Home soleras

Experiments with blending whisky, cognac and.. errr... chorizo fat. Plus events in London and Kent

Before we get into today’s post, I’m going to plug some events I have coming up. 

First on Saturday 8 June, there’s a Wine Garden of England event at Chilham Castle with all the top Kentish wine producers. I’ll be doing a special talk and wine tasting at 2pm which you have to pay for on top of the ticket price. 

Then on Thursday 12 June from 6:30pm, I’ll be at my local wine merchant Vino in Faversham talking about the book and tasting some wine. There may still be some space left if you ask Fabio nicely.

Finally, it’s not confirmed yet but it looks very likely I’ll be in London, well Balham, Wednesday 10 July at Backstory from 7:30pm. There will be wine. 

Right let’s get on with today’s post. Booze purists avert your eyes now!

I get sent a lot of miniature samples of whisky and other spirits for my main job working for Master of Malt. But what to do with all those miniatures once I've tasted them and logged them on my tasting database (I really do have a tasting database)? Well I could just drink them but that means I’d end up drinking far more than I already do, which is probably too much anyway. So instead, Scotch purists look away now, I put them in my house blend. 

It started about ten years as a bottle of Black Grouse with some Cutty Sark mixed in but I then began adding miniatures often of quite swanky whisky until it resembled a home-grown version of Johnnie Walker Blue Label. At the time I thought I was the only heretic but I had lunch with a well-known whisky writer, let’s call him Ian, and he confided that he has three glass demijohns in his cellar, one for whisky samples, one for very peaty whiskey samples so as not to upset the house blend and one for gin. 

He’s not the only one, in the business such concoctions are known as ‘infinity bottles’ because they never run out. They’re rather like the old Sicilian speciality that evolved into Marsala - vino perpetuo - a cask of wine that is topped up every year with the latest vintage. I refer to my various concoctions as soleras but this isn’t really the right word as the aim for a solera is for a consistent liquid to emerge at the end of it whereas mine fluctuate the whole time.

The mother of all whisky blends

From that first tentative experiment, I now have eight house blends: unpeated or lightly peated Scotch whisky goes into a six litre glass demi-john, and then there’s a bottle for heavily peated Scotch, one for Irish, one for rye, bourbon, Canadian and similar. Then there’s three rum ones: a white rum blend, a Spanish-style rum blend containing rums from Cuba and Venezuela etc and one from former British colonies like Jamaica and Barbados. Finally, there’s a brandy one made up largely of Cognac. I keep these topped up with miniatures or full bottles that only have a glass or two at the bottom.

I used to have a gin one but I found it didn’t really work, in some cases it just didn’t taste very nice and so with gin miniatures I tend to just drink them in a cocktail. Another failure was my sherry solera. It was ticking along nicely with a sweet cream base enlivened by various olorosos but then I made the mistake of adding some fino to it. Disaster! After that it was only good for cooking with.

Looking back, I’ve always had a strange passion for blending things. When I used to smoke roll-up cigarettes, I’d always keep a little bit at the end of my tobacco pouch and add it to the new one. These days because I love coffee but don’t want too much caffeine I’ve created a blend of half Lavazza full  strength and half Lavazza decaf. Sitting in the fridge, there’s little dishes of pork, beef and chorizo fat which I top up occasionally. Best of all, is my infinite gravy. I keep a tiny bit back of last week’s roast gravy and add it to this Sunday’s one. I have found that pork, beef and chicken all meld seamlessly together - whereas lamb must be kept separate. Nobody wants sheepy gravy on their roast beef!

Sometimes I worry that my obsession with blending things is getting out of control. Often when I’m a bit tipsy I’ll experiment with adding a dash of red wine to rose, for example, to turn a pale Provencal wine into the kind of gutsy rosados I enjoyed in my youth. It doesn’t always work. Sometimes you get a kind of lamb vs beef type clash. To help your own journey into blending, I have come up with some rules: