Part 2 - Grain. The New Terroir of Whisky
|
|
Time to read 8 min
This is part two of a five-part series on the concept of "sense of place" within whisky in 2026. If you haven't already, start with the opener, and catch up on part one, smoke, before this one.
I’ll be honest, I didn't believe in the idea of ‘terroir’ when it comes to grain, where it’s grown and how it impacts that whisky’s flavour for years.
Back in 2010, while I was writing my dissertation, I sat in Jim McEwen's office at Bruichladdich and he talked to me about barley, place and Islay. The idea that where a grain grows has an impact on flavour. I nodded along but didn’t fully believe it.
The moment where the penny dropped was two years ago, on a cask-picking trip to Ireland, at Waterford Distillery. Side by side, I tasted two new-make spirits, made in exactly the same way, from exactly the same barley varietal. The only variable was the field the barley had been grown in. They were chalk and cheese from a process that was identical in every other respect.
Obviously I was very lucky with this tasting epiphany - but hopefully these grain ‘musings’ nudge your mind to thinking about grain differently too.
(Side note: Waterford's story since has been a complicated one. The distillery went into administration in late 2024, and was acquired by a new owner in 2026. I don’t know if they’re still focusing on the terroir-first, field-by-field approach. But the new-make I tasted that day convinced me grain terroir is real).
A quick word on the whisky rules
Before getting into the grain itself, worth a brief, not-too-serious detour: grain, place and whisky don't just collide through pragmatism. Sometimes they collide through law.
Bourbon has to be made in the United States - a legal choice as well as a stylistic one. Single Pot Still Irish whiskey has to be at least 30% malted barley and 30% unmalted barley, with up to 5% of other grains allowed if a distiller wants them. That 5% has sat mostly unused, but distilleries like Boann and Blackwater are now actively highlighting, bringing back oats, wheat and rye that hadn't featured in a pot still mashbill in fifty years or more.
You have whisky made from Rye in Scotland too, at Inchdairnie and Bruichladdich (The Regeneration Project) among others, but by Scotch Whisky Association rules it has to be labelled single grain, not a rye whisky.
Sometimes grain has to answer to the law, as well as the landscape.
first up, barley.
More alcohol per tonne, better disease resistance, easier to grow at scale. This is what modern distilling barley is bred for. Yield. Alongside flavour. Goalposts needed if you're optimising output. But some newer distilleries are trading yield for flavour as their primary driver. And you can taste the results.
Golden Promise is an old barley variety, mostly abandoned by modern distilling because it yields around 30% less per acre than newer strains and is considerably more vulnerable to disease. But Ardnamurchan has dedicated two months of whisky production each year to it since 2018 (they distil with Laureate the rest of the year). It’s oily, it’s textural, and it gives the whisky the most incredible backbone.
A decision made solely for flavour. For quality. Not quantity.
It's also not a coincidence that a growing wave of American single malt distilleries have set up specifically in the Pacific Northwest. It's the country's barley belt. Westland, Westward…all looking at what’s in their backyard rather than falling for the US default of what others are making.
Barley itself isn't uniform. Amrut, in Bangalore, uses six-row barley grown in the foothills of the Himalayas - India's breadbasket, with a temperate climate and really fertile soils. These are smaller grains than Scotland's standard two-row. And in the whisky in the glass, that translates to a richer mouthfeel and a super creamy texture. The grain travels roughly 2,500km from Punjab and Rajasthan to reach the distillery. The miles sound like a lot, but they’re less than the journey from Scotland, that’s for sure.
Corn beyond bourbon
Abasolo Distillery is in Jilotepec, a town in the State of Mexico known as corn's birthplace. So when its whisky loving founders started a ‘why not / what if’ discussion, of course they looked to what was growing around them.
(pictured: Abasolo Distillery. The design, by architect Lorenzo Álvarez, was inspired by traditional Mexican corn storage structures called sincolotes.)
Rather than a standard corn variety, Abasolo uses Cacahuazintle, a non-GMO heirloom corn cultivated by local farmers for more than two hundred generations.
And instead of being traditionally ‘malted’, it’s nixtamalized - a roughly 4,000-year-old Mesoamerican process of soaking and cooking corn in an alkaline solution, traditionally used to make masa for tortillas, never before applied to whisky. As co-founder Iván Saldaña Oyarzábal puts it:
"In Mexico, corn is not just an ingredient for us — it is the original language of this land. The cacahuazintle ancestral grain that we use has grown in the volcanic valleys of Estado de México for thousands of years, shaped by altitude, soil, and a people who understood its potential long before whisky ever existed. When you nixtamalize that grain, the way Mexican cooks have done for millennia, you unlock something that no other whisky in the world carries: the actual taste of a place, a culture, and a living heritage. That is what terroir means to Abasolo."
The end result? Phenomenal. Roasted corn, honey, vanilla and leather in a glass. Recognisably corn, recognisably NOT bourbon.
(note: it’s also made at altitude, and matured in some serious heat - which, of course, is another link to sense of place)
The Ry(s)e of Rye
Usually, when we think rye whiskey, we think of the US. I love American rye. But for this bit, let's turn our heads to Europe.
Most German whisky is barley-based, the same Scotch whisky-shaped template many distilleries default to. Stork Club, distilled just south of Berlin, chose the opposite: 100% rye. When they started, they were one of only six or seven distilleries in the whole of Europe building whisky around rye as the main event.
"Although barley is very common to be grown in Germany there are a couple of regions in the north-east where rye is the dominant grain…Especially Brandenburg, one of the biggest growing regions for rye where our distillery is surrounded by rye fields. For us it was common sense to turn Stork Club into a rye whiskey distillery for three reasons: it is THE grain of the region; rye resembles the people out here - hard shell, but with a soft core; and it offers a different playing field, combining grain heritage with a more creative style of whiskey in comparison to single malt."
Finland's Kyrö is the same sort of narrative. The ‘why not/what if’ story that I love. The founders were drinking a bottle of American rye in a sauna and started discussing: if rye is Finland's main grain and rye bread is the national dish, why was nobody making rye whisky there? The idea still seemed good the next morning, which is more than most sauna ideas can say for themselves.
(sorry about the picture - i just couldn't mention Kyrö without posting a pic of the founders running through a rye field...naked. Which, for them, is a regular occurrence)
England's rye revival (rye-vival?!)
This happened almost by accident. Archaeobotanist John Letts spent years studying old thatched roofs and discovered around 200 preserved samples of medieval wheat and rye sitting undisturbed in the base layer - the one part of a thatched roof never removed or replaced. Letts worked with The Oxford Artisan Distillery, now known as Fielden, to revive those heritage grains for whisky production. Not spicy like a typical rye, but more floral, cereal, sweet whisky.
We were lucky enough to bottle a cask alongside them, #16 Fielden, finished in an ex-solera sherry cask - 100% rye, 75% landrace grown in Oxford's own chalky soils, 25% floor-malted at Warminster, England's oldest maltings.
One more thing worth knowing, without going too much into it: European rye producers currently can't legally call their rye whisky "rye whisky" in the EU at all, due to an old trade agreement. If you want the full story, Heather Storgaard wrote it up wonderfully for Whisky Advocate.
Wheat, out from the shadows
Wheat is usually used in a whisky mashbill to soften; the rounder counterpart to rye's spice in a wheated bourbon. But right now the US, wheat isn’t just in the spotlight for wheated bourbons, but also for wheat whiskey.
Maker's Mark has used soft red winter wheat in their Bourbon since 1953, a quite unusual choice when rye was the standard secondary grain almost everywhere else.
And, progressing from that, in 2025 Maker's Mark addressed the question: what happens if wheat stops supporting the mash bill and becomes the mash bill?
" Star Hill Farm Whisky grew from wanting to understand that relationship with wheat even further: what happens when we really explore the grain itself, the land it comes from and the way it's grown? Through different wheat varieties and regenerative farming practices, we're able to look at the relationship between healthy soil, grain and flavour, and ultimately explore what our particular piece of Kentucky can bring to the whisky while protecting that land for generations to come."
What holds all of this together
Through this, we’ve seen people choosing to work with what their landscape gives them. Not replicating Scotch, or Bourbon, or trying to out Scotch-Scotch or out Bourbon-Bourbon. But making a whisky that makes sense to where they’re from.
The same golden thread as smoke, just running through a different part of the process.
Next in the sense of place series: casks; specifically, the growing use of fresh, local wine casks and spirit casks in whisky maturation, and what happens when a distillery is built in a wine-making culture.
Part three - on cask - will be linked here once it's live.
Got a whisky question for Georgie? Email georgie@theheartcut.com
Georgie Bell
Co-Founder of The Heart Cut // Keeper of the Quaich // Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Distillers // Icons of Whisky ‘Whisky Ambassador of the Year’ 2020
