July 08, 2016

To peat or not to peat?

Whisky doesn’t have to smell and taste smoky to be Scotch.
In fact, some very fine blends and single malts have little or no traces of the smoldering peat that for centuries has imparted its distinct smokiness during the malting process.
All the same, I believe all Scotch master distillers have peat smoke slowly circulating in their blood streams, a residual ancestry that lingers just under the skin, perhaps a tribal memory of laboring in the peat bogs while mists hang over the glens and burns and frigid winds rake in off the Atlantic. While winemakers love to talk about their product reflecting a “sense of place,” they are often the only ones who sense that connection. But if there is a spirit that reeks of “place,” it is a smoky, minerally, pungent Scotch.