What is meant by premium


prem-ium (pre'me'em)
noun - very high value;
adjective - rated as superior in quality and sold at a higher price;
idiom - very valuable, usually because of scarcity;
modif - prime, superior, select, selected."


Rolls Royce and the question of age



In its heyday, Rolls Royce produced the finest cars in the world. If a salesman was asked how powerful the engine was, his only reply would be "adequate".

We don't think Dr. Jim Swan ever worked for Rolls Royce but if asked a question about the age of our whisky his short answer would be "it is only bottled when ready". If you catch him in a rare, more talkative mood he will wax lyrical about the whisky industryís over-concern with age, when the better policy would be to bottle whisky when it is at its peak.


 

Distiller Gill Opening Penderyn Barrel

Jim will explain that there comes a point when the whisky is in balance and needs to be bottled. This is the point at which the wood stops giving (complexity, flavour, etc) and starts taking (fruit, delicacy, freshness, etc).

"Older is always better" is a statement that any wine connoisseur would recognise as a fallacy. Any wine, even the greatest first growth Bordeaux, will reach a point in the bottle where it stops improving and starts a gradual decline to - frankly - vinegar.  Unlike wine, spirits will stop ageing once bottled - so the decision that a given malt whisky has reached its peak lies with the distiller, not the consumer

Jim will argue passionately that the policy of only bottling a spirit when at a certain age completely ignores the fact that many conditions will influence the ageing characteristic of a whisky spirit. These include climatic conditions during distillation, slight variances within the oak barrels and even the position of individual barrels within the cellar. 

He rejects the argument that we should deliberately leave a spirit that is "on point" just because we are bound by an age statement. His knowledge of each individual barrel - after many years of nosing and sampling within our cellars - and his decision as to exactly the right moment when to bottle is based on a lifetime of experience, but it is ultimately an emotional decision.

Our view is that it’s fine for global brands - who need to deliver many millions of cases of spirit consistently and with little or no variance - to use computers or prescribed systems to decide when to bottle. To our knowledge, however, unlike on Star Trek, no existing computer has an emotion chip.  We will continue to leave it to Jim Swan (and not Jim Kirk) to decide when our whisky is at its best.

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