Mortlach 16 Year Old - Flora and Fauna

This is a lovely whisky.

But  it’s one that’s difficult to get hold of now the Flora and Fauna range is discontinued. So the story of getting a bottle to review is perhaps worth more of a mention than usual. It started with mild curiosity and ended with me searching the websites of what seemed like every wine and spirit merchant in the UK. Via a spot of righteous indignation in the middle.

A rare sight...

There’s been so much written about the new official Mortlach range I can only be bothered to mentioned 3 things of note;

1 - Mortlach is a very well regarded distillery that has not previously had an official bottlings.

2 - A new official range of Mortlachs has been launched but they are unfathomably overpriced.

3 - The sort-of-official Flora and Fauna Bottling was much loved by whisky enthusiasts and it seemed like a good idea to get some especially given the price compare to the new official range.

With those three things in mind I tried to get hold of a couple of bottles. Obviously everybody in the world was pretty much ahead of me on this – everywhere  I checked it was either sold out (on all the sites you’d expect, Master of Malt, TWE etc) or suffering a massive price hike on the £40-odd you might have expected to pay a couple of years ago.

But once I had the idea I was determined to find some. Google searches for “Mortlach 16” returned endless websites that had no stock. I tried a variety of things but eventually  I took to getting a list of wine and spirit merchants in the UK and checking their websites individually on the off chance they had some.  Time consuming and a few dead ends with ghost stock that wasn’t really there.

But eventually, after much searching, I came to Gauntley’s in Nottingham. Their last two bottles - £50 each. Not cheap but better than nothing and it felt like a victory nonetheless.

So anyway – enough about exciting tales of buying stuff online how does it taste?

It’s good. Almost annoyingly so considering the ball-ache to get these bottles and the current hype around the new range. But no doubt less annoying than spending £50 and having it taste awful.

I didn’t find it hugely complex - one flavour note kind of dominates, but a very nice flavour. It’s big on the sherry and wood but it has nice smooth edges. Some nice plum sauce notes.  I had been informed it was a meaty dram (whatever that meant) – and there’s is a bit of cured meat, a bit of charcuiterie. But not the plate of sausages I’d been led to expect. But a nice bit of spice too.

It has a lovely tingling aftertaste. Not burn, but a bit of heat. I’m coming to realise that nasty whisky burns, but good whisky warms. This is more like a bit like a drop of tabasco. I might have got a tiny bit of Bailey’s in there too.

Certainly this is one of the most drinkable whiskies I’ve come across. Lovely colour too - very dark, russet.

In summary it’s just lovely. It’s quite reassuring that some many  whisky nerds on forums can’t be wrong. It’s good and it’s different. To get hold of any… well you’ll really struggle to find some now, certainly for less than £80+. You could pay that if you were curious.

As for the new range – I haven’t tasted it and apparently it’s even nicer than this - although I wonder how much of that is blogger bluster from grateful sample recipients. Honestly, I simply cannot conceive of how it would be worth splashing that kind of dough on a standard bottling. The 18 year old is £174 for 50cl (£243 p/r for 70cl). Their NAS entry bottle is £54 (pro rata £75). I think Diageo have got their thinking all wrong (I’ll be sure to mention it to the bosses as they heave sackfulls of cash into their Range Rovers).

In the future I would try some of the Indy bottles – there seems to be plenty of the 15yo and 21yo Gordon & McPhail about for a price that puts Diageo to shame – (15yo around £45 and 21yo around £60).

Finally I have also heard very good things of Dailuaine Flora and Fauna 16 that is supposedly very similar to Mortlach and goes for about £50. And seems plenty of stock for the time being.

So more bottles to try out, maybe I should park my curiosity. It is proving an expensive business….

WW

Flora, Fauna and Auctions (but not Merryweather)

Rather than a review this is fairly random post about auctions and the Flora & Fauna range.

I was browsing some whisky auction sites the other night. These sites themselves are quite an interesting phenomena and I might write something about them soon (read: months away). Sufficed to say that I find them quite interesting to browse even when I’m not looking for anything - particularly older bottles and old labels.

Anyway, a week or so ago I noticed that a complete set of Flora and Fauna whiskies had been sold for £4,000 on whiskyauctioneer.com

That’s 26 bottles from different United/Diageo distilleries all released under the Flora and Fauna label. I won’t go into detail about this range here because other people have covered it, but basically these bottles were limited releases from various distilleries under the same ownership, including some from distilleries that don't have an official bottling. They also have rather nice labels featuring, guess what, flora and fauna.

I wasn't aware of the Flora and Fauna range until early last year when the news of the new Mortlach range emerged. Long story short: I heard about this great whisky called Mortlach, then was excited to  hear about a new range being launched, then flabbergasted to hear how much they would cost and then spent a lot of time trying to get hold of a couple of bottles of the highly rated Flora and Fauna 16 year old. And get hold of them I did.

Since then I've seen other F&F bottles popping up on retail and auctions sites. So seeing the whole lot together being sold I wondered if £4,000 represented good value. I knew that Mortlach F&F was more difficult to get hold nowadays but paying an average of £150 per bottle seemed a bit steep. Then again a few months ago another complete collection of F&F went for £4,900 on the same auction site so maybe this person had snagged a bargain.

Being that kind of person I suddenly wanted to look at this in a bit more depth and satisfy my curiosity so I looked through auction data from all the auctions run by Scotch Whisky Auctions  (mainly because I find their site most user-friendly and they have a lot of data). I copied, pasted and tidied up the data and attempted to compare the prices of bottles in the range over the last 4 years. I excluded bottles with wooden boxes and 1^st editions – these are more sought after and skew the average price.

What did I find out? Are you still interested?

The first thing say is that pricing across the Flora and Fauna range is not uniform. At all.  The availability, age statements and release dates vary between the distilleries so there are huge differences in the prices paid for the bottles but I'll come on to that.

If you look at the average price paid for each bottle across auctions in the last 4 years and added it together it would come out at £3400 in total. So £4000 might seem a bit over the odds but not outrageous considering you're getting all the bottles at once.

Then again if you took the most paid each bottle at auction (standard versions not boxed remember) you might have ended up paying £6180. 

Then again had you been lucky enough to get them at their cheapest you could have had all the bottles for £2150. 

Perhaps a more useful comparison would be the most recent prices paid for each, which would total £3270 which isn't far off the average.

Looking in more detail at individual whiskies in the range revealed more volatility. The key thing for me was that there wasn't a steady climb of the prices of each whisky over time. The highest prices paid for bottles were rarely in the last few auctions. It can be very erratic. Notable variations for me included;

Balemenach: averaging around £190 with a peak of £320

Craigllachie averaging around £210 with a peak of £410

Dufftown averaging around £60 with a peak of £290

Glen Elgin averaging around £150 with a peak of £520

Royal Brackley with an average £274 with a peak of £500

Finally Speyburn averaging about £1000 (!) with a peak of £1800 (Somewhere Whiskysponge is dying with laughter.)

£1800 - Srsly?

Only one of those (Dufftown) hit their peak in the last 5 auctions with all of them recently falling quite a long way short of their peak. In fact a more sought after boxed version of the Speyburn could be nabbed for less than £1000 around 12 months after the £1800 peak for the non-boxed version. 

Most other whiskies in the range were steady throughout the auctions with smaller peaks and troughs. The brands that rose most steadily were Rosebank, Pittyveach and Mortlach which showed a clear rise over time. Unsurprisingly 2 of those are from silent distilleries and the Mortlach has had greater exposure recently and still represents better value than its latest incarnation. So this tells us more about the value of whiskies from closed distilleries than it does about collecting Flora and Fauna.

I think I'm right in say the range is discontinued now so they are collectible if you're into that kind of thing. And its within reach of the casual collector since most of the range is still available for £40-80. Completing it might prove tricky though - and it might be somewhat galling to eventually shell out £1500 for a 12yo Speyburn to complete the set. Patience would appear to be the key and not getting dragged into a bidding war.

Obviously this is just a snapshot in time, if I'd looked into this 18 months ago I might have been telling you to sell everything and buy Speyburn but I'd say unless you're interested in having this collection for it's own virtues (i.e. drinking, although those labels are pretty) I wouldn't stick bet the farm on it.

Look out for future in depth analysis on obscure mid-range whisky collections.

WW

Wemyss Tweet Tasting

Occasionally when I log on to Twitter I’ll find my timeline suddenly flooded with unanchored adjectives and random exclamations of joy from the various whisky-type folk that I follow.  Cries of “Summery!” or a thoughtful  “Smoky, Ashy, Peaty” will pop up. And I before I spot the #TT hashtag I’ll know it’s another Tweet Tasting.

I was a bit bamboozled the first time I saw it but I’m used to it now. As the name suggested a it's a whisky tasting that takes place on live on Twitter.

I got the chance to partake in one a couple of weeks ago (NB – actually a couple of months ago now) and I thought I’d write about it for those interested in how it works. The first thing to note is that, sadly, my participation wasn’t due to my prominence as an influential zeitgeist nailing blogger – but rather because I’d replied to a tweet from Steve at the Whisky Wire about a Wemyss Malt Tweet Tasting.

So after having been picked as one of the lucky 20-odd, I received a lovely little parcel with 4 whiskies from indy bottlers (and soon to be distillers) Wemyss Malts. And when the 15^th May  (see?) came around I got in from work fired up the laptop, poured the drams and waited…

I found it was useful to utilise Tweetdeck for the purpose so that I could have specific feeds set up for the Wemyss Hashtag and also a separate feed for Steve at the Whisky Wire so I could follow his instructions – after all I wanted to make sure I was doing it right on my first go.

We kicked off  with the Lord Elcho Blend. It took a while for the descriptions to start coming in but when they did come it was an avalanche. It was lovely seeing the other descriptions floating past – generally there was agreement about the style but every now and again someone just nailed it. It was a great way to crowdsource (crowbarred modern reference) descriptions. A bit like the 1000 monkeys in a room with typewriters; with that many whisky enthusiasts tasting at the same time some-one was bound to get it dead right.

One concern I did have beforehand was what to do if I didn’t like the samples sent through – on the one hand I usually only review whisky that I’ve bought and so I didn’t want to become a sell-out on the very first freebie that I got. But on the other hand I didn’t want to lose my chance of ever getting a invited to do a tasting again. Thankfully this wasn’t an issue as the whiskies genuinely were very good and interesting (I’ll pop notes below). Speaking of selling out there was a Mortlach in the mix –something that's been a topic of much debate among bloggers (including my own post elsewhere).

I’d never done a social event online before, it was a bit weird sitting alone at the kitchen table supping whisky whilst my wife was in the other room. Anyone watching may have been concerned for the state of the marriage... but in the virtual world it was all very convivial and surprisingly entertaining. It was nice connecting with other people  and I got the sense people were getting a little looser as it went on, there were more interactions as the whisky flowed – and definitely a few more spelling mistakes appearing by whisky number 4 too.

Anyway my thoughts on the 4 whiskies are below. Thanks again to The Whisky Wire and Wemyss Malts.

Lord Elcho – Vanilla on the nose.  Sweet pastry apple pie. Like biting into a toffee apple. Smooth and not too grainy.

Pastille Bouquet (Mortlach) – Fruit pastilles and rhubarb dipped in sugar. Fresh and fruity taste, peardrops. Citrus and pepper.

Merchant’s Mahogany Chest (Glen Scotia) – The best of the night. I had it down as an old stone built church on a rainy day, heavy damp and woody. Rich dried fruit. Subtle flavour. Loved it.

Peat Chimney – Decided this was my Most Likely to Buy. Strong peaty/smoke smell (as you might imagine). Tasted like all the Islays at once.TCP, Iodine and Smoke. Cream and seaside.

WW

Mortlach Draft Review

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From:  <whiskyandwrite@gmail.com> to <admin@diageo.com>

Subject: Mortlach Tasting and Review

Hi guys  - I noticed some other bloggers have posted reviews of the new Mortlachs?! I emailed and tweeted you about the invite to the tasting but didn't get a heads up - suggest someone in admin gets their arse kicked! Anyway, didn’t want to miss out on being one of the first reviews so I’ve pieced together a review from what seen from other blogs. Hopefully the seams won’t show…

Mortlach is the oldest distillery in Dufftown  <note - copy and paste details from whiskyportal.com ideally 2 or 3 paras>.

Mortlach is well loved amongst the whisky fraternity (or geeks if I may be so bold! LOL!!).  However the much loved and now much discontinued Flora and Fauna bottling was produced in such tiny quantities that prior to being discontinued it could only be found by visiting the obscure websites, like Master of Malt and Whisky Exchange, that might only have stock in the low hundreds of bottles at any one time.

Anyway nobody ever drank the old Mortlach but we're all agreed it deserved wider recognition so now, thankfully, Diageo is breathing new life into this much loved whisky. They are now making this more available to the mass market by launching the entry level “Old and Rare” bottling. The name might seem confusing at first but that’s fine though - things can actually become more rare the more widely available they become. <citation needed>. And I’m pretty sure it’s really Old too I think maybe there wasn’t enough room for the age statement on the bottle <check this>.

By the way the bottles look great don’t they? It’s like a proper glass decanter – and you were probably thinking of buying one of those anyway right? Well here’s one for you. And it has Mortlach written across the front. So there’s that. And after the whisky is finished you might use it for everyday things like putting 2/3rds of a bottle of wine in or 5/7ths of another bottle of whisky.

What I like about it also is that 50cl feels just the right size doesn’t it? I don’t know about you but I’ve always felt 70cl a bit unwieldy for a bottle size – it’s just too much! Besides, by reducing the bottle size more people can get their hands on this very rare and commercially available drop.

Anyway enough about all that. Let get onto the whisky itself, that’s what really matters. As a whisky aficionado I only really care about taste, price just shouldn’t be factor. After all if something tastes good enough it is worth literally any amount someone wants to charge, regardless of any costs related to production. What’s more it’s clear that Mortlach has been undervalued for a long time – probably by a factor of about 7. It’s a wonder other distilleries manage to keep afloat – but then they don’t have the special distillation process <insert details>.

Anyway, I’m getting distracted by the pricing fuss again. So here we go. The Whisky Writer verdict;

Old and Rare

It’s great

Old and Rare Special Strength

I wasn’t too sure whether to risk being slightly dissenting on this one to show a bit of impartiality. But decided to go with below- what do you think?

Really, really great.

18 Year Old

Just awesome. Totally better and different to 16yo F&F bottling which now seems like fucking dog’s piss by comparison (too far?)

25 Year Old

Just perfection. £600 might seem like a lot of money but believe me you won’t be thinking about how much each dram is costing you as you sip this stuff!

Conclusion: I don’t know what the fuss is about for pricing – this stuff is a bargain. Furthermore just show I’m totally genuine I’m going to forgo our family holiday this year and buy one bottle of each.

Let me know what you think – PS any chance of a sample? Cheers WW

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