Waterford Rathclogh 1.1 Irish Single Malt Whiskey Review

By Richard Thomas

Rating: B

I remember thinking in 2014 that Mark Reynier scored a helluva deal. That was when Diageo, in one of the moves rendered utterly inexplicable by their byzantine corporate veil, sold the Guinness brewery they had spent €40 million upgrading over the course of a decade to him for just a little over €7 million. The same angels who drink all that evaporating liquor clearly have some favor for Reynier, who had previously revived the fortunes of Bruichladdich. That brewery became a distillery, named for the town is was in: Waterford.

I joke that the thing that sets Waterford most apart from its peers, coming as they are in the midst of a historic boom in Irish Whiskey, is that they insist on spelling the liquid as if they came from the other side of the Irish Sea: in Waterford, it’s “whisky.”

But they have taken an approach to process (and marketing) that I think favors younger releases, which they bill as being barley and terroir driven. Waterford is centered on a single farm approach: a given release is made from organic, specialized barley varietals grown on a particular farm. This one comes from Rathclogh, “on the old Kilkenny to Waterford road,” and is the first release from that farm. It came out in 2020. They bottled it fairly strong for Irish Whiskey, at 50% ABV, and unfiltered.

They matured the whisky in ex-bourbon, French oak, new American oak and various ex-fortified wine casks for three years and 11 months, somewhat above the minimum three years required by Irish law. As I wrote before, Waterford intends this to be a grain-forward whiskey, and that means it isn’t going to be very old (despite the many cask types used).

The Whiskey
This is a medium golden pour, with a malt-honey, dried field grass nose, accented by a secondary note of vanilla. The flavor builds on that with a note of toffee and traces of nuttiness, but it remains honeyed and grassy in the main. The finish is again honeyed, grassy, but the nuts come up more to become a steadier presence. Overall, it’s a tasty, simple, imminently approachable Irish malt, and surprisingly smooth for something not even four years old.

The Price
The problem isn’t what is in the bottle, but what hangs around its neck, the price tag: $100 a bottle.