Aberfeldy 9 Year Old Exceptional Cask is... Being Boring by the Pet Shop Boys

In 1922, Zelda Fitgerald, a writer, bright young thing and the glamorous wife of
F Scott Fitzgerald, wrote in an essay titled Eulogy on the Flapper:

 
“She flirted because it was fun to flirt and wore a one-piece bathing suit because she had a good figure; she covered her face with powder and paint because she didn’t need it and she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring. She was conscious that the things she did were the things she had always wanted to do.”

About fifty years later, Neil Tennant, lead singer of the Pet Shop Boys but then teenager at St Cuthbert’s Catholic Grammar School in Newcastle, received an invitation from his friend Christopher Dowell. It was to a party inspired by the Bright Young Things, with the words “she refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring” inscribed on the outside.

Another twenty years passed. After performing at Tokyo’s Budokan arena in early July 1989, a Japanese reviewer wrote, “The Pet Shop Boys are often accused of being boring.”

Neil Tennant sat down to write.

Being Boring struggled even to reach the top 20. Yet it’s now widely considered to be one of the band’s greatest singles. Wistful and optimistic at one and the same time, it traces the three decades in its three verses, mourning the loss of friends – including Christopher Dowell who died of AIDS four months before Tennant wrote the song – and innocence as it goes.

A little like Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now, the song’s lyrics take on a different character depending on how long you’ve lived. The line “When you’re young you find inspiration / in anyone who’s ever gone / and opened up a closing door” can feel both like truth to the young and wistfulness to the older listener.

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On a mizzly day in June, a group of us piled into the back of Land Rovers and drove up into the hills around Aberfeldy, passing the dead brown, lifeless, formation plantations of Forestry Commission spruce, up to where more native Caledonian forest grows – Scots pine, juniper, birch, willow, rowan and aspen.

No oak, but oak was the reason for the hillside jaunt. I usually find it hard to get excited about oak when it comes to whisky. Whisky is aged in oak casks, and as with so much in the production of Scotch whisky, it’s possible to get very geeky about the wood the spirit is aged in. After all, without it, whisky would not become whisky. 

More often than not, it’s what was in the oak cask before the whisky that shapes the flavour of the liquid – bourbon or sherry, for the most part, though there are experiments with rum, red wine and even beer. It’s possible to accuse the wood itself of being boring, merely a vessel for flavour.

There’s good reason for using aged or seasoned casks. As Aberfeldy’s Master Blender Stephanie Macleod describes it a whisky aged in Scottish oak would be like ‘chewing on a fence post’. Nevertheless, here we were about to taste a whisky that was exactly that – Aberfeldy 9 Year Old Scottish Oak Exceptional Cask. 

Scottish Oak is a bit misleading. The trees are of the same sort you’d find growing south of the border or on the continent: Quercus robur. It just so happens that they grew in the damp and gnarly landscapes of Scotland.

Location acts like terroir, giving the wood a flavour, which in fresh barrels can be overpowering. To restrain its impact to something palatable, Stephanie kept the whisky in the cask for only nine years, making it a relatively young whisky. The result is a butterscotch flavour that complements Aberfeldy’s whisky’s signature honey sweetness. 

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As in life, youth in whisky is often looked down upon as lacking complexity or sophistication. But for the Aberfeldy 9 year old, its youth is its great advantage, allowing an experiment to succeed in a way that would not have been palatable if had been older.

As Zelda Fitzgerald continued in her essay: “Disillusionment comes easier at twenty than at forty,” remarking that it’s easier to live fully, throw caution to the winds, and have fun when you’re young and then settle down to life’s realities than live under the illusion “that they will be happy if they are good and obedient.”

We drank Aberfeldy 9 Year Old Scottish Oak Exception Cask whisky, looking down over the valley of the Tay river, the village of Dull, twinned with Boring, Oregon. 

Neil Tennant’s words fitted perfectly: “I never dreamt that I would get to be / The creature that I always meant to be”. It wasn’t guaranteed, but the experiment of his youth succeeded in creating something great. Being boring? Anything but.