SMWS Dalmore 7yo
13.84 Midnight Woodland Foxtrot | 59.6% ABV
How young is too young to become a grumpy old man?
The further I delve into many modern whisky releases, the more I feel like the uncle at the Christmas dinner table complaining about the general state of the world.
I’ve only been drinking whisky seriously for a few years now off the back of being in the craft beer scene. That said, I like to think I’ve squeezed quite a bit more learning and drinking into that time than would be considered “normal”, as is probably the case with a number of other Dramface writers. Most of that is just a personal character trait; deep diving into subjects of interest and soaking up as much as possible. Part of it, though, is working in liquor retail and getting to spend so much time around so many drinks categories, picking up tidbits that end up applying to whisky if only indirectly. Something I’ve noticed uniformly across almost all drinks categories is the attraction to sugar.
It’s crept its way into essentially every other drink category to varying degrees of obviousness. Rum is allowed dosage. Wine has whole categories of stickies and fortifieds, as well as some table wine varieties designed to finish with higher residual sugar (cough-Moscato-cough). Even beer now has regulated style guidelines for categories with “pastry” in their names. What mad times.
But whisky? It’s not typically what many would think of as a sweet drink. There are some wood sugars from the ethanolysis of toast/char degraded hemicellulose products, but by concentration, these oak contributions are negligible compared to many other drinks. So where does the sugar come in?
Well, from those other drinks categories we’ve just discussed. I ask that you will be patient as I follow one of my frequent tangential thoughts. As a disclaimer, we’re about to enter the realms of gross approximation, though it’s only to produce figures with an order of magnitude accuracy; what physicists would call a Fermi approximation in honour of the great intellect Enrico Fermi.
Let’s say a hogshead (ie approx, 240 litre volume) has the capacity to absorb around 10kg of liquid from being freshly coopered; a supportable starting point given some of the distillers I know report similar variance in weight between wet and dry/empty casks. Now, the specific gravity of a 63.5%ABV (i.e. traditional cask filling strength) mixture of water and ethanol is about 0.883 under standard conditions. Thus our volume of absorbed liquid is closer to 11.3 litres. Using our cask of Dalmore as an example, then let’s look at PX sherry which has a sugar concentration around 100g/L or more. So, if we say that a first-fill PX hogshead containing about 11.3 litres of sherry is used to finish our Dalmore, and there is sufficient time of finishing for dynamic equilibrium of liquids to be achieved between the sherry in the cask wood and the spirit in the cask, then we have 1.13kg of sugar dissolved into about 251L of liquid including that stored in the oak’s pores, giving a final concentration of roughly 4.5g/L of sugar.
Now for comparison this would be roughly standard for many white wines but we must account for some major differences. Firstly, wine has a high concentration of acidity - many traditional European rieslings are around a pH of 3. Scotch tends to fall into ranges from 4-4.8, with other styles of whisky going even higher. Perceived acidity also varies, since tartaric and citric acids have a sharper, more pronounced acidity than many of the organic acids found in whisky. This is where titratable acidity comes into play, but that’s a discussion for another time.
The balance of sugar and acidity makes a huge difference to perceived sweetness; German riesling can be classified as dry up to 10g/L, but a much less acidic American style chardonnay (pH closer to 3.4) at the same sugar concentration would appear much sweeter without the acidity to balance it out.
On top of this, it’s worth remembering that alcohol in high concentrations has some perceived sweetness of its own.
These figures all become exacerbated when we consider the problem (and yes, I think problem is an apt term) of small cask finishes. For instance, consider the dimensions of a quarter cask which are meant to have similar scaled dimensions to a hogshead, except for the thickness of staves which are essentially the same. If we use a cylindrical simplification to approximate the surface area and volume, let’s see how the numbers play out. Firstly, given a hogshead with quoted dimensions as a head radius of 0.290m and a height of about 0.890m, this gives us a surface area to volume ratio of about 91.4cm^2/L. For reference, using these dimensions gives us a shape with volume of about 235.1L, so our error margin is <2%.
To scale down from 240L to 50L is a factor of 4.8- thus by taking the cube root of this we can find the linear scaling factor for the radius and height of the cask (about 1.687). This then gives us a head radius of about 0.172m and height of 0.528m, which consequently gives us a surface area to volume ratio of about 154.2cm^2/L, while the volume for a cask of these dimensions is about 49.1L, so our error margin is still small (<2%).
The increase in our surface area to volume ratio moving from the hogshead to our quarter cask is thus around 68.7%. See our linear scaling factor of 1.687 from earlier; since the proportions of the cask didn’t change, our scaling factor also applies to the SA/V ratio as well, since the unit dimensions are inverse linear also (m^-1) but it seemed worthwhile to prove the point rather than ask you all to trust my algebra on blind faith.
So, after a bunch of tiresome maths, what am I really trying to say with all this? Well, essentially, if we finished our spirit in similar conditions with a quarter cask ex-PX rather than a hogshead, we could expect to see over two thirds more dissolved sugar (that’s now about 7.6g/L) in our final whisky. I’d like to stress again that these are all hypothetical values, but they should be reflective of what we might measure quantitatively within an order of magnitude.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s more sugar than I like in my whisky, but ultimately it’s horses for courses, and just like certain wines hide their sugar well with higher acidity and/or tannic bitterness, whisky can be savoury enough with peaty phenols or quasi-salty characters to balance things out too. My real bugbear comes when we see multiple finishings or back-to-back fortified cask maturation. And we have all seen it happen.
However you cut it, there’s a disturbing trend in modern whisky to bury spirit under mounds of soaking wet oak. We see it in Australia all too often. I know of distillers that move new-make through up to three consecutive wet casks. In fact, here’s the perfect example; an excerpt from an undisclosed Australian distiller’s website about one of their releases.
“This whisky is triple matured starting its life in (a) 100L French oak red wine cask before being transferred into 2 x 40L French oak tawny casks and finally finished in 4 x 20L refill wet tawny casks”.
Refill wet tawny casks you say? Yep, the casks were used to mature whisky, then refilled with tawny to season the wood, then dumped and filled with spirit that had already seen two maturation periods.
WTF? Full disclaimer- I haven’t tried that whisky, and I’m not interested in trying it. I’ve run through the numbers with the same methodology as above and assuming similar scaled cask dimensions as well as no sugar contributions from the first two maturations or the wood itself, just the final finishing would contribute about 10.3g/L of sugars.
What I find even more shocking than these figures is that this release sold out within hours. The feedback from customers was overwhelmingly positive and this distiller continues to enjoy widespread acclaim. They’re not alone either, with a slew of other distillers and independent bottlers utilising multiple maturations in casks as small as 20L. One of the most highly sought after independent bottlers in Australia (who’s 500ml bottles frequently hit the secondary market for four figures) is famous for producing wine - sorry, whiskies - of incredible sweetness and tannins. Here’s an excerpt from a retail website that sold the whisky;
“As the name suggests, nothing is left to waste by (redacted) while indulging in his whisky alchemy and (this) contains the whisky that didn’t go through the filter mixed in with the good stuff. The pieces of sediment you see at the bottom of the bottle are actually small pieces of charcoal left in the vessel when bottling.
The Cask type used is called TFMTM and after chatting with (redacted) he cheekily mentioned it stands for……. Wait for it… ‘TOO F!@#G MANY TO MENTION,’ We’ll leave it at that!”
Having tasted a few of the releases from this bottler I’m left asking myself: “Do the people drinking these styles of whisky actually like whisky or is it just the latest in a series of trendy mediums by which to enjoy sugar?” It isn’t exactly high society to pull out a vodka cruiser at a party, but a pastry stout, German Eiswein or triple-wet-cask malt? Yeah, that seems to pass muster somehow.
So please, genuinely, you the educated audience; is there a problem brewing in our beloved beverage or am I missing some fun point and just being a curmudgeon?
Review
SMWS Dalmore 7yo, 13.84 Midnight Woodland Foxtrot, 59% ABV
AUD$160 limited release
Nose
Comes off almost like an Australian malt in composition - that combination of semi-volatile young spirit with heavy- handed fortified cask. Pantry spices attack first with cinnamon, clove and nutmeg, while the PX notes vie for dominance with over ripe plums, candied figs, dates and whispers of brandy liqueur chocolates. A steady line of vanilla, teak and butteriness from the American oak form a pedal tone to the oaky melange, while that young spirit interjects with cooked pear ester. One might suspect this will be sweet.
Palate
The spice and cask fruits dominate again while a general sense of syrup envelops the whole. The tannin profile is quite restrained based on indications from the nose, lending to drinkability somewhat. The volatility of the spirit is still felt a mite though, not with any particular burn but a slight vaporous mouthfeel, more cooked pear ester and some semi-volatile aldehydes; a touch green (or to set Dallas’ teeth on edge, grassy- freshly mulched lawn specifically). A sense of maltiness yearns to be felt, but stays buried under the casks, which finish with a moderate nutty rancio.
The Dregs
I bought this bottle primarily out of curiosity. It’s seldom seen that Dalmore is independently bottled, even more surprising that it’s such a large bottler as the SMWS that got stock. While I have only tried a handful of the Dalmore official bottlings (the 15YO most recently) my general impressions have not been good. They all seem to possess some level of what I suspect to be cask sulphur, and as such often have awkward onion/beef broth or struck match notes that spoil what would probably be an otherwise passable dessert dram. I suspected it was a function of casks and not spirit since Dalmore utilises efficient shell and tube condensers, as well as water jacketed stills to increase reflux capabilities.
Oh, and the e150; so heavy I would argue it can be tasted. I must put that to the test some time with a blind sherry line up.
Anyway, this bottle seemed a good way to test my theory that the spirit is not at fault and rather it is the distillery/bottler’s cask management and general poor treatment of the make at fault. The Nose and his colleagues appear to do everything in their power to prevent the distillate from being put on display, and this bottling seems to toe a similar line. Maybe one day we’ll see an all bourbon cask official Dalmore, but the cynic in me says it isn’t likely short of a change in distillery ownership.
I’m not disappointed to have bought this bottle since many people in my whisky club will likely find many positives in the sweet spices on display. Other reviewers here with a sweeter tooth might have this closer to a 4 or 5. For this taster though, there is a general absence of balance and complexity with an underdeveloped, uninteresting spirit.
Please, take the score with a pinch of salt, or better yet, a spoonful of sugar.
Score: 3/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. TK