The man with the incredible nose
Whisky guru Charles MacLean probably has the best job in the world
Thursday, June 03 2010 || Features || BY Mark Revington
Does Charles MacLean have the best job in the world? Dubbed ‘whisky’s finest guru’ by the Sunday Times, MacLean has spent almost 30 years writing and lecturing about Scotch whisky, yet fell into his career by accident, only to watch it grow in tandem with an explosion in whisky drinking around the world.
“And I’ll tell you what, Mark, if I had my time again, I wouldn’t change anything,” he said shortly before a tasting at the Glengarry Malt Club in downtown Auckland. It was one stop on a sold-out tour of whisky tastings throughout New Zealand organised by Michael Fraser Milne of Whisky Galore in Christchurch. “My friends say I drink for a living.”
At the tasting, we sniffed and swirled our way through six single malt whiskies, ranging from a 19-year-old Glen Garioch that retails for around $225, to a 21-year-old single cask release of Bunnahabhain that retails for $699. MacLean, a veritable walking repository of whisky’s history, accompanied the single malts with an explanation of the distillery each came from, and what to expect from the drink sometimes described as ‘the blood of one small nation’.
Whisky is a grown up’s drink, as MacLean likes to say; an acquired taste, and the tasting that night was packed with grown men and women who had acquired the taste.
MacLean learnt to drink whisky in Scotland, where a night at the pub meant endless rounds of beer with a whisky chaser. By the end of a night, the whisky would taste just fine, he says.
These days he ‘noses’ up to 1000 samples of whisky a year, in demand as a knowledgeable independent expert with the most incredible nose, and, as Milne says, the ability to describe the ‘essence’ of a dram.
Assessing whisky is all about the nose, says MacLean. Get a good glass. Add a bit of water and give the whisky a good swirl. With a standard alcohol content of 40% or so, add enough water to bring it down to 30% or lower. Leave out the ice as it closes down aroma. Grab a few adjectives.
At our tasting, the 30-year-old Old Pulteney was described as “urinous yellow” with a soft mellow nose.
“It’s sweeter than you think,” said MacLean. “And it’s longer than you think, with an aftertaste of chocolate. Michael and I were thinking about this and decided it was Swiss chocolate.”
My immediate neighbour Steve, an engineer for SKM who regularly flies to Kenya to work on the world’s largest geothermal power station, described the 31-year-old Benriach as having the smell of wet tweed. Someone at the Blenheim tasting reckoned it smelled like cat pee.
The 21-year-old Glenfarclas had “a richer, fuller profile”, according to MacLean. “This is one for the sherry heads.”
In the 1970s, so the story goes, distilleries amassed a large loch’s worth of Scotch whisky. Until then blended Scotch was the thing, thanks initially to an act of parliament in 1860 allowing distilleries to blend whisky before paying tax. The main impetus was to produce a consistent product, says MacLean.
“The malt whiskies of the day were in all likelihood quite heavy and smoky — we don’t know exactly — but mixing the malts and grain whisky lightened the blends. Today people are looking for that idiosyncratic quality in malts but they were looking for consistency then.”
In the 1980s, distilleries and distributors hit upon the marketing of single malts, and the whisky world has never looked back. When the late Michael Jackson (the whisky expert not the King of Pop), released his first Malt Whisky Companion in 1989, it featured tasting notes for 300 single malts. Twenty years later when Jackson died and MacLean was asked to step in and finish the sixth edition, his brief was to write tasting notes for 1500 single malts.
We live in a golden age of whisky. As those single malts from the 1970s and 80s age nicely. So does Charles MacLean and his career.
