Prestige Selection Tour #3: Chivas

Off to the heart of Speyside! When Klaus St. Rainer was recently invited by Chivas Brand Ambassador Ian Logan on a tour of the local stillhouses, he was out the door and on the plane before we could even say “Cheers!”. The two were joined by plenty of flavor, loads of fun, a hearty portion of haggis and an exclusive look inside some of the world’s most tradition-steeped whisky makers.

If Ian Logan were a plant he’d be a tree. A big tree. A burly 40-something with a perfect moon-tan, red curls, a neck as thick as your thigh and an accent dotted with the rolled “r” and short “i” one hears throughout this part of the world, as Scotsmen go Ian is a fairly Scottish Scotsman. All that’s missing to complete the stereotype is a bushy red beard and “Mac” before his surname.

Ian Logan is also the International Brand Ambassador for Chivas Brothers whiskies. This includes single malt brands like The Glenlivet, Scapa and Aberlour. It also covers the company’s two world-famous blends Ballantine’s and Chivas Regal, headquartered at the Strathisla distillery in the village of Keith deep in Speyside. Here, hidden among the endless Highlands, the number of distilleries is rivaled only by the number of sheep.

An invitation malt lovers dream of

The single malts from the distilleries mentioned above and the higher quality Chivas Regal blends make up the new Prestige Selection, Pernod Ricard’s finest, most precious bottlings. To try them out, Ian and his colleague Max Warner, also an International Brand Ambassador for Chivas Brothers, invited Munich-based bar impresario Klaus St. Rainer and photographer Claus Föttinger to join them in Speyside and Edinburgh.

“Scotch is still my favorite spirit. No other spirit is so diverse”, reveals Klaus early on the first evening during a visit to Edinburgh’s famous Bramble Bar. And whisky still holds a very special position in Scotland. While the evening tour through the Bramble, The Bon Vivant, Devil’s Advocate and El Cartel unmistakably demonstrates that contemporary bar culture in all its majesty has truly arrived here, whisky is still the star in Edinburgh’s finest establishments. Where else could you get a sip of the strictly limited Chivas Regal Mizunara Finish outside of Japan? Perhaps more than ever, Chivas Regal and Scotch whisky in general stand for classic elegance, a sense of tradition and conviviality here, but also for openness and a modern attitude toward one’s own heritage.

Start at the start: Grain and mash tuns

A short train ride later there were no more bars, but still plenty of whisky. Three distilleries were on the itinerary, starting with the massive Glenlivet distillery and its 15 splendid pot stills, before moving on to the smaller operations at Aberlour and Strathisla. This was to be no normal “Visitor’s Center” tour, but rather a close-up whisky experience for aficionados, with the wooden washbacks and mash tuns revealed for both the camera and the protagonists’ interested noses.

Logan explains the idea behind the tour saying, “We want to show the whole process, not just repeat the same old whisky info everyone’s already heard. For me it’s also important to show people the steps involved. For instance, a washback like this doesn’t really smell very good. But its content, the ‘wash’, is a step in the distilling process and a component of every Scotch”.

An equally important component of every whisky is not just what’s inside, but also how it’s aged. This means wood, cask management and blending, so the tour also took in the Speyside Cooperage where the distilleries have been getting their new casks and having old ones repaired for decades.

Wood is the heart

“The actual heart of our whisky production is really the warehouses”, explains Logan on the way to just such a sealed warehouse, where the whiskies are aged to the desired maturity. He continues, “I love to be in the warehouses, because there’s such a real, living history here that you can smell and touch. Some of the casks here are so old that the people who originally filled them are probably no longer with us. That fascinates me. And of course it’s simply wonderful to experience this final, but very long step in the aging process”. Almost nonchalantly, Logan cheerfully taps on The Glenlivet’s most valuable cask, a hogshead-sized barrel from 1966 with contents valued at some 2.5 million Euros.

Klaus St. Rainer and Ian Logan meeting up brings two whisky lovers together who both turned their passion into their careers. Offering a taste of a new Glenlivet Nàdurra cask strength, Ian says, “I don’t usually refer to what I do every day as ‘work’, because I just love it so much”. The son of a businessman, Ian explains that he basically stumbled into the whisky business initially and has felt so at home ever since that he’s never looked back. For years now he and Max Warner have represented the Pernod Ricard whiskies at the international level. Logan deals mostly with consumers, while Warner focuses primarily on bartenders.

Not against the rules, but against convention

Klaus St. Rainer’s daily work is often informed by his unconventional approach. “I don’t like rules, They’re usually so limiting”, says the owner of Munich’s “Goldene Bar”. Located in the Haus der Kunst art gallery, the bar reflects Klaus’ attitude both in its drinks and its décor, making it one of Germany’s most exciting watering holes. The same unrestrained approach also goes for using Scotch creatively, as seen in drink creations such as the “Dirty Old Bastard”, “Zacharias” and “Kramer’s Breakfast”, which also relies on The Glenlivet Nàdurra. Equally unconventional is how Chivas Regal managed to establish itself back in the days of gray marketing prehistory as the very first premium blend, gaining the prestigious reputation it still enjoys today. As the official supplier to Britain’s Royal Court and the producer of the legendary “Royal Salute” series and Diamond Tribute bottlings, Chivas still moves in the highest circles.

This is probably the point where loyal malt fans among you might ask why such high praise for a blend from a company that has its own single malt distilleries? Ian Logan, who incidentally openly admits that The Glenlivet is his personal fave, brushes off the question with a smile saying, “I don’t like the narrow differentiation between ‘single malt’ and ‘blend’. We shouldn’t forget that much of the grain whisky that goes into a blend to give it the required lightness has also been aged for a long time” He continues, “For instance, if you buy a bottle of Chivas 25 Years, every drop of grain whisky in the bottle is at least that old. Many people think that the ‘age statement’ only applies to the malt content, but that’s wrong. So I see the difference between single malts and blends more in their characteristics, not in their quality”. Upon hearing this Klaus confesses, “That’s a big surprise for me. I’ve never heard that before. This is a fact that also completely changes the perspective on the product category”.

Where does Scotch stand today?

We ask Logan about Scotch’s status in today’s bars, particularly since it has never been a big cocktail star. Haven’t gin, vodka and US whiskey clawed away at Scotch’s territory over the last 20 years? Ian replies, “In my opinion, good Scotch shouldn’t necessarily be mixed anyway, except with spring water”. Everyone on hand agrees that if Scotch is mixed, it works best in classic simple drinks like a Sour, an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan. And while this seems to endorse the cliché of “heaven-forbid-mixing-Scotch”, that’s only half-true with this crew. Because if there really is one thing Ian Logan and Klaus St. Rainer genuinely don’t seem to like, it’s blind dogma. After all, if people had always stuck to the rules whisky probably wouldn’t even exist. And no one would want that, least of all Ian Logan.

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Translation by J.J. Collier.