I've Tried Hundreds of Whiskies. This Cheap Scotch Is My Go-to for Highballs
As the clock approached 12 p.m. on a Sunday, my late grandmother would start looking expectant. That meant it was whisky and soda time, and woe betide you if you were late with her drink. She came of age in the 1930s, when the whisky and soda, also known as the highball, was the modish drink of bright young things on both sides of the Atlantic.
I stuck to wine. For me, highballs were an old person's drink. It was only long after she had died at the ripe old age of 93 that I realized my grandmother was right all along. There is no better aperitif. While my grandmother wouldn’t touch anything apart from Famous Grouse, a love she shared with with Princess Margaret, for me the best mixer is Dewar’s White Label.
Its fruity and honeyed profile is custom designed to go with soda water. No wonder the Japanese, who have elevated the highball to an art form, import so much of it. Americans love it too. It’s the country’s second-bestselling Scotch whisky.
Dewar’s has a long history. It was founded by John Dewar in Perth in 1846. This small Scottish city was Scotland’s blended whisky capital with Arthur Bell, Matthew Gloag (Famous Grouse), and Peter Thomson (Old Perth) all founded there. Known as the Gateway to the Highlands, it was perfectly situated to buy flavorful malt whiskies from Speyside and combine them with grain whisky from the Lowlands. The resulting blends were quite different to robust smoke-influenced whiskies produced by Johnnie Walker in Kilmarnock on the west coast.
These light whiskies were perfect for the London market. Previously the fashionable set would have drunk Cognac from France but the region’s vineyards were destroyed by phylloxera in the 1880s, the vine eating bug accidentally introduced from America. Scotch whisky stepped into the breach and never looked back. They were helped by some innovative advertising. John Dewar’s sons John Alexander and Thomas, known as Tommy, were master marketers.
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In 1886 Tommy paid a bagpiper to play at the annual Brewers Show in London to drown everyone else out. In 1911, the firm had an enormous electric sign installed by the Thames of a Highlander in a tam o’ shanter raising a glass of White Label, and when he drank, his beard and kilt swayed. Before World War I, Dewar’s used to have a cart pulled by Shetland ponies and driven by a man in full Highland costume through the streets of Berlin. They were ahead of their time in other ways, too, as in 1898 Dewar’s ran the first ever cinema advert.
White Label was created by master blender A.J. Cameron in the early 20th century. Dewar’s had agents in London, Sydney, New York and Johannesburg and set about turning his new blend into a global brand. Following the end of Prohibition in 1933, America became its biggest market, which it still is to this day.
Dewar’s is now owned by Bacardi, which also owns Aberfeldy and Craigellachie single malt in Speyside, Scotland’s distilling heartland. In 2006, Stephanie MacLeod became master blender and this year she won master blender of the year at the International Whisky Challenge.
MacLeod was coy when I asked her for details of the blend: “The exact recipe of Dewar’s White Label is a closely guarded secret, but I often imagine that when A.J. Cameron was thinking about the flavor profile of what came to be White Label, that he took his inspiration from the profile of the only distillery to have been built by the Dewar’s Family—Aberfeldy.”
Henry Jeffreys
While White Label is everything you could ask for in an entry-level blended whisky, it's just the start of Dewar's range. There’s the superb 12-Year-Old which takes the profile of White Label and amps everything up a few notches adding a distinct note of marmalade. It’s my wife’s favorite and definitely worth the money over the standard. She likes hers mixed with soda and a splash of Angostura orange bitters. MacLeod, in contrast, goes for a lemon wedge in her highball.
Richer still are the 15- and 18-Year-Old expressions. After that, you’re in the realm of luxury whisky, with the long-aged Double Double range which starts with a 21 Year Old and goes up to the awesome 38 year old - yours for $2,199 a bottle. You probably wouldn’t want to mix that with soda but, hell, it’s your whisky.