Diageo has brought the new and the old together to create two rare bottles of whisky priced at $50,000. The new comes in the form of a technology called SmokeDNAi that uses complex mathematical algorithms to explore the aging process of whisky in casks like never before. Diageo invested an undisclosed sum in investigating the aging of whisky and brought the Ghost distillery Port Ellen back to life with Port Ellen Gemini, the name of the pair of rare whiskies. The technology opens doors to analyze the flavor profiles of non-identical twin whiskies distilled in different casks – one remnant and one original.
Per Fox News, between two whisky casks from Port Ellen, there was a variation observed in the vanilla characteristic; one contained around 3%, while the other was at around 6%. The remnant cask contained liquors from the 1960s and 1980s, according to Morgan. “What we want to do is have this wonderful slow maturation in a barrel where we’re controlling the flavor,” Ewan Morgan, national luxury ambassador and head of whisky outreach at Diageo North America, told Fox News Digital. “We have a much better understanding of why they taste the way they taste, or why they smell the way they smell, or the mouth-feel.” He added, “We can get a much better understanding of what the final product is going to be like.”
The process requires the whiskey samples to undergo a chemical analysis process, followed by gas chromatography, and data sets of distinct components are broken down by an algorithm. The astonishing aspect is that connoisseurs can gaze at flavor combinations, aromas, and profiles invisible to the human eye. “On the visual, you will see the small amounts of one particle that moves around,” Morgan said.
“Then, there’s a larger cloud in there and then that will show you the percentile of these compounds that sit in there.” Per Fox News, visual profiles may include a combination of coconut, smoky, earthy, medicinal, floral, and sweet flavors. “It gives you kind of a really great, at a glance, visualization of what’s going on inside the barrel,” Morgan said. “It just gives us a much, much clearer understanding of our own whisky.”
