The old adage holds that good things come in threes, but in the world of single malt whisky, two seems to be the magic number. Single malts are made of two main ingredients, water and malted barley, with yeast added as a catalyst. Most single malts are “double-matured” – allowed to absorb the character of oak casks for a few years, before being “finished” in sherry or wine casks for extra flavour. And these days, “whisky pairing”, the art of matching malts with complementary dishes, rather than just drinking it after dinner, is becoming increasingly common.
In the case of Tamnavulin – a single malt popular for pairing, because of its full-bodied, double-matured flavour – the rule of twos even extends to the brand’s history, which reads like a tale of two halves. What is now the Tamnavulin distillery first operated between 1966 and 1995, before shutting and then re-opening in 2007 under new ownership. But if you listen to Leon Webb, Tamnavulin’s distillery manager, he’ll tell you the real rupture came three years later.
“In 2010, there was a crazy winter and the roof collapsed,” says Leon. Temperatures across the UK that December were the coldest since 1890. Scotland’s coldest-ever temperature, -21.3C, was recorded in the Highlands. “We’re about 865 feet above sea level here, so it gets really cold,” says Leon. “That winter, there was about a metre and a half of ice and snow on the roof, and they just couldn’t get it off.”
Initially the collapse seemed like a catastrophe. But the incident had a surprisingly positive outcome. “When the roof collapsed, they had to change the stills,” says Andrew Lennie, whisky expert and brand ambassador for Tamnavulin. “That would normally be a strange thing for a distillery to do because that would change the character of the spirit. But by making the stills slightly shorter and wider, they were able to change the texture of the spirit, and add a little bit more body to it.”
Because the new spirit is fuller-bodied (meaning it has more complex flavour profiles) it responds particularly well to being finished in sherry or wine casks, according to Andrew. What he calls “these big, robust wine styles, packed with flavour”, have subsequently become Tamnavulin’s signature. And while the spirit created in the shorter stills was different, the makers still managed “to maintain the fruitiness – that kind of orchard fruit character that Tamnavulin is also famous for”, says Andrew.
It feels somehow appropriate that it was nature – in the form of a record-breaking storm – that intervened to change the shape of the stills, because the environment around the distillery has always played a huge part in making Tamnavulin taste the way it does. “A lot of other distilleries might bring up malt from East Anglia, Northumberland, or even from abroad,” says Leon. “But we only use Scottish malt from Aberdeenshire and Inverness-shire.” If locally grown grain helps give the whisky a particular character, the quality of the water is arguably even more important. The distillery sits just inside the northern border of the wild Cairngorms national park. It’s one of the least populated – and least polluted – places in the UK.
“It’s actually a phenomenal spot for stargazing, because there’s zero light pollution,” says Leon. “We’re officially a Dark Sky Park, and my wife is a star ranger – she takes people out to look at the stars for her job”. The Scottish spring water found in the national park is notable for its purity. “Our water comes from up the hill here, a couple of kilometres away,” says Leon. “You can see it bubbling out of the ground and it gets piped down to the distillery.”
The whiskies that Leon and his team distil from these elements absorb the flavours of the area, according to Andrew. “It has those classic Speyside characteristics,” he says. “So it’s sweet, it’s fruity, it’s not smoky at all – it’s actually quite reminiscent of the way that the landscape looks around the distillery.”
The taste of Tamnavulin might act as a Proustian madeleine to Andrew, and anyone else who knows this corner of the country well, but it’s also proved popular among those who don’t – Tamnavulin is not only the bestselling single malt in Scotland, it’s the second bestselling across the UK.*
In part, Andrew believes, this is because “by celebrating flavour first, we remove some of the stuffiness around whisky.” Tamnavulin, he’s noted in his role as a brand ambassador, “brings together huge whisky enthusiasts and people who have never drunk whisky in their life, and that’s quite unique”.
“We call it ‘the drinkers’ dram’,” adds Leon. “We find that people who buy Tamnavulin keep coming back for more.” Yet although it’s enjoyed everywhere, you couldn’t make Tamnavulin anywhere else.
The village of Tomnavoulin, with the distillery at its heart, is home to only 40 inhabitants, says Leon. There’s a post office, but no supermarket. Groceries are sold by a blue bus that stops in the village every second Tuesday. Local farmers stop by the distillery to collect “draff” (the byproduct of the mashing process) to feed their cows. “If you were to come up here and spend the day with the guys, you’d realise how unpretentious it all is,” says Leon.
“The distillery team are all pretty local – I’d say the furthest away is probably 45 minutes,” he says. This creates a real sense of family around the whisky-making process. “We had two shift partners that were father and son at one point.”
Even when people retire, they tend to stick around, says Leon. “There’s a real character called Beal, who used to work at Tamnavulin. He’s about 80 now, with this big toothless grin, and he’s never left the village his whole life. I think the furthest he’s been is about 10 miles, but he always seems content. It makes you think, there’s so much pressure in this world to go do this, be that, travel there, do all this stuff – maybe he’s got it right?”
It certainly sounds like there are worse places to grow old than in Tomnavoulin – and it’s this warmth, as much as the environment around the distillery, that you can taste in every dram of Tamnavulin.
Nature and community. Oak and sherry. Local grain, and pure Scottish water. Many of the elements that give Tamnavulin its unique flavours seem to come in twos. But it takes all of them – in exactly the right proportions – to elevate this spirit into something special.
Discover the whisky with double the flavour at tamnavulinwhisky.com
*Source ©2023 NielsenIQ data, Malt Whisky (client defined), Volume (70cl) Sales, 52 w/e 15/07/2023 (GB Total Coverage)
