bottling is going to be repeated? Well, that's the concept of the cuvees. The cuvee, the peated cuvee, the organic cuvee, Argo, are continual. Back in the day when we started with Bruichladdich, we couldn't do that. We didn't have that ability. That's part of how we set Waterford up was to be able to do that. But equally, to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, we can do the single farms too. That's what we started with, showing you this is terroir in action, compare and contrast. Now, we've got our core of cuvees there, the creative cuvees. Now we can start playing with the single farms. So we've proved the point. Now we can start playing. So going forward, the single farms will become smaller bottlings. Pat and I went to one of the farms, and I feel horrible as I was trying to look and remember the name of the farm, and had lunch really quick. And it was an older farmer who had contributed a couple of different harvests, two or maybe even three. So it was one that was relatively well used. And even on that visit, he talked about where he got the primary piece of the crop, because his farm was much larger than what your needs were. So it really came from a section. And he even talked then about, well, the first time we did it, we took it from here. And the second time we did it, we took it from here, just because of the quality of the grain. And so to answer your question, so it is going to be a little bit even farm to farm to farm. Well, and harvest to harvest to harvest. No harvest is the same. We've just had a pretty rocky one just now. Right, and that's part of terroir. The harvest is part of terroir. But the thing is, just because it was a difficult harvest for the farmers doesn't mean that the flavor is necessarily compromised. Quite often, what produces the most interesting flavor compounds is when you have a long growing period. It's called the fill, when the grain fills. If you get a very hot summer, that fills very quickly, just like grapes, and that doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be a good wine, because it's going to be quite jammy and quite rich. Quite often, what you want is a consistent summer fill, which doesn't necessarily mean hot weather or wet weather, but it can be relatively gray. But as long as it takes, as long as that's growing and progressing, you'll get more interesting flavors. So what we consider to be a great summer isn't necessarily conducive that it's going to be good for crops. So yeah, that adds another hole there. This could be an unending discussion, obviously. We haven't even talked about the rum yet, and we have to wrap this up now, because we got to turn this room around. So I guess what I would say, we have to turn the room around, listeners, because Mark's doing a seminar this evening here at Lincoln Park. So if you're interested in things like that, you should always be checking out binnys.com/events, where you can see cool educational opportunities like this at a store near you. We're going to have to have Mark back on in the future for a rum episode. Just so everybody knows, if you think that the dive is deep in whiskey, and the factors are large, the factors are exponentially larger, not numerically, but exponentially larger in rum. Mark, can you give a five-minute explanation of the Renegade Rum Project? Well, yeah. So this is a distillery we had to build in the Caribbean because nothing like it existed, and it was designed to distill terroir. If Ireland is, we're dealing with glacial soils, here we're distilling volcanic ones. And of course, volcanic, as it implies, is a lot more volatile. So the terroir opportunities are considerably enhanced because of the pyroclastic issues, mineralization, tropical weathering. So, it's an absolute... The variety you can have in a single acre is huge. Whereas a single farm in Ireland is going to be one glacial dominated terroir, here a single farm is between three and eight distinctive volcanic-inspired terroirs. It's real terroir city. And the varietals do matter because they just never got artificially evolved because sugar got sort of forgotten about. And so we're dealing with varieties from the 50s and 60s, which are very, very different. So, you know, the compositions we have, the permutations are... And it's all sugar cane, of course, because you couldn't have terroir without sugar cane. And as you know, most rum is made from molasses, which is what's left over after you've distilled or make, sorry, after you've refined sugar. Refined your sugar, yeah. This is dealing with the primary source, the sugar cane. So it's French inspiration, Scottish distillation, on French stills. And we've got the cane code again, which gives you that authority, because there's none in rum. People can make it wherever you are, and people do. So there's 70 or 80 countries distilling rum from molasses. So here we're doing it with sugar cane. So just like the terroir code on the back of the Waterford, there's a cane code on the back of... This is Renegade Cane Rum. Your distilleries in Grenada. Grenada, yeah. Which you guys know pretty well. You visited it for a day trip. We had a quick cup of coffee there, yeah. On that cane code and terroir code, something that we touched on earlier was the agricultural produce. Reminding people that that's what it is. Part of that is a sound file. So you can pour yourself a Dunbell or a Dunfermline Rum, and sit down and play that sound file and listen to where that barley grew. That is absolutely something Roger would do. I was looking at it and they showed a picture of the ground, the earth in the one whiskey. But listening to it, that really brings it home. One of those, I can't remember which one, I think it might be the Dunmore. The sound file has a rain shower and you're sitting there. It's just done, not just for fun, it's done to really make you think, this grew somewhere, it's of a place. I think what resonated with me earlier, I think is worth mentioning is I know a lot of people that have moved away from beer and are into bourbon especially now, and it's interesting to watch them work their way through the bourbons on the shelf, and they get bored with a lot of them quickly, and then they turn to, as you pointed out, cask finishes for variety. But again, if they really wanted to truly experience unique whisky flavors or dare if they try a rum, these are the kind of things where Yeah. Well, it's what goes back to 100 percent, and it's what goes back to this, me having another epiphany, which I've had hundreds of, that I would drink malt whisky if I had to pick a particular just because of the variety. I think that what's happening in bourbon right now is more and more people are realizing they're chasing the same things, and more people are realizing that bourbon, the rules are so strict and the things are so well-controlled. It's very difficult in the actual production of bourbon. It's almost impossible to be innovative in the production of bourbon. There are just too many controls on it, too many rules, too many both chemical rules, and production, everything up and down. The way that they're trying to introduce is exactly what you're talking about. Now we're messing around with wood and treating it in different ways, almost to a certain extent, flavoring it by introducing different woods that aren't part of the very, very strict narrow band, which is what makes things like, certainly Waterford is a malt, and we'll throw away Irish malt, throw away Waterford is a malt of a place. If you have a chance to try the Renegade Rums, which we're trying right now, the rum is another thing where there are 20 different islands that make rum, kind of use first press sugarcane juice that use similar sorts of stills. But there's nothing like this. And the amount of variety you can get out of rum also far exceeds anything that you would get from a single bourbon or rye or- I think with the rum, so we have drams and we have drums. So if you're having a drum, the same cuvee concept is what it's about. As an independent bottler, when I was exploring rum all those years ago, the thing that struck me was that you had, as a malt whiskey drinker, where was the complexity in rum? You had lots of broad breadth of flavor, but where's the depth that we're used to with rum? Where's the depth? And that's where this project happened, because how can you make rum as complex and compelling as a single malt? That's where it started from. This is my answer to that conundrum, is by cuvee concepting, using that terroir defined flavor and stacking them up to make complexity. That's where the project came from. So, I think I had to build a distillery to do it. There was nothing to buy or save, because they're all pretty old and from a different era. So, I had the chance to design a distillery from scratch. Now, unlike whiskey where you're dealing with barley, which you harvest and you need to store as it goes into hibernation for six or seven months and then you draw on it. It's relatively straightforward. Sugar cane, 30 degrees Celsius. What's that? It's 190 something. With sugar, you've got a whole different ballgame of hygiene and calibrating how much you can harvest by hand and get it to the distillery, get it milled, get it fermented. It's a whole different logistic. And everything has to be balanced. Yeah, and it starts spoiling pretty much immediately. You cut it. This is it. It's about calibration. Everything has to balance. And so that gave us the chance to design a distillery that was balanced, that we could distill not one island, not one farm, not one terroir, but one field within that terroir, and then build that library of maturing in decent wood, sugarcane rums, that we could then start to assemble to create the mindfuckery. I like mindfuckery. Yeah. I mean, who doesn't? One of the things you talked about when we were talking about Waterford was the milling in a very, very unique milling process meant to extract all the flavor components that are available in barley before you even start to introduce heat and yeast, which is opposite, because normally you introduce the heat and yeast and break it out that way. Is there any special process you use when you're processing cane to try to achieve the same thing from the cane? Well, it's that fermentation. You know, we all talk about distilling being, you know, the be all and end all. We talk about it being the alchemy. We talk about the master distillers and this sort of stuff. No, it's more about how you run them. And that's a question of how greedy you're going to be. The greedier you are, the larger the middle cut, the more spirit you take, the cheaper the spirit is going to be. Remember, we're talking about the faster you run, the hotter you run. Yeah. So the corollary of that is take a narrow middle cut and you get purity. I choose to reject potentially up to 70,000 liters of whiskey. I could collect, but I don't because I want that purity of middle cut. And then the other thing is the speed. If you're impatient, you distill fast. You distill fast, you get thinner spirit. Distill slow and you get more unctuous spirit. Or as the French call, cramp. So it's really how you run your stills. When you distill fast, that means, inherently, it means you're distilling hot and that means everything's coming off at once. You're not controlling. And it's coming like a river. Yeah. So whether it's rum or whether it's whiskey, we've unified the same principles of slowing it down, you know, to make thicker, richer, unctuous, flavorsome spirit. And of course, the cane code is even more relevant in rum because that's really what we're doing is declaring what we're doing. This is how we're doing it. I don't know what anybody else is doing. This is what we're doing. So people understand when you talk about first press, cane juice or just cane juice, the milling process for that, you're just, you're taking your cane stock, you're grinding. Yeah, milling, three, three mils in sequence, one, two, three. You're getting the juice that's extracted. A little bit of water being added to do that to make sure that you wash the juice out. And that's what ends up getting fermented. Correct. And it looks a bit like milk when it's done. Yeah, sort of, sort of grayish, not terribly attractive. It has to be said, but. So you've got a pot still with two retorts. And and that's the only still making this room. No, no, we've also got I got for size to do that for me. And I was talking to Richard, the proprietor, and he said, well, why didn't you have a column still? I said, you don't want a column still. That's, you know, that's silent. You know, that's no, you know. And he said, well, I think you should. And he said, well, you want to play tunes. And I said, yeah, sure. He said, well, you can play more tunes on what I'm going to design for you than you can on a pot still. Pot still, you put it in, you turn it on and out it comes the other end. There's not much you can do to influence it. He said, I'm going to make you one like a clarinet. I'm going to make you one that you can play tunes with. You can take spirit off at different, 24 plates. And you could draw from however different many plates. Put it back in below or put it back in above. This is a batch operated column still, or in fact split into two. So it's batch operated. So it's not designed for... Yeah, it is. It's really cool. The pot still gives you a heavier weight and the column gives you a more floral lighter weight because you're distilling to a higher ABV. That's the base. This is still a young project, so it's worth mentioning that we're just getting Renegade Rums in pretty much now. Yeah. I'm very proud and very pleased to show you what we're doing. Roger, what did you think of these? I thought they're phenomenal, especially the Blanc. I mean, usually with some of these unaged agri-coles, they're a little too vegetal for me or they're not as expressive as this. I just kept, especially it opens up too, again, with time. Just 10 minutes later, a whole new set of aromatics. Really nice. Cuvee Aura. That's a cuvee, yeah. It's several terroirs brought together. Okay. This is rum like you've never had it. This is rum. Absolutely. Yeah. I've tried a lot of agri-coles, but again, unaged wise, never like that. Yeah. The fruit profile on it is extraordinary. Scottish-Irish distillation but sugarcane, French inspiration. Really cool. Keep an eye out, listeners, those should be arriving soon. They are on the shelves. Okay. They just arrived. Yeah. We got them last week. We put them on the shelves last week. I'm very proud. Very proud. Thank you so much. Hey, thank you. Thank you for sharing them. We need more people doing projects like this. We've got enough commodity rum. We needed something like this. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Well, people have been saying this for years. Where's rum going? Rum is going to be there. It never is. It's never changed because it's that definition of madness. If you just keep repeating the same thing and expecting, it ain't going to happen. Something radical had to happen. This is it. I think the other important takeaway is that all whiskey drinkers need to give these a try, not just Irish whiskey drinkers. I mean, it's another thing that might get lost. That's a very good point. This is double distilled, the Scottish way. We don't use the Irish spelling of whiskey for a reason. It leans more towards that. To me, double distilling is where it's at. Yeah. Listeners, check them out at Binny's near you. It's only going to get older. Yeah. It's only going to get better, honestly. I mean, at least in my experience with it in the last couple of years. All right, listeners, thanks for hanging on for this wild ride of a podcast. I hope you've been here with us from start to finish because there's so much interesting stuff to talk about with these whiskies and these rums. Mark, your history in this business and with these distillers is really something else. I mean, we could have done two hours on that alone. Well, thank you. It's absolutely crazy. So it's really a privilege to have you here today. And thank you for coming in. Listeners, we'll be back in your feed with something shorter next week. Sorry about that. No, it's fine. No, it's our pleasure. Until then, I'm Pat. I'm Brett. I'm Roger. And I'm Mark. And I'll say keep tasting. Thank you very much. Say keep tasting. Oh, keep tasting. Sorry. Keep tasting, guys. Keep tasting.