Limited Edition Batch 3 | 57.5% ABV
Score: 6/10
Good stuff.
TL;DR
Tasty peated whisky with nicely rounded edges but bad bottle design
First impressions are everything.
With an impassive nod of recognition, the anniversary of my birth registers like I’ve remembered it’s Wednesday.
No more exciting, or daunting, or troubling, or significant than any other day, of any other week – it’s just another day. My wife wishes me a pleasant one and my daughter waves me off with our unique, rehearsed hand gesture that represents, in those wee wiggling fingers, our unfathomable love for each other. With that, I’m off into the world to tackle what will manifest in the hours between now and dinner time.
It’s a brutal example of the inexorable yomp of time: as we get older, we place less and less importance on remembering that another year has passed, and that we’re another year older — that a new ring, weathered but armoured, has grown around the fragile core of our life-tree. How many new rings we will grow is a question so many of us ask, silently, for fear of receiving an answer. But anyway, I digress. Today is my birthday, and I’ll cry if I want to.
Every day that has passed between reaching adulthood and this very moment has moulded us into the people we are. The trials we’ve faced, the problems we’ve solved and the important moments that have diverted us this way and that, into and away from trouble, into and away from happiness, love, fear, remorse, exaltation or failure. We are who we are as a result of the things we’ve seen and done in the intervening years, bridging the time between when we were released from parental care to now, where I find myself once again bound by parental care, though now for my children. The fun and excitement for life that had started to dwindle, owing to work/life imbalances, money woes, housing woes and many other woes, are reignited because of a brand-new person experiencing life and all its permutations for the very first time. So too does the responsibility grow, and grow; some days feel like a twelve-tonne weight is pressing down upon my shoogly shoulders, with other (less frequent) days feeling like I’m the king of the world.
Isn’t life funny? I look back, much like I assume a lot of people do, and think about who I used to be — how naive or ungrateful I was as a younger, less responsible person; the opportunities missed due to idleness or ignorance. The life experiences that, at the point of happening, were anxiety-riddled throbbing bands of worry tightening our chests and shortening our breath in retrospect are seen as triumphs over adversity. I suppose retrospect is the joy of life, isn’t it — looking back, reminiscing or exploring what we’ve seen and done through the safe prism of a maturated minds-eye perspective.
Anchors are important life tools, totems that mark these life moments out from the rest, and allow you to travel back in time through the endless memory banks and uncover otherwise inaccessible motion pictures that appear, out of thin air, for our own enjoyment. Memories are captured from a single point in three-dimensional space but can be expanded and developed post-event, if that moment was shared with other people — this is how I saw it, but now I can see it from your perspective too. Anchors offer us access to these memories, and for most of my life, the anchors I used were unreliable and patchy, and the memories therefore harder to access. Luckily for me, I discovered an anchor so heavy, so solid and reliable that my ability to conjure up otherwise hidden memories has increased tenfold: the anchor of whisky.
Yes I know, the very thing that fundamentally manipulates memories — the thing that, if abused, can destroy much more than that. Whisky can be a potent and dangerous form of human enjoyment but, if you are sensible and considerate, it permits a solid anchorage of memories. A time in your life when things weren’t looking so good: I’ll buy a nice whisky to ease the stress a little. A life achievement: whisky to celebrate. A birth, a death: whisky. And that whisky, whether it be a NAS Ben Bracken or a vintage Rosebank, lodges its presence in your memory banks like a neon sign: this life experience can be accessed here.
“It’s safe to say that somewhere along the line […] decisions were made that didn’t necessarily take into consideration the end-user experience…”
If I take a moment, I can faithfully remember most, if not all, of the whiskies I’ve bought and tried (likely because I’m not that far into this game and thus not into thousands of whiskies to remember). I don’t go to whisky clubs and haven’t attended festivals, but I have tried multiple flights of an evening and those whiskies are a bit harder to separate out, but the evening surrounding those drams is the memory instead. With the bottles I’ve bought and the whiskies I’ve sat down to enjoy, I can remember the period of time around them.
Through the smell and taste experience, new whiskies can unlock unrelated memories, too. The Glenfarclas that smelled like my newborn daughter’s nappies suddenly transported me back to the time when, mid-nappy change, she decided she wasn’t finished and proceeded to pepper the changing mat, table, wall and door, 6ft away from her bum cannon, with vivid orange baby plops.
The bottle of Aberlour Casg Annamh, the second or third bottle I ever bought, tasted a bit like sticky toffee pudding and I can remember sitting on the sofa and declaring to an empty room that whisky is most certainly for me (finally). With the small sample of Mortlach 16 F&F offered to me by my father in law, I sat and enjoyed in a dark room and really explored what I was smelling and tasting. That memory unlocks other memories from that time period too: sitting at the in-laws’ dinner table with four whisky bottles in front of me and trying each one in sequence (a Chieftains Bunnahabain 10, an Adelphi Bunnahabhain 21 that I subsequently rinsed this year on holiday in Strontian, a Blair Athol 12 Flora & Fauna , and a Glemorangie Lasanta).
For me, whisky stabs its spiked talons into my memory banks and affords me these anchors to recall at a future date. That’s a really potent tool to have. For my birthday this year, I received another anchor to add to the collection, and it’s a memorable one not just because of the whisky but because of the way this whisky is presented to us. It’s safe to say that somewhere along the line, from concept to production, decisions were made that didn’t necessarily take into consideration the end-user experience and the usual dimensions of a modern house…
Review
Spey Fumare Cask Strength, 57.5% ABV
£60 Batch 3 still available, Batch 4 released.
The metal capped cardboard tube extends far above the paper gift bag and causes a difficult transition from gifter to receiver, but we manage and I plonk it down on the table. Whatever is in here is either resting upon something at the bottom of the bag, or this is one remarkably tall bottle. I need to wait a few days until my birthday to find out what it is, but soon enough two days pass in a blink of an eye and I can reveal it to be a bottle of Spey Fumare. I’ve seen the brand of SPEY whisky in the wild, momentarily and without really registering what it was, so the name was not unfamiliar to me. But holy mother of good whisky, this is the tallest bottle I think I’ve ever seen. I’ve been miffed in the past at Glen Scotia, Lagavulin and Cadenheads for choosing tall bottle designs, but this one blows everything out the water.
It’s so tall, in fact, that not only does it fail to fit in the recess between my illuminated supershelves, but the bottle extends from the surface of one shelf all the way to an inch above the shelf above. It’s strikingly tall. It reminds me of those comical pepper grinders that require you to have your hands 4ft apart just to get some freshly cracked pepper on your cheesy toast. Or a table leg. Or a javelin. I guess it’s a good way to stand out from a crowd — just be head and shoulders (and waist) above everyone else.
Someone likened this whisky to a fancy olive oil bottle, and I can see why — it’s tall, yes, but it’s got an oval label and a caramac-coloured ribbon glued behind it, which extends all the way up to the stopper. It gives the impression that you are getting way more than the 70cl capacity, especially when sat alongside something like the Lochlea in its dinky, yet still 70cl, textured bottle. When placed on a table, the Fumare towers above all else around it, and is so precarious that I have to move it somewhere else, preferably beside a wall, to ease the uncontrollable anxiety of knocking it over.
I fundamentally dislike this bottle design: it’s way too tall. It doesn’t even fit inside my cupboard with its half-way split shelf, or indeed in any other cupboard other than the one under my stairs. It’s homeless, therefore, and short of using it to prop the washing line up or propel a gondola, the only thing I can do with it is let it live on the worktop, and Mrs Crystal has many things to say about that — none of them friendly.
For avoidance of doubt, Dougie does not approve of tall bottles: whisky is best presented in stubby, low-to-the-ground affairs. They should withstand the grab for the water dropper that inadvertently passes through the bottle. They should look like they’d remain upright in a Force 9 gale. Stoic. Robust. Even pouring this bottle of Spey Fumare into a glass is at odds with instinct: your hand is placed miles away from the neck of the bottle, where the whisky now speeds from, because you have to balance this glass vaulting pole at its fulcrum, otherwise leverage comes into play and it’s wrist-wobbling and spilled whisky time. It’s an exercise in arms-length precision! Absolute scenes.
Anyway, enough about the bottle design, which by the way is far too tall. How does the whisky smell and taste, and what does it all mean for the trajectory of human existence?
Nose
Peaty smoke, quite sweet. Smoked meats and cheese appear — Applewood Smoked. A robust meaty creaminess. Plasticine. A bit salty, a bit caramelly.
Palate
Crème brûlée tops, overdone and crystalised. Smoky marshmallows — perhaps a really well-roasted smores. Fireside boiled sweeties and a hint of mint.
The Dregs
It’s at once smokey and peaty — that much is obvious — and it quickly flings to the mind’s-eye Ledaig 10, or even Lagavulin 8yo, owing to the accompanying creaminess. It’s luscious and nose-filling with notes of sweet smoked meats and cheese. Think Bavarian smoked cheese or even an Applewood Smoked: big robust smoke flavours with a dense, smooth, creamy texture. Not a cheesy note though, thank goodness (see Bladnoch 11). I find a wee bit of plasticine on the nose too, which is interesting, but the overall sentiment from sniffing the Fumare is a nicely rounded sweet smoke; there’s no ashy quality here, for me.
This continues onto the palate and moves from meats and cheese towards an overdone crème brûlée. The hardened burnt sugar top cracks to reveal the silky cream underneath, the custard taking on the char of the sugary cap. It’s all smoke, sweetness and marshmallows, and superbly drinkable at the 57.5% cask strength that this Limited Edition Fumare is delivered at. Looking at what’s available from Spey, I see there’s a 46% Fumare available, launched in 2016 as the first peated malt from Spey. I also see that the cask strength version is now up to Batch 4, and that there’s loads of other Spey whisky available — a tawny port version called ‘Tenné’ is getting the side-eye from me. I decide to compare the Fumare with Ledaig 10 and see how closely it sits, and I’m shocked to find the Ledaig is a lot sharper, ashier and generally edgier than the Fumare. It’s remarkable given how creamy I took the Ledaig to be. Water dials down the Fume’s smoke and opens up the sweetness to a fairly inert evenness – I prefer its cask-strength guise more.
I’ve never really looked into Spey as a brand, but after this rather delightful experience I whip open the laptop and bash ‘SPEY’ into Google, sipping as I go. It’s now that the aristocratically tall bottled jigsaw falls into place: this is a brand borne of royal connections, of Lords and Kings. The Spey whisky brand was founded in 1770 by the Harvey family in Glasgow, where the Dundas and Yorker distilleries were opened. It is said, on their website, that to celebrate his marriage to Lady Annabella Milbank, Lord Byron gifted a cask of whisky to King George III – a cask of Spey whisky.
Over one hundred years later, in 1881, the Harvey family opened a new distillery located on the isle of Islay, off the west coast of Scotland; a little-known brand called Bruichladdich. The turn of the century found the world at war and the now-struggling Harveys sold all of their distillery interests, with the family turning to sourcing, blending, bottling and exporting whisky using their ‘Harvey’s Codex’ instead — a recipe and general operating manual for their Spey whisky. This move, helped by Prohibition and the selling of their whisky to the law-breaking circuit of speakeasies and gangsters and the criminal underground abroad in the US, saw the Harvey family grow in status, stature and wealth. Secretive clubs for the rich and fortunate were established and Spey whisky is purported to be the oil which lubricated the machinations in those halcyon days of excess, enjoyment and care-free attitudes otherwise known as the Roaring 20s.
It was the grandson of Alex Harvey who decided to reignite the family ties in whisky when, in the 1980s, John Harvey McDonough Junior moved to Taiwan and launched the Spey Whisky brand. I’m not too sure the source of that whisky, but I assume it was whisky produced at the Speyside Distillery based in Kingussie — the most westerly Speyside distillery.
This arrangement of bottling whisky from Speyside under the brand name ‘Spey’ continued until 2012 when, according to the Malt Whisky Yearbook 2022, the Harvey family purchased the rights to distill Spey whisky at the Speyside Distillery under their own guidance. However, it seems they currently only rent the site and the building. The actual owners of the place, Glasgow Whisky, have given them until 2025 to sort themselves out with new premises, which, again according to the whisky bible, will be slightly north of the current location. There’s no mention of all this on the Spey website, which only says that they bought the Speyside Distillery Company Ltd and secured the future production of Spey whisky.
This is an interesting malt, with a delicious smoky sweetness that disguises its bottled strength really well and delivers an enjoyable, charred sugary cream pudding-like experience. It’s not going to challenge you in the ways that a Uigeadail or Port Charlotte, or perhaps a Caol Ila, might — even the Wee Beastie brings more through its visceral tongue-ripping qualities — but in summarising what Fumare is, I don’t think it’s about any of that sort of nonsense. This is a bottle of whisky that excites enough, but doesn’t take you to the ragged edge. It awakens the senses and gets the motor ticking, but to a pleasant temperate speed — a musical thrum befitting a leisurely jaunt along a hedge-lined B-road, with a delicate wind ruffling your perfectly over-combed hair. An ASBO whisky this certainly is not, and it fits perfectly into the bottle design, the backstory and the language used to promote Spey whisky to us plebs: this is stuff of royal historical importance. What’s more, if you are deemed a Spey ‘special guest’, you are offered exclusive access to royal palaces like Kensington and Hampton Court, can enjoy private dining and, the bit I’m most interested in, private viewings of the crown jewels.
As for that dastardly bottle design… Watching the promo video on Spey’s website featuring the gargantuan white-washed mansion of John Harvey Sr, complete with a swirling vortex of a glass-clad water feature in his matured gardens, I can only assume that the ceilings are far taller in that place than in most of the barely legal new-build constructions cluttering the landscape the length of this fractious country. Folk like John are sure to have the head-room in their cupboards in which to fit such a precarious, dare I say pretentious, French baguette of a bottle.
But above all of this sits a new heavy-cast anchor of whisky, secured in its place amongst the tangled, misfiring network of my memory. The Spey Fumare will be remembered — mostly because of how jealous I am of John’s impressive water feature.
Score: 6/10
