Dr. Bill Lumsden Talks Glenmorangie and More
Dr Bill Lumsden
Dr. Bill Lumsden is the hardest-working man in the booze business. Known as “The Mad Scientist Of Whisky,” he’s the Director of Distilling, Whisky Creation, and Whisky Stocks for two vastly different distilleries — the Speyside-based Glenmorangie, which produces classic light-bodied, fruity whiskies, and Islay’s Ardbeg, renowned as one of the world’s peatiest single malts. He’s also the creator of SirDavis Whiskey, the boutique brand for a certain Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.
Apart from his day job, Dr. Bill is a walking encyclopedia of pop culture, waxing as enthusiastically about old-school R & B artists and his current favorite TV shows as he does about cask finishes and distilling techniques. So when he sits down to talk whisky, it’s a foregone conclusion that he’ll also discuss whatever else is on his mind, and that encompasses just about anything and everything.
I met with Dr. Bill to go over (and taste) the newly revamped Glenmorangie core range, but that’s not all he talked about, as you’ll soon read. His comments are edited for length and brevity (wait, is that the same thing?).
On the Newest Glenmorangie Core Range
Glenmorangie range
"I like to keep myself busy, and our marketing department — the Ministry of Lies, as I call them — they’re always looking for new stuff. You know, it's nice to refresh it, but I'm a great believer in having a stable core range. So I'm pretty sure this is going to be the core range for at least the next five, six, seven years."
On The Original 12 Year old (formerly 10 Years Old)
The Original 12 Year old
"I was a bit reluctant to change that, maybe for selfish reasons as much as anything, because Glenmorangie 10 Year Old Original was the very first single malt I ever tasted, and has always been my favorite in the range. The challenge the former CEO set to me was, 'You think it's perfect as it is, Bill, so could you improve on perfection?' I know that sounds a little bit BS-y, but you know, I tried all sorts of things. And in the end, a slight nudge up in age was kind of obvious, and I felt that it kept the character the same, but just made the palate a little bit more creamy, a little bit more sweet. I reckon nobody was going to thank me — least of all myself — for changing it completely. I’d like to keep the same character, and obviously having that [age] number on the bottle means that we have parity with a lot of our key competitors. That was not the driving factor here, I have to stress that. The kind of citrusy note has been toned down a little bit [but] it’s still there, and it's one of the things I love about it. You know, that kind of mandarin orange type thing."
On Celebrity Encounters
"I actually, literally bumped into Paul McCartney at LAX once. My flight had been delayed, and it was a really tight connection at LAX to get up to San Francisco. I was in business class, Sir Paul was in first class, so they let them off the plane first, and I almost knocked him off his feet. I stopped and said, 'Sir Paul, I am so sorry.' He was very charming about it. I chatted to him for about two minutes. So that's my Paul McCartney story. The other celeb that I literally walked right into was on Madison Avenue, and I was doing a bit of window shopping in the fancy stores there, and I turned around and walked straight into someone. And I looked up at this person towering above me, and it was Donald Sutherland. I apologized, and he kind of looked down at me as if to say, 'Bloody tourists.'”
On The Quinta Ruban 14-year old (formerly 12 Years Old)
Glenmorangie The Quinta Ruban 14-year old
"Obviously, you can tell from the color right away that there's some port cask being used in that. I changed it from 12 to 14 for a couple of reasons, just to see what kind of flavor I could create in this. The base whiskeys are about 11 and a half years old in the bourbon barrels, and then they spend about two and a half years in the port casks. You get these signature plummy dark chocolate and mentholic notes, funnily enough, and it always makes me think of being in a church with the incense burning. It’s bigger and bolder than the original, it’s got these really lovely chocolatey notes."
On Old School R&B Jams
Diamonds And Pearls by Prince
"It's quite funny, my son's 34 and my daughter's 28, so obviously, they weren’t alive in the ‘80s, but they are massive fans of ‘80s music. And you know how often, as a father, you become kind of a little bit uncool and a little bit of a joke, but actually, it helped re-cement my coolness in there. That’s my favorite period of music.
One of my most prized possessions [is] the single, Gett Off, from the Diamonds And Pearls album by Prince. There was seven different versions of it, and it's very sought after. The CD single, and I've got it, it's got Gett Off (Houstyle). It's just fabulous. [Sings] 'Everybody pump it like you want somebody!' I saw Prince in 1992 on the Diamonds & Pearls tour at Celtic Park in Glasgow. And then I saw him in 1993 at Meadowbank Stadium, Edinburgh. That was a weird time, when he put out The Most Beautiful Girl In The World. It was his only #1 single in the UK. But that album, that was from The Gold Experience. That’s my favorite Prince album.
When I was in the shower this morning… for some reason, the song Candy by Cameo was in my head. I arrived in the office here just after 11:00 am and Candy was playing. How spooky is that! Word Up [also by Cameo], absolutely brilliant. That always reminds me of a fabulous holiday I had in Miami Beach with five of my buddies when we were all 21. As you can imagine, it was complete carnage, the holiday. But Word Up was one of the songs of the trip."
On The Lasanta 15 years old (formerly 12 Years Old)
The Lasanta 15 years old
"I did a kind of U-turn on the Lasanta, because the 12 Year Old, 50% of the finishing casks were Oloroso, and 50% were Pedro Ximenez. I've removed the Pedro Ximinez, using it for other things. This is all Oloroso now and it's a slightly more limited period of finishing. And if I'm honest about it, I wanted to try and recreate the taste profile of Balvenie Doublewood, which is my favorite in the Balvenie range.
Quite perfumed, very obviously sherry, but I think in a slightly more restrained way. Lots of toffee and ginger and cinnamon and things like that. [It’s finished] about a year and a half, two years. So it's less than for the Quinta Ruban. My favorite sherried whisky which I've done in the 40 years I've been in the industry is the Glenmorangie Accord 12 Year Old, which is a travel retail exclusive. I've tried to recreate that taste while kind of laddering the range in terms of aging. So I personally prefer it to the old Lasanta. I think it's got a bit more Glenmorangie-ness to it."
On a Memorable Song
"The other song, which I remember very clearly, because the boys, we flew from Manchester Airport, so we had a wild night out in Manchester before flying the next day. And it culminated with we all got arrested, as it turned out, for something we totally didn't do. A girl had been raped. I remember saying to the policeman, 'We can barely stand,' you know? Yeah, they let us go. Apparently the suspect had ginger hair, and one of my friends had ginger hair. But anyway, the song that was playing in all the pubs we went into was [by] Spandau Ballet. Ah, what's it? Chant No. 1 (I Don't Need This Pressure On).
This is another random fact here, but my favorite R.E.M. song was Shiny Happy People, which had the B-52’s singer, what's her name? Wanda?… Kate Pierson. Was it? Kate Pierson on it, and she was singing, playing on it. Apparently, Michael Stipe detests it and never plays it. I have to say I do like the rest of their music, but that was, I just think that song is so upbeat."
On The Nectar 16 Year Old (formerly Nectar d’Or 12 Year Old)
Glenmorangie The Nectar 16 Year Old
"I was struggling in terms of supply of Sauternes casks, because Sauternes is a tiny appellation. And on a good year for the semillon grapes, there is only about 2,000 barriques filled. That's a tiny number. So for me to keep supply going — because it used to be 100% Sauternes — that was really not going to be sustainable. So I changed the recipe. And basically what I've tried to do here, if you remember A Tale of Cake, that was a fun expression. Well, basically I've recreated this, so I'm using, not only Sauternes, but I'm using Tokaji and occasionally some Muscatel sweet wine casks. You get that lovely honeycomb type note, but it's not as cloying.
This has always been the most popular of the finished ranges here in the United States. People seem to really love that. My late grandmother and also my daughter, they used to make me a pineapple upside down cake dusted with desiccated coconut, and my daughter still occasionally makes it for me on my birthday. And that's what this reminds me of. I don't have a particularly sweet tooth, but I do like all this luscious pineapple."
On Swing Music & Mob Movies
Lately, I've actually been listening to quite a bit of, you know, kind of swing music, like Tony Bennett. I love Tony Bennett. And I love the song Rags To Riches, not least because it reminds me of one of my favorite movies, which is Goodfellas.
Once Upon a Time in America movie poster
My absolute favorite film of all time is, of course, Once Upon A Time In America. I’d recommend the director’s cut. I first saw it in the film house in Edinburgh, and there was an interval in it, because the film is about four hours and 20 minutes long. And when I left with my current girlfriend at that time and my best friend Ian, we absolutely couldn't speak for about an hour. We were blown away with it, and it basically bankrupted and killed Sergio Leone, but I think it’s his finest piece of work. But [it’s] just amazing, with Robert DeNiro and James Woods and Elizabeth McGovern. It has some very uncomfortable scenes in it, so you need to be aware of that. But it's just so, every single scene is just amazing, and it's filmed and set in three different decades, as the gangsters.
On Signet Reserve (a new variation of the still-available Signet)
Glenmorangie Signet Reserve
"When I first made Signet and was playing around with it. I took some samples home, and I let my daughter, who was only 15, I think, at the time, I let her taste it. She's got a very good nose and palate, and in fact she works on the blending team at Macallan in the industry, and she said to me, 'Daddy, this tastes like tiramisu. So that combination, that chocolate and coffee and liqueur, that's why tiramisu is on the tasting notes of Signet.
This is a slightly different Signet. I make this in much smaller quantities. We do about 15,000 cases of Signet each year, and there's only enough for about 500 to 1000 of this. Basically what I do is, I put together the very complicated recipe with the six or seven different styles of Glenmorangie, I let it marry in vat for about three months prior to bottling. But what I do for this is I take a little bit of that liquor out of the vat, and I fill it into Pedro Ximenez sherry casks, and it's in there for about a further three years."
On TV and line dancing
This City is Ours
"There's a great series on TV in the UK just now called This City Is Ours, and it's about an organized crime gang in Liverpool in England who control the drugs trade there. And it's really fabulous. And there's a song in it where the crime family are at a christening, and they all do a sequence dance, you know, a line dance, which is a little bit naff, but the song they do it to was Andy Williams’ House Of Bamboo. I've re-watched the episode so I could even learn how to do the line dance to it, but you don’t see enough of it."
On songs for funerals
Andy Williams Moon River
"My late father was a huge fan of Andy Williams, so I chose the music for his funeral and did the eulogy. And you know, my young sister, she'd never heard Moon River. 'Oh, my God,' I said. 'Gail, Dad used to sing it all the time. That was his favorite song.' So at the start of his funeral, it was Moon River, and at the end, when his coffin went out, it was In The Mood by Glenn Miller, another favorite song of his.
And for my mother, who passed away, she went peacefully at home on her 92nd birthday. No one else had ever heard of the second song, but the first song was Spanish Eyes [by Al Martino]. The song going out — I wanted something a bit more upbeat — was The Turntable Song by Deanna Durbin. If you haven’t heard it, you’ll love it. The reason I chose that was there was a fabulous radio show on Saturday mornings in the UK, many years ago and it was all about jazz, that genre. And the opening song for that was always The Turntable Song.
My going in song — I've already discussed this with my daughter, it seems a bit early — is Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’ by Michael Jackson. Which is a bit curious, because, of course, I'm actually ending something. For my going out song, I haven't quite yet decided, but it's highly likely to be something by Prince."