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About the Attempt to Understand Tastes Rationally
What you may Learn from Macallan & Co

If you listen to whisky experts for a while, you hear taste explanations like: 'a light almond tone connected with peaty water!' or 'a little salty with sea-weed flavours'. The whisky beginner will wonder, how somebody is able to determine such flavours in a Single Malt Whisky? And why is it almond and not marzipan?

Humans smell 1'000 times more, than they can ever taste. At birth we are first equipped with few taste sensors. The taste buds on our tongue can only differentiate between four main directions: Sour, salt, sweet and bitter. We taste sweet at the tip of our tongue. When our early ancestors touched something sweet with their tongue they knew exactly: Here is some calories-rich food. The sensors for bitter are at the rear end of the tongue and function as a protection mechanism. Before we swallow something poisonous-bitter, we are warned before. Sourly represents unripe fruits and salt has always been important for the water regulation in our body.

These essentials for human survival are mapped over the tongue; nothing more.

The predominant part of our taste perceptions is produced by the nose. The brain thereby has a special task. Let’s look back into our history. What do we connect with the stink, sorry the smell of a lion? Today our thoughts wander back to our the last circus or zoo visit. Our stone age ancestors or today's African savannah inhabitants connect these evaporations with rather dangerous moments.

The meaning of a smell depends completely on the context in which we notice it. Most humans have two differently sized nasal tubes. In the larger air moves very fast. Here only heavier molecules are analysed at the mucous membrane of the nose. In the smaller air moves more slowly. Much finer flavour molecules can be detected. Look into your nose in front of a mirror! Not everyone has differently sized nostrils. But many do.

Let’s begin with our virtual tasting. Pour yourself a dram of Macallan 12 yo matured in a sherry cask. If you don’t have it at hand, another sherry cask matured one also serves like Glendronach or Aberlour. Lead the glass to your nose and smell carefully. What happens? The ascending various flavour substances (= molecules) are pulled through the nose by the air and pass millions of receptors. Some remain hanging, others move by. The brain of a child signals ‘sharp' or 'stinging' for many alcohol molecules. An adult with more 'alcohol experience' is able to discover a lot more between these main flavours.

Nearly everyone among us whisky lovers will find two smells in the Macallan: 'fruit’ and 'caramel-sweet'. If we instead smell a smoky Caol Ila, which usually matures in old Bourbon casks, then almost all of us will find 'smoke' and 'oil' in it.

If we analyse these basic flavours for their origin, we find the main influencing variables of the taste of a Single Malt. The fruitiness result from the yeasts, which produces a multitude of very fruity esters during the fermentation. Distillation concentrates these esters. The caramel (toffee) sugar originates from the wood of the cask. The wood sugars are caramelised by heating the cask up at the production and is transferred into the whisky during the long maturation time. Ex-Bourbon barrels deliver only little sweetness. After the burning of the inside they already held Bourbon for 2 to 4 years, which we all know as sweetish.

The smell of smoke originates during the drying process of the malt. Hot peat smoke dries the damp malt and the phenol of the smoke settles on the barley corn. The oiliness of some whiskies is created during distillation. If one distills a Malt for a relatively long time, not only light ethanol and fruity ester flavours will collect in the spirit receivers. With increasing distillation time and higher temperatures also the heavier oils will enrich in the finished product. Very intensive Malts like Caol Ila therefore frequently have an oily touch.

Now these four fundamental flavour directions are not everything that humans can smell in a Malt Whisky. There is much more to find. Specialists use a chart, the 'Nosing Wheel', for the description of their smell perceptions. Others call it 'Spider Diagram'. Since taste can hardly be described with words, they place many different flavours around a circle and connect them with scales to the centre.

Nosing Wheel from Macallan

The Macallan Nosing Wheel gives the taster the possibility to indicate 11 different flavours on a scale from 0 to 5. In order to describe a whisky, several persons evaluate this Malt and make notes on separate cards. The data is averaged afterwards and the points are connected. Macallan gives the following diagram for its 12-years old Malt.

Nosing Wheel Macallan 12 Years

You can clearly recognize the two opposing flavour areas. While the fruity flavours top-right come from the yeasts, the opposite flavours are a result of the maturation in the Oloroso Sherry casks of Macallan.

A young Macallan cask might look as follows. This is of course only an example. All casks develop individually.

Nosing Wheel of a young Macallan

In this artificial example you can recognized that at the beginning of maturation the distillery character is still very large. The influence of the cask is still comparatively small.

Critics of this procedure regularly note that you cannot describe all tastes with this Nosing Wheels, since it is limited to a certain number of flavours. They also mention, that not everyone who tastes this whisky will recognize the same flavors, since we are all not alike. Everybody made his own experiences and will therefore also describe them differently.

The Macallan Nosing Wheel is made especially made to describe Macallan and is not very well suited for other whiskies. It is an aid, which is only used in the House oh Macallan.

Blenders inside Diageo (Johnnie Walker, J & B...) use a different Nosing Wheel with far more subdivisions. They have to make by far more distinctions for the different Malts in their numerous Blends and Malts.

Nosing Wheel of the Diageo Blender
(sorry only in German)

Behind each of these 16 special main directions there are again 3 sub-groups, which are not shown here.

For smoky:

1. Bonfire, Peat, Cinnamon
2. Lapsang-Souchong, Smoked Fish
3. Smoked Salmon, Moss, Fresh Peat

and for wood:

1. Burned Cake
2. Ground Coffee, Rubbers
3. Exhaust Gases, Ginger, Wood Sap

The full Nosing Wheel of the Diageo blender describes approximately 100 different tastes of 'antiseptic cream' to 'Cellophane'. The Johnnie Walker Blue Label is the coronation of this art of tasting.

Why do all that? Why not take individual casks, bottle them unfiltered and undiluted and leave to the choice to the consumer? The numerous independent bottlers already do that. And 200 years ago the procedure wasn’t much different!

As always the reason can be found with the customer. Apart from Hardcore-Islay-Fans, most whisky drinkers think, that the strong and intense Malts are too strong. Thus there’s no wonder that over the centuries the softer Blends reached a high ranking. Only 5% of all Scottish whisky bottles sold contain Single Malt Whisky. However the softest casks are again too expressionless for the Malt Whisky loving customers. How can you make it right then? An always same flavour distribution according to the Nosing Wheels is the answer. Not only the strength of the flavours has to be right, also the relationship between the individual flavours has to remain identical from bottle to bottle.

Nosing Wheel of different Macallan Casks

This is the task to which Macallan committed itself. In addition the quantities requested by the consumer are constantly rising.

Why not always burn identical? Always fills into the same barrels from the same wood and let the whisky mature in air-conditioned warehouses? Then you mix 1,000 barrels and the homogeneous brand is finished. Without wanting to tell names - this procedure exists. What else can you do with the hundreds of football field sized warehouses which stand at several locations in Scotland? However in these warehouses mature mainly near neutral tasting Grain Whiskies and cheap mass-produced Malt Whiskies. They are the largest components in Blended Whisky. Nevertheless the procedure for No-name Malts is not much different.

Macallan demands a far higher quality of its own products. Only 50 casks are always vatted in one batch. Whether it is a 12 year old or a 25 year old Macallan. There are the same high specifications for both.

Nosing Wheel Macallan 25 Years

While the similar quality in the distillation performs quite well, there are still problems with the identical cask maturation. Investigations in Spain showed a very varying picture for Macallan. The same oak trees only 200 km away from each other were fabricated into identical Sherry casks and given to the same Bodega for Sherry maturation. Nevertheless fundamentally different Malts developed in Scotland. The scientific investigations are not finished yet. It is known already that: The quality of the soil affects the wood in exactly the same way as the different microclimates of the location of the oaks.

With a stock of 10'000 casks Macallan is plagued for making choices. Which 50 special casks should be vatted? It will take forever to select the correct casks for the vatting? If each individual cask is classified according to the Nosing Wheel above, the result of a mixture can approximately be predicted. This is a good starting point. From this point of view, there are no more good or bad casks. As long as they can supply enough harmoniously fitting casks for the amounts required by the customers, the work is fulfilled. Instead of mixing all, Macallan mixes the right ones to meet the demand of the consumers.

But think about the huge amount of work! With roughly 3 million Macallan bottles sold per year, 1'000 casks have to be evaluate annually. And not only those which are used. From the others, which mature slowly in the warehouses, the ones that will never become something useful have to be sorted out immediately. Otherwise they only block the valuable warehouse space. The Blended Whisky industry already waits for them. And now and then such an unwanted cask escapes unwillingly to the independent bottlers.

In autumn 2002 I was allowed to taste such a particular cask. Despite 12 years storage time it was not a real Macallan. Something was different. The distillery character with lemon and flowers could be tasted clearly. But the cask had not worked in the sense of Macallan. It became a completely different whisky and was therefore rightfully not allowed to carry the name Macallan.

What is Macallan doing with the casks, that don’t fit? They are stored further under close surveillance or they find their way together with similar casks of Highland Park, Glenturret and other distilleries in the corporate group its way into the famous Blend The Famous Grouse.

At Macallan there are no more casks squandered easily. The current lack of 18 to 30 years old Malts led to a better caution. The shortage won’t happen again at Macallan. World-wide demands are rising too fast.