John Glaser Dips Into LMDW's Scotch Whisky Archive To Craft 'Blend Of Blends' Anthology Metablend
American midwesterner John Glaser is best known for being the founder of Compass Box, hailed for its unusually creative approach towards blending Scotch malt and grain whiskies and presenting them in meaningfully labelled expressions. It successfully created a niche in very collectible blended Scotch whisky at a time when the market seemed to be drunk on single malts.
La Maison du Whisky has had a long relationship with John Glaser, beginning in 2001 when the French spirits specialist became Compass Box's first importer. Their collaborations have repeatedly surfaced in LMDW's past catalogues - including "Blended by Compass Box" within Artist #7, "This Is Not A Festival Whisky" in 2021 (a cheeky reference to the postponed 17th Whisky Live Paris due to the pandemic).
In 2024, Glaser stepped away from his executive role at Compass Box, while remaining an owner. The relationship with LMDW continues. This year's work with Glaser goes one step further by giving him the keys to LMDW's prized whisky archive.
The starting point was LMDW's Golden Promise Whisky Bar in Paris, where almost 300 rare blended Scotches had been collected for several decades. Glaser and the LMDW team opened and tasted dozens of these bottles dating from the 1950s through to the 1990s. From them, Glaser selected 46 bottles, including old vintage editions of Ballantine's 12 Years Old, Dewar's Pure Malt and Chivas Regal 12 Years Old.
Glaser sorted the selected bottles into six flavour camps, and then assembled them. And since these are all blended whiskies - rather than single grain or single malt whiskies - Glaser was in essence crating a "Blend of Blends" using finished blends that carried the choices of another blending team from another era.
"From the La Maison du Whisky archive, we opened and tasted dozens of antique bottles of blended scotch whisky, dating from the 1950s through to the 1990s. These bottles gave us a palette of flavours rarely encountered in whisky today: shaped by older production methods, different ingredients, different blending traditions and decades of very slow evolution in bottle. Rather than treat the archive as a museum, we have approached it as a source of flavour. We selected the bottles that moved us most, grouped them into six flavour camps, and composed a new whisky from them, seeking balance, complexity and deliciousness. We've made something new, from flavours that belong to another time."
– John Glaser
Anthology: A Metablend by John Glaser was assembled as a liquid collage from historic bottles of Scotch blended whisky. As such, LMDW notes that this whisky cannot be recreated. Bottled at 42.1% ABV with only 196 bottles to be released.
The official notes move from passionfruit and bana into wax, botrytised grape and medicinal notes.
Official Tasting Notes
Colour: Old gold.
Aroma: Fine, complex. Exotic (passion fruit, banana), waxy, honeyed (linden blossom), and peppery, the initial nose shines with an ancient patina. With aeration, scents of honeysuckle, pineapple, and candied lemon harmoniously fill the atmosphere. Over time, curry and musk aromas emphasize the heady character of a highly nuanced aroma palette.
Taste: Elegant, nourished. First, violet candy, marshmallow, and cut hay flavours vie for intensity. Then, the flavour palette opens toward tenderly powdery and tannic cereal registers. Oxidative (botrytized grape), spicy (ginger), and infused (chamomile), the end of the palate possesses plenty of lift.
Finish: Both broad and airy. Creamy (rice pudding), tangy (lemon zest), mentholated, and sappy (pine resin), it is, like the palate, submerged in violet candy flavours. On the retro-olfaction, gentian roots intertwine with white fruits (pear, mirabelle plum, yellow plum). Long after, dry extracts of the empty glass add an invigorating medicinal touch.
Kanpai!
88 Bamboo Editorial Team
