Daftmill 2010 Winter
2023 Release | 46% ABV
You Must Be Daftmill
“There’s Francis!” came the gasp. Expectant heads in the vicinity turned to see a man standing behind a table, pristine white shirt on body, tall amber bottle in hand.
Amongst a crowd you’d not pick him out as anyone of note for he looks just like a normal bloke, sounds just like a normal bloke and very much carries himself like a normal bloke. However, if you are in any way burrowed inside whisky excitement, this man represents something special.
Some of us inside whisky excitement would fall on their swords to protect this man, because of what he means to them. The utterance of his distillery name causes little beads of sweat to form on brows, and legs to start stretching in preparation for the Olympic dash to the nearest stockists. It’s one of the rare instances of a humble small batch producing distillery, made of slow and steady assurance being the laser focus of ripping-hot speculation.
The situation is completely out of the hands of the folk who make the whisky - they have no say in who wants what and are willing to pay anything for it. In fact, it’s a producer's dream not just in whisky, but in any field of production from magazines to t-shirts, watches to car tyres. If you make a product that is far outstripped in demand than you can supply well, you’re onto a winner.
I arrived on the whisky scene four years after Daftmill launched their inaugural 12 year old whisky. That’s right: 12 years ticked by following the first drops of alcohol plopping through their small spirit safe, before brothers Francis and Ian Cuthbert decided to release it into the world. Think about that in the modern perspective of whisky distilleries: these days whisky is launched at three years old, as soon as it’s legally allowed to be sold as whisky. Even before that golden number is reached, we are seeing products from distilleries being sold as “spirit drink” so that money can start coming inwards, instead of flowing freely outwards; distilleries are expensive places to build and run, don’t you know.
How then could Daftmill have the patience to wait so long, or the financial ability? Daftmill is a distillery located in the outbuildings of a working farm, a farm growing barley, potatoes, as well as nurturing cattle. The main focus for the Cuthbert brothers is grain and beef, not whisky, which is why the demand for clawing money back as soon as possible wasn’t necessarily required, or perhaps as immediately essential. Distilling begins only once the farming season has concluded - as Francis states, much like they used to do back in the olden days - meaning only twice yearly does Daftmill distil, using a parcel of barley from their own crops to boot. I’ve often wondered why Daftmill had “Summer” and “Winter” on the labels, and the reason is because this is when the farming shuts down and the distilling ramps up.
I say ramps up, but in reality the Daftmill ramp is about as inclined as the entrance to Tesco, and isn’t anywhere in the proximity of big distilling quotas. When we think of places like Glenfiddich or Glenlivet who have a capacity for circa 21,000,000 litres of alcohol per annum, the 65,000 litres of alcohol per annum that Daftmill outputs looks a bit…funny. That’s around 100 casks a year. It’s as small as you can probably get before you become a moonshiner, pipped only by Dornoch and Strathearn (30,000lpa), Toulvaddie (25klpa) and the Isle of Lewis distillery Abhainn Dearg (20klpa). But it’s this fact, and this fact alone, that means releases from Daftmill Distillery are met with utter carnage.
Demand colossally outstrips supply, but not because the whisky inside is regarded as the most perfect whisky to be produced since the dawn of time. It’s in demand because of the intrinsic value that these rarified bottles hold, especially when released onto the secondary market. It’s a disaster that Daftmill can’t be spoken of without the word “speculation” attached somewhere, but this is the reality in 2023.
As a recent example, the Fife Whisky Festival kicked back into life post-covid in 2022, and with the announcement of dates so too came the announcement of special festival bottlings - things released for the festival that can only be purchased there and then. For 2022 the festival bottling was actually two bottlings - one from Lindores and one from Daftmill. Predicting some scenes, the team behind FWF decided that, to keep fairness front and centre, they’d introduce a system whereby each attendee was given a scratch card - if you scratched and found nothing, tough luck. No bueno.
However if you scratched your card and found either Lindores or Daftmill, then you were entitled to head over to the Luvians shop stand and purchase one bottle of your given whisky. I can only imagine the dejected faces of those turning up at the Luvians stall to ask for their bottle of Lindores. If you did scratch and sniff Daftmill, then you had two choices - pay £140 and have your name written on the label, or pay £170 and have it pen free. The idea being that if you were of flipping persuasion, you’d have to pay a premium for it (and the social awkwardness of asking for it unsigned in front of other whisky exciters - apparently folk were being boo’d upon this request) - the difference in the two bottle prices going to charity. It was reported that some slithery snakes were offering other festival goers £50 for their successful or unused scratch cards. Desperation reeks from any speculator, and the folk chasing Daftmill for profit are amongst the most pungent.
Needless to say the moral compass of auction houses inevitably points towards profit too, and so it transpired that in the months following the Fife Whisky Festival, online whisky auctions were stuffed full of Daftmill FWF bottles, including those with correction fluid or Sharpie masking the names of those emboldened or cheap enough to leverage FOMO. And oh how bidding went through the roof - bottles were going for anything between £300 for a signed / redacted bottling and £525 for a pristine label. When you think of the return on investment, it’s easy to see why people do this. 200% return in a matter of weeks?
A shame then that a bottle never makes it a week in my house before it’s opened, for I’m here briefly to smell and taste whisky while I still have the faculties. You never know when (or what) your last dram might be, but the prospect of getting to smell and taste Daftmill in the wild is about as realistic as joining Bezos inside his silver phallus as he blasts his gigantic ego into the upper atmosphere. Which is to say, I’m not geared up to chase Daftmill as you must, if you want to open and experience it. If I have no chance of trying a whisky without camping outside Luvians overnight, then I don’t even think about it. Radar jammed.
Review
Daftmill 2010, winter Release, 2023 Bottling, 46% ABV
£100
February this year saw me attend the Fife Whisky Festival 2023, and despite the festival bottling being a nice little unflippable Staoisha 8 year old (that I wished I’d bought), I was there primarily to absorb everything and anything. Daftmill were in attendance and, after the shout came from the growling horde that Francis was here too, the stall remained rammed from the moment I set foot in the lower hall, to the dying embers of a genuinely thrilling festival. I managed to try one of their expressions, after I elbowed my way past many stoic supporters. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, fairly satisfied with what I smelled and tasted.
It’s unfair to judge any whisky during a festival, as I’ve come to realise, because you are in such a weird headspace that almost all whisky falls on a scale between “I love whisky” and “this is blowing my mind”. I thought it ok, the Daftmill I tried, but to be honest with you I felt totally out of place - the stall was jostling, folk were planted firm footed right across the width of Daftmill’s single table, and getting access to the white shirted Francis was an exercise in eye contact and micro movements of the eyebrows. A glass thrust through the gaps in people’s arms was the only way to get a sample of whatever Francis was holding at the time - requests for other expressions fell unheard into the din of “ooo” and “ahh” permeating the shimmering air. I retreated quite quickly and was far happier loitering around the less jostling climes of the other stalls.
After the festival, Daftmill took its rightful place in my whisky life - in the basement beside the dusty set of floral china teacups that Mrs Crystal inherited from her gran. Until today, when I switched onto Facehoot to see that someone had put up a one-liner - “Daftmill is on Berry right now.” The super sleuth in me decoded that as being Berry Bros. and Rudd, the independent wine and spirits merchant, and independent whisky bottler. They are, as it turns out, the official distributor of Daftmill too - BBR moving Daftmill products to other shops but keeping the lion’s share for their own shelves. Sure enough, typing into the search bar (for they’re not silly enough to broadcast its presence on the main page) there was indeed a new bottle of Daftmill, and it was indeed available to buy.
A crisis of faith ensued - do I take this incredibly rare opportunity to buy a bottle of this whisky, at a price usually reserved for special occasion purchases, knowing that I’d become one of those idiots you see opening a sure-fire investment bottling with stifled titters from onlooking speculators? Or do I let it pass? £100 on 12 year old 46% whisky is a huge amount to pay regardless of how few there are circulating in the world (6,550 to be exact). Well, I opted for the former because if I’m to avoid Daftmill going forward, I need a better reason than “I can’t buy it” or “that sample I tasted in a glass at the tail end of a festival that held 20 other whiskies prior wasn’t blowing me away.” I need to know why Daftmill is revered. I need to know why it’s chased to the ends of the earth, or why it costs £100. I need to know if I should ever buy Daftmill again, or if this will be my one and only purchase of the green sealed, turtle embossed bottle of uisge beatha from the Fife micro distillery.
To take the edge off, I suggested a split between Jackie and Hamish, which was gladly accepted. £38 for 230ml seems a bit more palatable an outlay in the grand scheme of things.
Nose
Orchard fruits with skin on. Fresh rain. Grass, flowers, soil, sunshine. Cannabis smoke. Creamy fruits. Woods and vanilla candles. Cotton sheets drying. Juicy fruits - boiled sweeties. Maoam plastic sweets - banana and strawberry. Paper wrappers.
Palate
Juicy, mouth watering and luscious. All the orchard fruits mushed together in one big juicy pot. Fruit salad. Grass, coconut - gorse is a perfect example of the vegetal sweet sugary coconut note. So easy to drink, zero burn. Like a powerful tropical fruit juice. I keep using juice because it’s so damn juicy. It’s delicate too. Purple pops but overly bright white/creamy coloured in the mind’s eye. Key-lime pie colour.
The Dregs
The smell filling the room as I decant this tall bottle into the wee stumpy smaller bottles, is delightful. I’ve made my feelings known over on the Spey Fumare review enough to not repeat here, but this bottle is just as perilously thin and tall. It even tapers inwards to a narrower base than the shoulder, which is just not cricket. When it was first delivered and I took it out to raise it aloft into a beam of sunlight, I had to immediately put it back in the protective packaging, for fear of tipping it over and causing all those £110 to spill out onto the office carpet.
It’s light in colour - golden and delicious looking. I don’t drink with my eyes but even I’m having a hard time looking at this and not expecting a really summery, brightly dram. It smells lightly fruity - there’s no indication of filth here - it’s all spring flowers and summer meadows. In smaller bottles it looks fantastic - that colour through refractive glass makes me want to lick it, like a juicy wee gummy bear.
I send off the 2/3rds split to Hamish and Jackie and await their opening - I wanted to drink in unison with them and revel in the red hot glow of WhatsApp as we discover new things in real time, but the bottler of the split is also gifted with a little dram left after decanting the splits - the heel - as a wee payment for the effort. I have to say that I was quite impressed by what I found in that ~15ml pour, but it’s not until you can swish it about in your facehole that you really absorb the full spectrum of a whisky’s character.
A week later and in a fit of impatience I pour a big measure and head out to the garden. The sun is shining and a light warm breeze ruffles my thinning hair. An airliner blasts overhead at 40,000ft delivering passengers from Chicago to Frankfurt, leaving four pristine white lines in its wake - its shadow casts directly over my garden. Immediately afterwards two low-flying military gunships, of Apache shape, fly over the rooftops and a fleeting panic washes over me - should I be making moves to safety rather than lying prone on a picnic blanket? A noisy reproach to my unsanctioned decadence.
I get vegetal notes in abundance from the glass and it manifests as the slightly vinegary, green and hairy herbal wood west-coast narcotic de jour. Then we’re onto the orchard fruits and summer dresses. Outside it’s a perfect accompaniment to the scene playing out before these wibbling eyeballs. I feel at peace and before I know it, the super-sized measure in the glass is gone. I retreat to the sanctity of the cool house for round two.
Inside with a new pour I find a lot more of the juicy sweeties and apples - there’s no wind in here to whip those away, other than the puffing of my nostrils. This is really approachable stuff and has literally zero spice - it’s uniformly round and creamy, offering no spiky shouts or glimmer of attitude. Just quaffable juice. Quite remarkable.
One of the problems with drinking Daftmill, for me anyway, is that I can only get ten bright-eyed paces into the orchard before I realise how much entry has cost me, and I get fiercely grumpy. A glistening pear, like a fleshy water balloon filled with bright juicy wonder distracts me long enough to forget about it, but soon it reappears. And so it goes for the remainder of my time with this whisky.
It’s easy for me to forget why Daftmill is more expensive than other whiskies. This is a low-outturn, small batch whisky distilled in off-seasons by two farmers who produce just enough spirit for 100 casks each year. Economies of scale are nowhere to be seen in Daftmill Farm whisky production. This whisky is made with utmost care, patience, dedication and deftness to give the world a taste of how lowland whisky can be if it’s done right. I am enamoured with the whole concept of Daftmill and I love the fact that it’s made by such humble, hard-working folk, offering something else to the wide spectrum on offer in whiskyville.
My biassed eyes see the speculation on the auctions each month and connect Daftmill to that of a plaything for those with more time and money to spare than most, and I inevitably link the brand to Macallan - whisky made for the sake of profiteering. And if whisky is made for the sake of profiteering, then you can assume that the whisky inside the bottle isn’t worth very much in the smell and taste department - it makes perfect business sense to not put your best stuff into bottles that you know almost certainly is not going to be opened. That is an unforgivably unfair comparison for Daftmill.
This Winter Release is 6,550 bottles, and I haven't seen 6,549 on auction. 20 maybe, but not thousands. As such, this opinion I hold that every Daftmill bottle is snaffled by profiteers and hoarded for eventual flippage, is simply not true. There are thousands of people buying and opening Daftmill whisky each time it’s released, because the idea that so many bottles are sitting gathering dust in cupboards is an idea too far removed from reality. Even the fact that pubs and bars have stock of these releases means that many bottles are being opened almost automatically around the world.
So what does it mean then, in the scope of whisky purchasing with intent to drink and enjoy? Removing any financial burden and appraising Daftmill 2010 Winter Release from a purely flavour experience position, this is lovely whisky, there’s no getting around it. If you were to look up the dictionary definition of “orchard fruits” a picture of Daftmill would be alongside it. Juicy and luscious and delicate and green and yellow and sunshine. Holey moley, if I could sit and drink this in the sun all day long, you bet your bottom dollar I’d be doing it. Overtly nice weather whisky. Flowers and butterflies.
It flows down the facepipe with the easiest silky swish I’ve ever experienced, with not a hint of burn or fizzle. It just goes. And goes. By dram three I’m half-way down the 200ml bottle split and I need to vocally state to an empty room that “that’s enough”, to stop me reaching for it again. I can see easily why folk love Daftmill whisky - it’s just stupidly easy to drink, and very enjoyable as a result.
Right after the Daftmill leakage of 2023 was stemmed, I poured a dram of a recently acquired Berry Bros. and Rudd bottling of Benriach that I won in the latest auction for £55. It was finished in a Croatian red wine cask and is the colour of cranberry juice; presented at 62.2% ABV this whisky is almost at the opposite end of the scale to Daftmill, and the huge burst of flavour, spice, burn, power and dark red fruits is such a contrast that I shout “WOW” into the same empty room. This is where I’m finding my joy at the minute, in these outliers of exceptional emotion. It makes Daftmill feel a bit pedestrian in contrast, or in a more just sense, wonderfully approachable.
Approachable, 46% ABV whisky exciter presented whisky with just enough flavour to keep things interesting. That sounds to me like something akin to the Glen Garioch Founder’s Reserve - 48%, approachable, just enough. It sounds to me like the Thompson Bros. SRV5 blended whisky - 46%, approachable, just enough. It sounds like Maclean’s Nose, Kingsbarns Doocot, Glen Scotia Double Cask or Thompson Bros. TB/BSW blended 6yo whisky. All priced around £40 or lower. Even the Bladnoch Vinaya - 46.7% and approachable, despite being just over £40. You see where I’m going. Approachable whisky is just that - approachable. That it’s 5, 6, 12, 15, 25 years old means nothing. Easy is easy. Simple is simple. Paying £3,000 for whisky that’s 30 years old and has all the rudiments of prestige emblazoned upon it, to find that it’s nothing more than approachable whisky is money wasted, if you put zero wistful significance into the time it’s sat in cask. If your focus is flavour and it smacks you like kitty soft paws, then that is the truth irrespective of age.
In the Dramface writer’s chat, when this 12yo Daftmill Winter Release 2010 was up for grabs, the general sentiment was that £100 was too much for 46% Daftmill. I hadn’t ever tried enough of it to know either way, so despite the growing swell to the contrary, I felt it justified to get a bottle and see for myself what Daftmill is and why it commands such a fervent following, as well as such a high price to purchase. Now, having spent time with this spirit, I must bow my head and accept that the Dramface groupthink knows what they’re talking about - this is good whisky, but not £100 good whisky. £50, even £65 at a push whisky, but not £100. Not worth chasing across the country, and not worth the auction prices demanded of it.
But that’s not to say it’s not worth trying it. I think what Francis and Ian Cuthbert are doing out at Daftmill is fantastic. I think that the approach they’re taking to whisky is so refreshing in the current climate of confoundingly large outturns in the tens of millions of litres per annum, with hundreds of thousands of casks being stored in gargantuan warehouses, with whisky decanted into increasingly wild casks.. 100 casks a year: that’s all that Daftmill will likely ever produce for capacity has been reached. The Cuthbert’s know it and are at peace with this fact. Cask management must be crucial, for a duffer can’t be as easily hidden, you’d assume. There doesn’t seem to be any drive to expand. There doesn’t seem to be any need either - demand outstrips supply by factor of, well, loads. Every single bottle of Daftmill that is produced from this wee farm in Fife is bought immediately - in advance if allowed. There’s not a single bottle that sits on a shelf in a shop gathering dust.
From a business perspective it’s the perfect scenario. Daftmill have crafted a product that people want with urgency - they’re winning bigly no matter which way you cut it. Just because I don’t want to play the game, or put the effort into chasing, or afford the high asking price doesn’t mean that Daftmill are on a hiding to nothing. They will continue to have their products fly off the shelves just by the very nature of their small-batch production. I want to say that it’s a poisoned chalice, that because Daftmill is outside of the reach of many enthusiasts they will eventually fall foul of the speculation bubble burst, but that’s only true if it wasn’t being bought by exciters, opened and enjoyed by exciters and shared by exciters. Which it is.
It’s everything, everywhere, all at once, then - a whisky that hits the spot for a lot of enthusiastic whisky people, delivers good flavours and easy going enjoyment, offers great return on investment for flippers and will forever be in demand by the limited nature of how it’s produced. The producers themselves are respected in the industry, and in a lot of justifiable ways, idolised by the consumer; Daftmill make whisky on their terms, not bowing to pressures of industry or consumer. This should be the first whisky you give to someone new to whisky as evidence of what whisky can give, if your pockets are deep enough. It costs what it costs. It is what it is.
There are single cask expressions of Daftmill released - like the Fife Whisky bottling - but they are 50% more again and are even more difficult to snag. I’m taking a mark off for this 46% whisky being £100 a bottle, even if there’s nothing that can be done about it. I’m not willing to pay this high a cost again for such an overtly approachable dram, especially when there’s an abundance of quite incredible flavour explorations around for anywhere between £40 and £70, on auction or even from retail - I’m just not in that “nice happy medium” phase of my whisky journey. I want to be ripped through the flavour hedge backwards, and this Daftie just doesn't offer me that experience. I’m delighted I’ve tried it finally, but will leave it at that.
Score: 6/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC