The New Terroir of whisky

This is the opener to a five-part series on why whisky's sense of place is shifting beyond soil and beyond Scotch.

Each piece that follows will take one thread - smoke, grain, cask, water, climate - and explore it in a way that hopefully makes your train journey, or sipping, or wherever you're reading this, more enjoyable.

Some context. In 2010, I wrote my university dissertation on whisky and regional identity - how the whisky industry builds the image of a "projected identity of place", and sells it back to us in a glass. 

Just like when you think Champagne, you picture the Champagne region itself, or when you think Amalfi lemons, you picture that coastline. I looked at Islay, "The Golden Kingdom", and how when we think of the isle we think of whisky, tradition, heritage - a projected identity of the island. One that, when you set foot on Islay, isn't 100% correct - but whisky marketing has driven us to think that.

Sixteen years on, I wouldn't write the same dissertation, or come to the same conclusion. Not because it was wrong then, but because the landscape of whisky has changed completely since. It used to be that whisky was just drunk across all four corners of the world; it's now made across all four corners of the world. Danish, Australian, American, New Zealand whisky sit next to Scotch without anyone blinking. And once that shift happens, the old question about origin and flavour stops being academic. It becomes practical.

Terroir is a wine word first. It comes from the French terre - land, or earth - though the word translates more loosely to "sense of place". From a wine perspective, that's still fundamentally about the ground: soil, terrain, climate. The taste of the soil. The idea that a specific patch of ground - its minerals, its drainage, its microclimate - imprints itself directly onto what grows there, and eventually, what you drink.

During my research, one sentence on terroir stuck with me. It was Andrew Jefford, writing in Whisky and Philosophy (published in 2010 - worth noting the date). In his essay on whisky and origin, he writes: "if the consensus is correct, the impact of origin in the creation of malt whisky flavour is, indeed, largely chimerical." 

Chimerical. 

An adjective for something that exists only as a wild, fanciful imagination. Something I’d apply to the idea of a full night of sleep with young kids, not whisky today. 

That was a fair position to hold in 2010. I'm not sure Jefford himself would hold it as firmly looking at the landscape today (who knows, I’d love to discuss it with him over a whisky - I’m a fan!). 

New-world distilling has spent the years since making a fairly compelling case that where you make whisky shapes what it becomes, even if it doesn't do it the way wine does. Newer wave Scotland distilleries have done the same too.

I'm not combating this.

Whisky writer Dave Broom, in his book A Sense of Place, argues that this literal version of terroir doesn't map cleanly onto whisky. Yes, there's grain - but the flavour of whisky was never just raw grain in a glass. Grain is grown, then malted, then mashed, then fermented, then distilled, then aged, then blended - too many transformative steps between soil and spirit for the ground itself to speak as directly as it does in a glass of wine. Instead, Dave expands the idea into something broader: a sense of place built not just from soil chemistry, but from community, culture and human craft.

This is the lens I use to look at whisky, and one I’m using for this series. Not terroir as geology. Terroir as pragmatism - the accumulated decisions a distiller makes because of where they are. 

What grain grows nearby. What fuel is to hand for drying malt. What water runs underground. What casks are close enough to use fresh, rather than shipped halfway round the world. None of that is soil chemistry. All of it is place.

Here's the analogy I keep coming back to: whisky isn't one thing, any more than cake is one thing. You don't judge a chocolate cake against an apple tart on the same scale and call one the failure. They're not competing versions of the same food - they're different foods that happen to share a category name.

New-world whisky isn't a lesser attempt at Scotch. It's a different whisky entirely, made by people working with what their landscape actually gives them. Understanding that takes a bit of unlearning - throwing out the old-is-better, chase-the-age-statement instinct, and judging what's actually in the glass on its own terms rather than against a Scottish benchmark it was never trying to hit.

That's the whole premise of this series: five pieces, five different ways landscape shapes whisky. 

For over 16 years I've loved whisky. It's not just my passion, but my business. 

I spent 8 years as a Global Whisky Ambassador, travelling for 8 months of each of those years world over talking about whisky - getting not just my 10,000 hours, but my 20,000 hours in. I visited distilleries as others would museums. I also have a second degree in distilling - bio chemistry and chemical engineering. Told you I was in deep! 

In 2023 my husband - Fab - and I founded The Heart Cut to shine a spotlight on these newer producers across the world through single cask and small batch bottlings. To turn the concept of Independent Bottlings on its head, and create one that's not just for today's drinker, but reflective of today's whisky landscape. And in the last three years we've won Independent Bottler of the year - globally - three years in a row. 

To date we've bottled 24 single casks, from 19 distilleries across 11 countries (I've highlighted 4 of my favourite below, simply for the boldness and flavour-boundary-pushingness of them). 

These musings all come back my love of whisky - my fasciantion with learning as much as I can about it from an academic perspective - and then sharing it in a way that others can digest and enjoy. 

To further your sipping experience as much as mine.  

Over the next few weeks, we'll take this apart piece by piece:

• Smoke. Why peat was never really chosen for its flavour, and what distillers reach for instead once they leave Scotland

• Grain. The new landscape of whisky and grain: corn, wheat, rye, oats, heritage varietals, barley and combinations of

• Cask. The growing use of fresh, local wine and spirit casks, and why proximity changes what a cask can give a whisky

• Water. The most overlooked variable in the room, from volcanic aquifers to glacial springs

• Climate. How arid, tropical and temperate ageing conditions do entirely different work on a cask over time

None of these are the soil talking. All of them are a place talking, through the people who chose to work with what it gave them.

Pragmatism. 

Part one - on smoke - is next.