The Weekly Mash, Friday 3rd October

This week… Four thoughts about time, and a tasting of the world’s oldest single malt

I The Incredible String Band Tribute Concert, Royal Festival Hall, London, Sep 2025 

My eyes were prickling with tears. Why? Because these were the songs if not of my youth then my adolescence. Sitting in Douglas’ loft as he tutored me in the music which wasn’t on the radio. The Incredible String Band dominated the conversations. They spoke of the Other, open to the world, its music and mythologies. ‘Folk’ as in folk memory and tale, drawing from bards, the White Goddess, the Golden Bough, Joseph Campbell. Songs which rarely had choruses, but were narratives, surreal autobiographies, occult weavings. Psychedelic magpies. Words that made you laugh, think and muse. They changed me. As importantly, my parents didn’t get them.

Nostalgia is a powerful emotion. Memories keenly felt, the past welling up. The first smell of something, the first mountain top, the recollection of an epiphany when you suddenly got it. 

But nostalgia can also exert a negative pull. It can lull you into the belief that the past was better, that the sun always shone in summer, and every Christmas was white, but there was no golden age. We cannot hold on to the past, or make a return. Neither can we cut ourselves off from what is happening now.

The ISB are still part of my world, but so is the music of today. Folk, more than any other form, respects and accepts time’s continuum. The passing on of tunes, words and stories. There is an acceptance that over time they will be reinterpreted, misheard, transposed but in that passing on, they continue to live. We cannot go back, but we can learn and carry the mistakes and missteps as well as the positives with us. The circle is unbroken.

‘The worst thing you can do with a song is not sing it,’ the musician Ali Roberts once told me. I think he was quoting Martin Carthy who was possibly quoting something he’d been told.

The ISB’s songs have been part of me, but have been distanced. Recorded sound is preserved, locked away in grooves. Archived, they sit, silenced, only released when you drop the needle or press play. Even then, they are at a remove. A song only truly lives when it is sung. 

Today, those words I know by heart were being sung afresh by a new generation. Respectful but loving, willing to put their own stamp on them – new life being breathed in. This is also the heart of craft. The passing down, the handling of clay, the beating of copper, the singing of song, the telling of tales. They live again, reformed.

What has this got to do with whisky? Everything.

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II Golden Promise Bar, Paris, midnight, Sep 2025

The conversation was gentle and slow, glasses being passed around, sips taken, judgements, thoughts placed into the mix. There was little analysis, rather each dram acted as a gateway to a new topic –  the distillery or bottler, the identity (or otherwise) of the source of the fakes from the ’90s, memories of fallen comrades. Each anecdote ends in a laugh, or fond silence. 

Another bottle would be quietly uncorked, a single dram poured and passed around. The sole thread was they were all old bottlings whose order was dictated by the conversation. We slid from Tormore to Bruichladdich, to Clynelish, Glenfarclas, Longmorn, Miltonduff, Ardbeg, and Rosebank. 

Rather than finishing, as convention dictates, on dense smoke, we ended on tropicality. A whisky which rolled gently over the palate, peaking, falling, clinging, then cresting once. A swell dram. If the others were considered, this one spoke. Here was the epiphany. 

There can be a sense of melancholy when drinking these whiskies from the past. There’s an awareness of the finite nature of the liquid, not just that this might be the only time you try it, but be the last bottle. It is easy to approach them with over-reverence, or to leave them on the shelf, locked away. But all of these are open. They are there to be drunk. They live.

‘None of these can be recreated,’ says Sukhinder, as I ask him if these are models for Tormore and Portintruan. ‘We can dip in and take ideas, but that’s all. We can’t go back.’ 

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III Japanese Whisky Seminar, Whisky Live, Paris Sep 25

‘My initiative for the future?’ says Chichibu’s Ichiro Akuto, ‘It’s from the past – direct fire, floor malting, local barley. This,’ he holds up his glass, ‘is all of these, aged in a cask made from mizunara harvested in Chichibu’s forests.’ 

The Golden Melon barley Ichiro used is the same variety used by Shinjiro Torii and Masataka Taketsuru when they made Japan’s first whisky at Yamazaki in 1924, yet Ichiro isn’t trying to return to the past, but learn from it, re-engage with the flow.

The dialogue around whisky is often around the need for change – the tedious posturing about being ‘disruptive’, spurious claims of ‘innovation’. In Japan, there is an acceptance of change’s inevitability and a different concept of time. 

‘If all that there really is, is now [then] within the present there is a past, a present and a future,’ writes Kosho Uchiyama in ‘Opening the Hand of Thought’. ‘Time is not linear in the Western sense. The past and future are real and alive only in the present…’ You cannot go back because the past doesn’t exist.

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IV Glenlivet 1940 (85yo), Hove, Paris

The tiny sample is in front of me. How do you approach this, the oldest whisky in the world?  With excitement certainly, but also a certain trepidation. I mean, what if it’s flat, over-oaked, astringent? Is that a scintilla of cynicism lurking? Yet another player in the oldest whisky arms race? Is price a factor to consider? Do you cut it some slack because it’s been held in cask since 1940, or approach it like any other whisky – looking for balance, complexity, character? Just you and the liquid. Worry about the rest later? I pour it and inhale. Clear mind.

Fresh. Bright, exciting, exuberant. None of the slow, soft shyness of many older ones. None of the weariness. Then taste. One sip. Wet the lips. Let it expand, the past in the present. Tasting whisky is tasting time. 

The first response isn’t what it is, rather what it isn’t. The label says first fill sherry, but where’s the wood? Where’s the rich colour? Maybe an ex-solera shipping cask? No dried fruits, clove and incense. This is fruited, waxed, lightly smoked. Write, return, write more, return again. Repeat until the glass is dry and even then return once more.

Only then the story. A Glenlivet distilled and casked on February 5th, 1940 by John Urquhart and his son George, now bottled by the latter’s grandsons. It was filled as the Second World War started, British troops were being sent to France. Dunkirk was only four months away. That month, whisky production was cut back to a third of the previous year’s. 

What was on John and George’s minds and that of the distillers? Were they thinking that it would lie for 85 years? Was even putting it in cask a small act of defiance, of a belief that all would be good in time. The fact that they were filling lots of casks suggests so. 

If the cask was filled in an unsure time what happened subsequently was planned. Over the decades the whisky was sampled, assessed and earmarked for long maturation. Its bottling wasn’t down to chance, the serendipity of finding a cask lost in the warehouse, but planned. It drew from an understanding of what could happen over time.

The idea of time warps when faced with any whisky, especially one of this age. Filling a cask is anticipating the future. Drinking it is experiencing the past contained in the present. 

In Paris I get the chance to taste it again. The Japanese class has finished late, so I rush to the venue, working out my apologies to the small exclusive group allowed to try the precious liquid. I open the door to a theatre with 100 plus people. This bottling may be limited (125 decanters) but here it is, being shared. 99.9% of us can’t afford it, but we can taste, talk, share.

What would you be buying? Whisky, reputation, history, time, a talking point, something to show? The bottling proves that it is possible to age a whisky for 85 years, but it is more than that. It is a story of nurturing and a very Urquhart family way of quietly, considerately, passing things on. The number of years is remarkable, but meaningless unless the liquid astonishes, which it does. A whisky only truly lives when it is drunk.

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Glenlivet 1940 (85yo). G&M Generations, 43.7%

Colour Gold, moving to amber. 

Nose: Mature and elegant. Beautiful, super-ripe, orchard/tropical fruits, backed with waxiness which you can only get with great time and slow oxidation. There’s apple syrup, mango, papaya, and fried banana. It has density and aromatic lightness simultaneously.  Amazingly fresh and fragrant, there is also light oils, a hint of miso, some glossy chestnut. 

It demands that you take your time, and patience pays off with the aromas deepening  and developing an almost vinous quality: old Sauternes rich with noble rot (marmalade, sticky apricot, propolis, mildly medicinal). The initial exuberance is slowed, the sun going down.

A drop of water increases the waxiness (more candle-like now) and brings out a cocoa powder element and the bracing side of oxidation, which adds a savoury, almost  culinary element to the fruits, plus a hint of moorburn in the gloaming. The years have added weight and experience.

Palate: A dusky fragrance rises. There’s more oak now plus a little touch of smoke, bitter chocolate and a tiny hit of rose. In contrast to the sun-bathed late autumn orchards of the nose, things have now moved indoors. Dunnage, rosin, a touch of ash, darker slightly nuttier elements with Darjeeling-like tannins holding things together. Then comes a sudden burst of fruit, as if to say “I’m still alive!’ As it progresses things become concentrated as the grip and the odd, savoury, oxidised fruits work together. It teases and confounds. A drop of water brings out more of the fruits (now slightly faded and sepia-toned), grilled pineapple, oils and a burst of acidity, though as its addition tightens the tannins, it’s probably best to keep it on the side. 

Finish: Long and exotic. Bitter orange, dried flowers, ashy smoke, savoury. It is a journey. A life.

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In My Ears

It has to be The Incredible String Band … and this one [link] seemed the most appropriate

Within your fingers the fates are spinning

The sacred binding of the yellow grain

Scattered we were when the long night was breaking

But in bright morning converse again

(Robin Williamson, ‘The Circle Is Unbroken’)