The Peat Essays: Part Three

If you are reading this series after navigating parts one and two, chances are, you love peat.

If peat was used more widely, more diversely and as much for pragmatism as flavour during historic eras of production, today it is deployed with a conscious and targeted deliberateness like never before. Peat today is fashionable, desirable, cool, delicious and fascinating. It is the core of endless smoky cocktails; a benchmark measured in PPM (part per million) phenols that ‘peat freaks’ are always seeking to exceed; and it is the cornerstone identity of Islay whiskies. Where Aenas MacDonald writing in 1930 saw a unique economic heat source with secondary benefit of flavour; today we cannot realistically claim any distillery needs peat. Rather, they want it.

The whiskies that feature peat may be more similar to each other than in the past, but their makers are far more conscious of the importance of peat to their whisky’s identity. Peat has travelled from being whisky’s incidental soul, to being the heart emblazoned upon some of its biggest and brightest sleeves.

The era of ‘modern’ peat flavour in Scotch Whisky can be characterised as beginning with the rise of large scale commercial maltings, a phenomena that became entrenched by the outset of the 1970s. This notion of ‘modernity’ should not automatically be conflated with ‘poor quality’; Brora produced some of the most remarkable and charismatic malt whisky of the past fifty years using decidedly modern processes and commercial malt from Glen Ord maltings. What’s more, many modern peated whiskies produced since the 1970s have matured into exquisite and truly beautiful drams: think Caol Ila, Port Charlotte, Talisker, Longrow or some Ledaigs. While some of Scotland’s most charismatic and enigmatic contemporary distillates owe thanks in part to varying degrees of peat, the likes of Ardmore, Springbank, Glen Scotia, Ben Nevis or Ballechin. Not to mention all the various Bruichladdich makes that dial peat upwards or downwards in compelling fashion.

If the whisky makers of the past made beauty through incident and instinct, today we – both producers and consumers – are increasingly preoccupied with dissecting their practices, understanding, and implementing anew the processes and ingredients that might deliberately construct beauty in whisky in new ways today. Whisky is often characterised as slow moving, but these phenomena are happening more rapidly than is often acknowledged. Today’s Scotch Whisky industry is already fragmenting into those larger producers who continue in the more established model of scaled production for blended Scotch, and those producers more concerned specifically with single malt. Producers that are often smaller, formerly an independent bottler, independently owned, new, or a mix of all those things. These sorts of distilleries are already far more prevalent outside Scotland, particularly across Europe and in America.

It is unsurprising that out of this world has come a lot of contemporary discussion about, and fascination with, the concept of terroir. The vast majority of discourse about this subject is concerned with the question of whether or not terroir exists, or can exist, in whisky. This is to miss the point.

Terroir forces a confrontation of our production practices, it exposes the implications of the ingredients we use, it contrasts the choices of intervention versus non-intervention and it offers a route by which to redress the balance of roles between nature and human in the creation of whisky (although, of course we humans are as much ‘of nature’ as anything else). All whisky’s ingredients are up for grabs in this decision-making process because all are natural. However, it is peat that has the most profound implications because it is whisky’s most direct link to the land. If a whisky maker wishes to step backwards and ‘make space’ for nature, peat is one of the clearest and most profound of nature’s voices which can enrich that space. 

All these discussions and debates are unlikely to end up with a newly segregated Scotch Whisky industry that mimics French wine. But the discussions and efforts are worthwhile and likely to lead to a more complicated but fascinating result. This is the key difference between ‘craft’ and ‘terroir’ in their truest definitions. One is deliberate, interventionist, layered and compositional. The other is interpretive, conversational, analytical, supervisory and nurturing. The master and the custodian.

Both can be profoundly complex and qualitative but in different ways; they are also not without areas of crossover. The greatest whiskies yet to be made will very likely represent a nuanced tension between the two doctrines of production. And just as peat has played a key role in almost all the greatest whiskies of the past, so it seems that it will be the case in the greatest whiskies of the future. At least, that’s what we ‘peat freaks’ hope…