Few distilleries or malt masters could credibly produce such a selection. The Balvenie is one of few distilleries to maintain its processes largely unchanged since it first eked out some distillate in spring 1893. The Balvenie still grows its own barley—even in October, a field has yet to be harvested—and it’s one of barely half a dozen in the industry that employs the floor-malting process (a hands-on drying process to ready barley for fermentation), rather than simply buying ready, prepped barley from commercial malters.
The Balvenie is an outlier in other ways, too: It has a full-time coppersmith to mend and tend the stills (Dennis McBain, who started here as an apprentice in 1959) and an onsite, wholly owned cooperage, at which pallets of barrels await inspection by the workshop’s head. (Stewart says head cooper Ian McDonald has been working onsite for less than 46 years, making McDonald a comparative whippersnapper.)
The most compelling ingredient in the DCS, though, is Stewart himself, at least according to Becky Paskin, who edits ScotchWhisky.com, an industry site.
“[Stewart] has dedicated his life to making whisky with this one company,” she raves, citing him as one of the industry’s landmark innovators. It was Stewart, Paskin explains, who first marketed a cask-finished single malt in the early 1990s, the Double Wood brand; it has become an industry-wide expression and one of the Balvenie’s own top-sellers. (When pressed, Stewart admits to some pride over the idea: “Now, that’s what I’m proudest of at Balvenie, the idea I had of transferring whisky from American to European oak to see what would happen.”)More Than Marketing
Other companies have tried super-premium launches, too. Two years ago, Dalmore’s master distiller, Richard Paterson, created a one-off, dozen-bottle collection in partnership with London’s Harrods. It included a 1926 vintage dedicated to Dalmore founder, Alexander Matheson, with a price tag of £987,500 ($1.5 million). Likewise, Gordon & MacPhail just began offering a limited-edition of 100 teardrop-shaped decanters filled with a 75-year-old Mortlach, plus a book co-written by No.1 Ladies Detective Agencyauthor Alexander McCall Smith, for £20,000 apiece ($31,000).
Those showy launches risk being dismissed as headline- grabbing gimmickry; even whiskies begin to show their age in all the wrong ways, eventually. But Becky Paskin doesn’t discount Stewart’s $50,000 Compendium. She calls it a smart buy. The Balvenie is “the most-liked geek in the school,” the easily overlooked over-performer among the major whisky brands, she says. “And the liquid itself is spectacular—every single individual bottle has merits of its own, and the set really conveys the distillery characteristics: That fruity, green Speyside character even comes through in the 46-year-old, where the barrel would normally have taken over the flavor.”
Paskin points out that a rare bottle of whisky from the 1960s can easily fetch around £19,000 ($30,000). Since the first Compendium chapter includes a 1968 cask packaged as a collectible, with four other handpicked barrels (1978, 1985, 1997, and 2005), it’s a relative bargain.
The DCS quintet is also a smart investment, given how rapidly speculation on the water of life has increased since the first stand-alone auctions were held in Glasgow 15 years ago. A newly launched online platform, WhiskyInvestDirect, even allows collectors to trade. Thanks to its rarity and romantic provenance as Stewart’s final collection, the DCS Compendium is likely to quickly skyrocket in value among whisky traders.
Much of that value derives from the self-effacing Stewart. He says that working for five decades on whisky has taught him a major lesson: “Patience. I can’t honestly say I’m a very patient person in other things, but you can’t rush a whisky experiment.”
The DCS Compendium will be available later this month via select wine and liquor outlets across the country. Six sets have been allocated for sale stateside, priced at $50,000. Limited numbers of individual bottles will also be available.