Pure nonsense – David Broom

This suggests that the malt whisky market is evolving in the same fashion as wine.  Cardhu has become the equivalent of Jacob’s Creek, while Lagavulin is a château-bottled, single vineyard wine

IT ALWAYS happens just before you go on holiday.  You try to wind things down, finish off the work (or in my case panic at what hasn’t been done), pack the bags, load up the proverbial donkey, and then what happens? Some enormous, problematic, convoluted, yet fascinating story breaks at the last moment. Every bloody time.

This time it was "to do" with Cardhu – which not only rhymes, but was appropriate since I was off to sunny Spain and it’s that country which is at the root of the problem. Actually, problem is perhaps the wrong word to use.

After all, it’s a situation that most distillers would love to be facing – a brand which has become too successful.  Cardhu is the world’s fastestgrowing malt, with most of those sales coming from the booming Spanish market where it’s selling in excess of 200,000 cases – and to date there are no signs of these sales slowing down.

Equally, there’s no reason why it should stop in Spain either. Owner Diageo feels confident that it can replicate this performance in "emerging" markets like Portugal, Greece and maybe parts of Latin America.

This is good news for a firm which, despite dominating the global whisky category overall, punches woefully below its weight in malt.  Trouble is, you can’t just make more today and sell it tomorrow.  You have to wait; in Cardhu’s case for 12 years.

In any case, even if production was racked up today the volumes needed are in excess of the distillery’s existing stocks and capacity.  A number of options were weighed up, but the conclusion reached was "let’s make it a vatted malt" aka a "pure malt" (a mix of malts from more than one distillery, in this case Cardhu and Glendullan).

There’s sound commercial logic for the move, but where does it leave the brand – and perhaps more importantly, where exactly does it leave malt whisky? My immediate reaction was that when you start to dilute Cardhu, you dilute the brand equity, though this was rebutted by Nick Morgan, Diageo’s malts marketing director.

The equity, he claims, lies in the name, the pack and the taste and not around single malt. Whether you buy that or not, the vatting of Cardhu can be seen as the start of a new category. Vatted malts in themselves are hardly new, but this is the first highvolume, entry-level, hardbranded example.

This suggests that the malt whisky market is evolving in the same fashion as wine. Cardhu has become the equivalent of Jacob’s Creek, while Lagavulin is a châteaubottled, single vineyard wine.

Conceivably, vatted malts could be a major player in Scotch’s future development and hence it’s fast becoming a hot issue for all those involved in the industry. 

The new whisky consumer wants malt but the capacity of (most) single distilleries is such that they can’t meet growing demand and the industry has had its fingers burnt too often to start a major building campaign. If whisky is to prosper, the logic suggests, then a new sector of vatted malts/special whiskies needs to be created.

By necessity this means that the single malt category will become smaller and restricted to more individualistic malts, which itself raises plenty of questions, the major one being can malt whiskies be brands?  A brand, in today’s neo-liberal interpretation of the word, is detached from its place of origin/function.

Nike isn’t asports shoe, but an idea.  Trouble is, malt whisky is ultratraditional and a malt’s identity is intrinsically linked with its place of birth.  Cardhu, if it’s to succeed, must behave like a brand and not like a traditional whisky – after all not all of it comes from Cardhu distillery any more! In addition, the whole issue over what "pure" and "single" mean has to be clarified.

In Italy, Glen Grant (a single malt) is sold as a "pure malt" to differentiate it from the other single malts.  However, in France where there are now a larger number of vatted malts calling themselves "pure" Glen Grant is a "pure single malt"!

Now comes Cardhu. If it was down to me, "single malt" should be the product of a single (existing) distillery; "pure malt" should be used when the whisky is an amalgam of malts from more than one distillery.

There’s a strong case to say that "pure malts" should not be allowed to carry the name of a single distillery on the label or, taking a leaf from the rules governing most varietal wines, can carry the name of that distillery on the label if there is a minimum of 75% of that distillery’s malt in the final vatting.

Actually, maybe the easiest thing is to simply change the distillery’s name back to Cardow. Just a thought.  Now, I really must get on that plane – taxi!!! the same fashion as wine.