Waterford Sheestown 1.2 – 50%

“For years, people have been presented with all sorts of explanations for the supposed true quality of whisky – from stills to water to wood. We want to show what really makes malt whisky the most complex spirit in the world, what is the real source of its extraordinary taste: barley.” For Mark Reynier and his team, 100 per cent Irish barley is the focus of flavour and the focus of all attention. Clearly, because the Waterford CEO acquired the site on the banks of the River Suir in 2014 with a very specific goal: to make Waterford the epicentre for the radical implementation of the terroir philosophy known from the winemaking world. Over the course of his legendary 40-year career in the wine and whisky industry, Mark Reynier has come to realise that how and where barley grows has a significant influence on the complex flavours of malt whisky. It grows differently in every field. Soil composition, sunlight, location and much more lead to a different flavour profile with every harvest, in every place. The terroir of the barley holds the secret to truly unique whiskies. Each Waterford Distillery bottling explores a different location in the barley growing focus region. Terroir by terroir, the exclusive Irish single malts map their place of origin in terms of taste. In addition to selected first-fill oak casks, long fermentation and slow distillation in the two in-house pot stills, Waterford’s cradle therefore lies in the cooperation with more than 40 regional farms. When dealing with their barley, Reynier and Co. follow a strict methodology from viticulture: the grain is grown, stored, malted and distilled separately. Farm by farm, harvest by harvest, the whisky from Waterford thus captures the consistently authentic taste of Irish single malts. Where exactly the contents of each bottle come from is revealed by an imprinted terroir code. Around 21,580 data points per distillation in the company’s highly developed logistics system open up an extensive world of information about the place of origin, the barley farmers or the distillery itself to single malt lovers. All they have to do is enter the code on the website or, in future, in the specially developed app. For Mark Reynier, this kind of trackable, 100 per cent transparent terroir-based Irish whisky is a dream come true: “I’ve spent a lifetime in the higher end of the drinks industry – half dedicated to wine, half to single malt – and Waterford is the culmination of this rather unusual journey. It’s rare to have the chance to breathe life into such a provocative concept.” The distillery’s ultimate goal: to create a globally unique, profound whisky. This is created in the composition of the individual “Single Origin” malts, of which Waterford has now brought the first two bottlings onto the market in a limited edition.