Gavin Lucas

The WATERFORD REVOLUTION

Independent Irish distillery Waterford is shaking up the single malt whisky category with its single-farm origin releases. Its founder, Mark Reynier, speaks to FONDATA’s Gavin Lucas about his obsession with terroir, traceability and transparency – and how his radical approach is driving unprecedented scientific research into the flavours derived from barley grown on different soil types

The English language is a wonderful and quirky thing. Among its many idiosyncrasies is a multitude of homonyms: words with more than one meaning. Take ‘revolution’, for example. On the one hand, it conjures images of stencilled portraits of Che Guevara, guillotines and Marie Antoinette. It makes one think of propaganda and persuasive communications, both graphic and oratory. After all, if you want people to join your revolution, you’ll have to get them to come around to your particular way of thinking. ‘Revolution’ also evokes thoughts of vinyl records, bicycle wheels, watch movements, history repeating itself—and planets revolving on their axes and around the sun. Revolution, quite literally, makes the world go round.

When considering the drinks industry’s revolutionaries, the mavericks that have made an impact by thinking differently, it could be argued that many—such as Jules Chauvet, Antonio Mastroberardino, Enzo Pontoni, Pepe Raventós—didn’t look to reinvent the wheel but rather to uninvent it. Or at least refer to an earlier blueprint, looking to the past to help inform their visions for the future. It takes courage and conviction to reject the norm and forge your own path but, after the post-war era of agrochemical-fuelled homogenisation in European wine (primarily driven by disillusionment, a rise in socialist ideas, and misinformation)—a reversion to abandoned methodologies more in tune with Mother Earth, and a move away from global homogeneity in favour of the local and indigenous seems, in retrospect, almost inevitable. After a period of darkness comes enlightenment. And when the wheel does come full circle, it invariably feels revolutionary. It also feels new. Like a reawakening, a rebirth, a renaissance, if you will.

These circular patterns can be found in almost every industry and sector, wherever you care to look. A young adult might have felt embarrassed to tell their friends they’re a sign-painter, a cabinet-maker or a ceramicist just ten years ago. But now craft, tradition, and making things by hand are in vogue, and these treasurers of traditional techniques and practitioners of ancient skills are quite rightly enjoying renewed respect. Only a few years ago, the humble hamburger ruled epicureans’ social media channels as the Western world revelled in a particularly gluttonous and meat-focused phase. Now veganism is having a well-deserved moment. The precise speed at which these wheels turn is slightly mysterious, but turn they most certainly do. As the world zigs, so it feels intuitive (to those with the passion and the charisma to lead rather than follow) to zag.

  Mark Reynier is a man who understands these things better than most. He is the driving force behind independent Irish distillery Waterford, which is taking a radical approach to single malt whisky production. Last summer, it released its first editions (to no small amount of press fanfare), which were all single-farm origin, ‘barley-forward’ expressions created under the distillery’s guiding principles—Terroir, Traceability, Transparency—words that appear embossed around the base of each striking, cobalt blue bottle.

  Over the last 20 years, Reynier has spent a lot of time thinking about how the drinks industry misappropriates words such as ‘provenance’. “The problem,” he says, “is that it’s easy for anybody to say these words without actually doing anything, so they become glib buzzwords that sound impressive but don’t, in the end, mean anything. It struck me that if we’re going to talk about terroir, we’ve got to be able to prove that it exists. We’ve got to be able to demonstrate it. So we set up Waterford with that in mind, and we have an unprecedented traceability system.”

  He’s not kidding. Each of Waterford’s releases comes with a ‘téireoir’ code (yes, Waterford has combined the Gaelic word for Ireland, Éire, with the French word terroir) that allows drinkers to access a wealth of information about the contents of the bottle. Type in the code printed on the bright blue box of one of Waterford’s first releases—Ballymorgan 1.1, for example—and you soon find out that it was made with Overture barley grown ‘in the rain shadow of the Wicklow Mountains where the Slaney river winds its way southwards through County Wexford. Here Robert Milne exploits one of Ireland’s premier barley terroirs. Farming now with his son and nephew, five generations of his family have farmed these fertile fields with their loamy, clay soils derived from slate and granite, and where the famous Clonroche Series of soils dominates.’

  Keep scrolling, and you can look up the elevation of the farm (280-295 feet), the date the barley was sown (7th April 2015), the date it was harvested (13th September 2015), the date the grain went to maltings (5th May 2016) and note the day it arrived at the distillery. On the production side, you see what yeast was used to ferment (Mauri Distiller’s Yeast), the length of fermentation (136 hours), how long distillation took (three days), when the casks were filled (13th June, 2016), what the make-up of casks was (37% first fill US, 18% Virgin US, 27% premium French and 18% Vin Doux Naturel), the date all the casks were married (6th May 2020), and when it was sent for bottling (8th July 2020).

  You can also read the Head Distiller’s observations and notes regarding appearance, nose, taste and finish. To do so while nosing and sipping the whisky is a bit like poring over the sleeve notes of a special edition LP release as the disc spins on the turntable. You can even look up the names of all the players (shout out to distillers James Ellickson, Ian O’Brien, Padraic Power, Cian Dirrane), and soak up the nerdiest contextual information imaginable. It is all there, collected from thousands of data points that document every step of the journey from seed to bottle. The whisky is pure and unadulterated—and the almost ridiculous amount of information about all facets of its production, undoubtedly represents the most comprehensive commitment to transparency ever seen in the drinks industry, ancient or modern.

  But why is Reynier so obsessed with terroir and traceability? Why—if he’s distilling in Ireland—does Waterford profess to make whisky without the ‘e’ normally associated with Irish whiskey? And why is Waterford bottled in cobalt blue bottles? To better understand Reynier’s vision for a new era of ‘terroir-driven’ single malt whisky, we need to trace the trajectory of his story back to the beginning.

A life in wine

  Born into the wine trade (his parents—and grandfather before them—had imported wine from France to the UK), Reynier set up his own wine company in the early 1980s and bore witness to what he describes as “an incredible renaissance period” in French wine in the 1980s and ’90s. During this period, the centuries of knowledge abandoned during the post-World War agrochemical, wine co-operative age was rediscovered by a new generation of vignerons devoted to reclaiming their winemaking heritage and rebuilding the reputation of their families’ domaines. They returned to traditional methods while simultaneously looking to California and Australia’s more progressive wine industries to embrace new thinking. Some adopted Steiner’s principles of biodynamics which, it could be argued, essentially repackaged thousands of years of farming know-how with a sexy new title (how revolutionary). Above all, this empowered generation of French winemakers allowed the rootstock of their vines to dig deep to find moisture and nutrients in the ground—rather than rely on chemical feeds on the surface. Reynier could see (and taste) how this renewed commitment to ‘terroir’ resulted in wines that exhibited distinctive flavour traits that corresponded to the place and the conditions in which the grapes were grown.

  And when it comes to appraising and appreciating the nuances of flavour that terroir imparts, Reynier’s training began at an early age. “At Sunday lunch, we were never allowed to start eating until we, the children, had guessed what the wine was in the decanter,” he recalls of his upbringing. “That was a discipline I’ve known all my life, and it was a fantastic way to make you sit up and think about what you’re drinking, to develop the ability to taste. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, this is a Mouton Rothschild 1945.’ it was always a sort of 20 questions process of elimination to get to the actual vineyard and the winery and the year. Of course, what you learn about tasting as you develop your palate is that it’s not about wham bam; it’s about harmony and balance. Wine is like a triangle: it’s fruit, acidity and tannin. It’s an equilibrium between those, and if you have too much acidity or too much fruit, well, they’re out of balance. With a really great wine, you almost don’t notice any of those three elements because they’re all in such perfect harmony.”

The cat getting out of the bag

In 1985, very soon after Mark launched his own wine business, he had a chance encounter that introduced him to the potential of single malt whisky. “I’d never really drunk whisky at all, but I accepted to nose some barrel samples of Islay whisky with a chap I’d just won a bottle of whisky from in a charity Tombola,” says Reynier. “One of them was astonishing. It had that triangular harmony and I just thought, ‘My word!’ I had no idea this principle could or would apply to a spirit.” That particular sample was made by the Bruichladdich distillery on Islay, and it prompted Mark to consider the whisky business—where it had been, where it was now, and where things might be heading.

  “At that time, no one was really drinking single malt whisky [outside Scotland]. Single malts were being suppressed by the emerging big companies like Diageo and Pernod Ricard because they wanted everyone to drink blended whisky, which, by default, could be made in unlimited volumes. Single malt is merely, as far as those companies were concerned, a component of a blended whisky.”

  What Reynier had accidentally become aware of, was what he now refers to as ‘the cat getting out of the bag’—a period in the early 1980s when the big distilleries responded to a global recession by realigning their portfolios. Huge amounts of single malt whisky made in the 1950s and ’60s – and even earlier – were liberated for next to nothing from the inventories of the big distilling companies, and a lot of this ‘surplus’ whisky was from the smaller distilleries that had been bought up and shut down in the ’70s.

  “That was the nemesis in my view,” says Reynier. “That was when distilling changed and became a different, a more efficient industry which resulted in consolidation of distilleries, shutting down of outlier distilleries, increasing both capacity and industrial production methods. It was also a period where there was a lot of recycling of barrels (because it saved a lot of money), and the invention of additives like Paxarette and E150 that covered up a multitude of production sins.” While the big drinks companies were zigging in one direction, the barrels of maturing whiskies they were offloading (without, apparently, any thought as to their marketability or quality) were about to spark a serious zag.

  “It was a halcyon period,” recalls Reynier. “We, and other independent bottlers, would receive a list of what one of these companies was offloading, and yes, you’d have to buy the whole parcel, which was like a hundred barrels, but you’d take out the ones you wanted and then sell on the rest. And you bottled them naturally under your own label, naming the distillery it was distilled at—and an underground movement was created by people prepared to explore these whiskies that nobody even knew existed.”

  Reynier understood two things quite quickly: there was a market for these single malts, and that the supply of barrels from the ‘age of innocence’ would soon dry up. “I started thinking ‘I’m sure I can do better than what the big industry is doing. I want a go’.” In 2000, he finally managed to buy the then defunct Bruichladdich distillery with a group of investors with the express intention of using the very best Scottish barley to make unadulterated single malts of exceptional purity. “It’s not rocket science,” says Reynier of his approach. “There’s only three ingredients in whisky, and one of them is water. It’s barley and yeast, yet, for some reason, people will tell you that whisky’s flavour comes from the wood it’s matured in. Well, if that was the case we wouldn’t bother with barley, we’d use industrial alcohol.”

  Reynier’s ‘barley-forward’ approach did indeed restore the reputation and the fortunes of Bruichladdich: the distillery was bought by Rémy Cointreau in 2012 for £58m. But Reynier felt he could take his ideas and learnings a step further. When the opportunity arose, just three years later, to buy a state-of-the-art brewery built in 2004 by Diageo for Guinness on the south bank of the River Suir in Waterford, Ireland, Reynier snapped it up. He’d long known that Ireland produced excellent barley, and he now had over a decade of experience driving quality at Bruichladdich. He created a long-term plan for his new Waterford distillery that would not only produce remarkable whisky, but would also go further than anyone had previously thought to go to prove that terroir is a real phenomenon crucial to a number of key flavour components in distilled malt whisky.

The Whisky Terroir Project

Waterford currently works with 97 farms all over Ireland (some of them organic and biodynamically run), growing barley on 19 distinct soil types. With a pioneering digital logistical system keeping track, each farmer’s crop is harvested, stored, malted and distilled separately. The harvests of 40 farms are distilled each year to hit Waterford’s annual target of 1,000,000 litres.

  This might sound a bit like a crazy science experiment—and to a certain extent, it is. From the outset of the project, Reynier set up an academic research study, The Whisky Terroir Project, to rigorously investigate the effects of farm environment on the flavour of barley-derived new make spirit (whisky post-distillation and prior to cask maturation). “We set it up as a joint venture with Cork University, the Ministry of Agriculture in Ireland (Teagasc), Scotland’s leading independent whisky analysts (Tatlock & Thomson), our maltsters (Minch Malt), and it is led by Dr Dustin Herb of Oregon State University. Dustin had already done a project on barley with a view to finding out which flavours were interesting and which weren’t,” explains Reynier.

  After three years of laboratory-controlled testing, tasting and analysis using the Gas Chromatography Olfactometry method, The Whisky Terroir Project published its first peer-reviewed paper earlier this year. Its findings strongly suggest that the environment and soil type where barley is grown does affect the flavour profile of the corresponding new make whisky. The paper is fascinating, not least because it identifies, for the first time, which chemical compounds responsible for specific flavours are terroir-responsive. Among those identified as being positively impacted by season, environment or both are β-Damascenone—a ketone that effuses floral aromas and, more specifically of honey, tea or plum; (E)-2-nonenal—an aldehyde which has a fried, toasted or fatty smell; 1-Octen-3-one—a ketone that delivers earthy tones of metal, mineral and mushroom; and ethyl hexanoate—an ester which evokes the scent of pears. 

  What was also interesting, but not surprising, to Reynier is that the group’s testing revealed that the difference in terroir had considerably more effect on whisky flavour than the difference in the type of barley used. “The Scotch Whisky Research Institute, which is the home of all research into barley, had never [in its history] been asked to look at flavour,” says Reynier. “So we started examining the seed banks with our maltsters, and have started propagating heritage varieties—one from the 1960s, one from 1900, and another from the Middle Ages.”

  Given that Reynier and his team have to propagate each of these historic varieties from a starting cache of just five grams of seeds, it will take several years of growing to bulk up to the tonnes required to actually plant a few fields—but this too is part of the work being funded by Waterford in its quest for the best whisky flavour and the knowledge of how and where to find it. “We’ve had to rent land to do this, in collaboration with our maltsters,” says Reynier. “We will undoubtedly end up with interesting flavours but probably at a cost: the yields may well be appalling, both off the field and in terms of spirit per tonne. But we want to know what barley tasted like before it was cultivated for high yield and disease resistance. As we go forward, we can experiment with heritage and modern barley varieties, and perhaps we can create new varieties, propagating (for the first time for generations) specifically for flavour.”

  Nosed individually, each of Waterford’s ‘single-farm origin’ single malt releases is rich with interesting aromas. Taste them side by side and they begin to articulate the method in Reynier’s madness: they are all unique despite being made the same way. This is certainly interesting but this is just phase one. Waterford is building a library of maturing whisky organised by terroir, and in the not-too-distant future—once the distillers better understand the flavour profiles that each farm’s whisky makes—it will be better placed than any distillery before it to make the most profound single malt whisky of all time without relying on cask finishes.

  As is natural to him, Reynier looks to the wine world for the appropriate simile to describe his ambition: “The most important real estate wine labels of the world produce a Grand Vin, made up of various ‘small’ wines—different grape varieties grown around the estate on various different optimised terroirs—cultivated, harvested, vinified and barrelled separately. Then, 18 months or two years later, they are assembled to create one great wine. It’s the same with Champagne—look at Krug. They have vintage Krug, sure, but vintage Krug—as Rémi Krug will tell you—has got nothing to do with him, it’s God that decides on the quality of the wine. But with his Grande Cuvée, Rémi is God because he decides what goes into it, picking 50 or 60 different wines and assembling them to create a Grande Cuvée. The combination of several wines is even more compelling than the individuality of the contributing wines on their own. That’s what we will start to do, same principle.”

  Grande cuvée, terroir-driven, single malt—not to mention an experiment to propagate more flavourful barley—is surely something to look forward to, but not everyone in the industry is excited about Waterford’s way of doing things. Which leads back to a niggling question: why ‘whisky’ rather than ‘whiskey’? “I’m making single malt whisky, I just happen to be doing it in Ireland,” comes the blunt reply. Reynier will also tell you that the choice of blue glass bottle protects the liquid inside. And that blue is the colour of Waterford, worn by the county’s Gaelic football and hurling teams. One suspects, however, that the real reason for these bold choices is to make a point of being different, to be proactively nonconformist—and to signify that Waterford is shaking things up, pushing the envelope. In Reynier’s own words: “I’m not going to just follow everybody else. And I certainly don’t want anybody to mistake Waterford for ordinary whisky.”