Blended Scotch Whisky | 46.4% ABV

Score: 6/10

**Good Stuff.**
***TL;DR***
*A lovely wee sweety Speysider with a kick of grain.*

Blended in Leith

I began enjoying whisky as a means to pass the time in January 2021.

Like many, I hadn’t found whisky until during the boom of covid, arriving late to the party, as always. Glengoyne 18yo was my gateway into whisky. I wrote about it over three years ago here, in my first ever piece for Dramface.

Around the same time as I was getting into whisky, a new brand appeared on the scene called Woven. At that point everyone in whisky exciterville was rising quickly to a fever pitch of acquisition and excess (believe me when I say that scattergunning my way into whisky was as expensive as it was exciting). The arrival of a new, trendy, effortlessly cool brand from Leith - blending whisky inside an old mill with exposed beams and chipboard walls - couldn’t have been timed any better.

Folk were buying whisky because it existed and it looked cool. The whisky from Woven, and their fresh approach to the Uisge Beatha, was introduced via a manifesto that played into the sentiment of the times - we are all Woven. Woven together. Woven around this beautiful spirit we speak about often and plentifully. A statement of intent, to reintroduce the legacy and tradition of whisky through a more modern, more accessible lens.

Words like “fun” and “friendship” were used, and I was keeping a keen eye on it all from a distance. I was knee deep in auction buying, collection diversifying and double-sometimes-triple-dunting on popular bottles that I felt I must acquire and keep, for when the dark times come. One to drink, one to keep. Or two.

Woven launched their inaugural range of whiskies in August 2021 and they arrived, as promised, under the incendiary bracket of “blended” whisky. Through the tortured porthole of reflection, 2021 was a strange old time in whisky and one thing was abundantly clear - blended whiskies were not to be trifled with. Single malt was where the excitement was. Even NAS whisky was frowned upon back then, depending on who you were taking your advice from; age statements for the win.

For me, for Woven to launch a blended range, in 50cl bottles, was an uphill struggle from the get go. I remember excitedly seeing them launch, and then less excitedly moving on to buy another bottle of Glen Scotia Victoriana.

Bias. Lack of perspective. My inability to see past the draw of the single malt or the single cask; the purity, the essence of a particular place. It caused Woven and their “Experience” whiskies to pass by through masked isolation.

Reading the Woven website journal entries from 2021 feels remarkably prescient. Two blokes yomp into an exciting new world of blending whisky because they believe that if they can nail the message and the whisky, that the bedrock upon which contemporary whisky was built will shift to accept that blending, the possibilities of blending, and blended whiskies are all as exciting, if not more than, single malts.

They spoke of the rising concern of cask investment companies and the likelihood of those “opportunities” turning into pyramid schemes. We watch on as, four years later, unfortunate investors find they’ve potentially lost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds to crooks slinging fake or non-existent casks. They talk of cask availability, for those not centuries ingrained in the industry; tightening on account of demand being at an all-time high - cask trades to independent bottlers dried up.

Most of all, there’s talk of adventure and honesty - the joy of forging out into the unknown. They set out to change the face of blended whisky through “Experiences” that redefined what a blended whisky could be. Did they succeed?

The honest answer is I don’t know. Starting from such an anti-blended whisky perspective in 2021, I was naively ignorant to what blended whisky could be, and thus what Woven were offering. Their aesthetic and their chat was new-wave, and for an industry steeped in dusty trad insulation, it fell on deaf ears.

I suppose my then layperson’s concept of taking superb single casks of whisky, each unique and unrepeatable with inherent qualities that impress, and smooshing them together to create a blend that delivers an experience that would better that of the “pure” whisky, was always a hard sell for someone schooled in accepting that single malts are king.

It felt a bit rude. It felt a bit like doing something for the sake of difference, rather than pursuit of excellence; excellence had already been achieved in the single cask of whisky, before it was tainted with something else.

It’s a hard position to inhabit, for it dismisses, almost universally, the chance of a blended whisky being more enjoyable than any single malt could be. It ignores the fact that most single malts are blends of many casks, albeit from the same distillery.

It spurns the skill required to blend a core range whisky to a repeatable, consistent standard, using the many casks to hand that are all unique, and always changing. It’s incredibly impressive. It also masks the reality that a lot of single malts released today are rubbish.

By extension of logic, it shuns batch variance or that non-age-statement whiskies could be very well aged whisky with youthful whisky blended carefully together for character. That if they stuck an age statement of “4” on the label, it would be tantamount to lunacy, given that 10 years maturation is the lowest we go, because whisky becomes great overnight at 10.

All of this is to say that, as a whisky enthusiast maturing past the excitable maniac phase, I’m not infallible when it comes to misconceptions and poor judgment. I’ve been wrong on many counts, and have held opinions formed from advice received that has prevented me from enjoying myself.

A position that causes tension when the shouts of “it’s too young” play directly against what I’m finding and experiencing in young whisky - that it can be stunningly excellent, and worth getting excited about, because it’s all I know. So many lessons to learn.

That we’re seeing a surge of uptake in all forms of whisky now - grain, blended, world, young, unique cask types et al - not just scotch single malts, is evidence that as a group, we’re all maturing together. I guess you could say we’re all woven.

Review

Woven Homemade, Blended Scotch Whisky, 70cl, Natural Colour, Non Chill-filtered | 46.4% ABV
£38 - widely available

I never did try Woven’s “Experience” range, and up until last week hadn't tried any Woven whisky at all, save a whisky and coffee experiment “W X C” that confused the living daylights out of me when I expected whisky distilled in Coffey stills, and instead tasted thick, sweet coffee liqueur.

Four years on and Woven is still with us, which is excellent, and they’re up to Experiment No. 22 now - “Pastures New”. But it’s not the “Experience” range I speak of today, instead a bottle of “Homemade” that I picked up when I was buying doggo bandages for The Hairy Bullet’s sliced pad off Amazon. The bottle cost £38 - free shipping!

Nose

Spongey. Rice pudding. Banana loaf with choc chips that’s been just overdone - a bit toasted. Cookies baking. Baked pears, sugary and caramelised. Orange peel. Digestives. Peach melba! Double cream a day over. Pencil shavings.

Palate

Sweet, peachy. Stone fruits. Delicious. Bit of spice on the tail - warming. There’s caramel sauce laced with something souring - a citrus thing maybe. Actually, it reminds me of Craigellachie 13, albeit from a distant memory. Fleeting coke. Coconut shreds. Honey cashews. Oatcake.

The Dregs

Well, I’m really impressed with this whisky. 70% of the “Homemade” is 8yo single malt from Speyside, with the remaining percentage a “Lowland Single Grain” of undisclosed age or provenance, but given they state it’s a “prominent grain distillery in Edinburgh”, can hazard that it’s North British.

It’s juicy, sweet, nutty and moreish, with the grain likely adding a big bulk of that sweetness. Shifting 75% of the blended liquid into sherry casks (Palo Cortado and Pedro Ximenez) doesn’t make this a sherry forward whisky, or something that’s been cask finished to blooter some flavour into the mix. It’s a light touch, but adds (I assume) the peach and orange tones, a bit of the souring edge perhaps, but certainly not something I’d describe as red, at all. Definitely blush or coral.

I really enjoyed nosing this whisky, and the waves of peach melba and pears, malty notes of baked cakes and biscuits really are lovely. On the palate it resolves as a simple, quaffable whisky. It feels light on its feet, which plays in tension with the mouth-coating nature, but together it feels balanced and, crucially, resolved.

The flavour graph on Woven’s website shows this as being big fruit, almost as big floral, some malt, some wood and a little funk. I’d agree with all that. £38 is a fair asking price. Woven have increased the bottle size from 50cl to 70cl as of Experience No.20 onwards; have released Homemade at 46.4% ABV naturally, without colouring or chill-filtering, and for the ages involved it doesn’t feel young at all. It’s a wee sweetie.

I think if you bought this with the expectation of having a solid, reliable whisky to enjoy as an engaging calibrator that stuffs Glenmorangie 10/12 into the weeds, as a whisky to relax with, or even a whisky to mix into high-balls (shock horror), then you’d be really chuffed with the Homemade. I know I am.

I think I might wade into the Woven world a bit more.

Score: 6/10

Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC

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