RESEARCH AND WOOD MANAGEMENT
Experimentation
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Glenmorangie has always been matured in American oak hogsheads; these are made by enlarging a used bourbon barrel with more staves to make it hold 250 litres. In the early days, in common with everyone else in the industry, little real control was exercised over the maturation policy.
In the late 1980's this changed at Glenmorangie, and by early 1991 a comprehensive study of maturation strategy was started - Glenmorangie was the first company to undertake this type of research in such depth and the scheme was awarded UK Government support. Since 1991 more than 8,000 casks at Genmorangie distillery have been analysed to measure a series of key flavour compounds. A list of the flavour compounds has been compiled and the characteristics of all the warehouses and how each contributes to the final flavour has been established (and they are all different). Most distillers buy used bourbon barrels to mature Scotch, but these have too limited a life to produce ideal Glenmorangie nowadays. For its delicate yet complex character it relies to a great extent on the use of refill casks for some of these essential qualities. Therefore casks are manufactured as hogsheads using slow growth American white oak from the Ozarks to a strict specifation and the wood is left to season naturally. The hogsheads are used to make bourbon in unheated warehouses, then shipped to Scotland. By combining a detailed knowledge of how each warehouse behaves and exactly how much of each flavour should come from its own casks, Glenmorangie has captured the intellectual high ground of Scotch Whisky maturation. Transferring whisky matured in ex-bourbon hogsheads to other types of wood - mainly European oak from used wine barrels - the flavour spectrum can be altered to give different types of finishes. The concept reproduces the practice of the wine and spirit merchants from the last century (when Edinburgh was second only to Bristol in wine imports and one of the biggest sources of wines and spirits in the burgeoning British Empire)
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