Glenmorangie’s new 50 Years Old sits at the center of a ceramic structure that seems to have grown around the bottle. Curving porcelain forms rise on either side in bands of rust, blue, pink, ochre, and gray, while the dark mahogany whisky glows through the glass between them. Turn it around and the composition changes again, with no obvious front or back and every one of the 149 pieces slightly different from the next.
It is the oldest whisky Glenmorangie has ever bottled and, at £25,800 (approx. $34,200), with a release of just 149 bottles, but the fascination here is that the liquid and the object surrounding it have been conceived almost as one thing.
Has Glenmorangie created an extraordinary whisky with an extraordinary case, or has Peter Pincus created an artwork that happens to hold a 50-year-old single malt?
When Dr Bill Lumsden joined Glenmorangie in 1995, there were around 300,000 casks in stock, mostly younger spirits but with a scattering of older whisky distilled during the 1960s and 1970s. By 1999 he had assembled a 25-year-old recipe that particularly interested him, made up of whisky of the same age from two different types of cask: 75 percent from first-fill bourbon and 25 percent from first-fill Oloroso sherry.
Rather than bottle it, he married a small parcel together at the same ratio and put it into a refill bourbon hogshead that had already held two fills of Glenmorangie. He had the cask recoopered extra tightly at Speyside Cooperage to reduce the risk of leakage and, having already given up much of its flavor to earlier whiskies, the wood was deliberately far less active, allowing the spirit to continue aging slowly and gently.
The longer a whisky survives in cask, the rarer and more expensive it becomes, while evaporation reduces the amount left and the oak can eventually overwhelm the spirit until what remains is effectively alcoholic wood water, unusable and beyond rescue. With Glenmorangie’s particularly delicate spirit, produced in its exceptionally tall stills, every additional year carried a greater risk and, as Lumsden puts it, “the risk increases exponentially with age.”
He never set out to reach 50 years, but kept checking the whisky as it rested in Glenmorangie’s cool, damp dunnage warehouses until, around three years ago, he decided it had reached the point he wanted.
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The whisky was also made from some of the final batches of barley produced on Glenmorangie’s own floor maltings before they closed in 1977, leaving traces of a style of spirit that has since disappeared. “It’s a throwback to a different era and there’s a subtle smokiness in there, which you don’t normally get these days in Glenmorangie,” says Lumsden.
Tasting it at the launch at Gleneagles, the storied Scottish country estate, the surprise is how vibrant it remains after half a century. The nose is fragrant, with toffee and raisin from the sherry, while the palate is soft and almost buttery in texture, moving through orange peel, pepper, and cumin. Underneath is a dry, ashy note from the old floor maltings, less smoke than the residue of it, which gives the whisky another glimpse of the distillery it came from without ever overwhelming the fruit.
The flavor, color, and history of the whisky became the starting point for Peter and Laurie Pincus, with Peter having discovered ceramics as a teenager and essentially never stopped since.
Talking to Pincus, the conversation races through centuries of ceramic history with an infectious enthusiasm, including Sir William Hamilton’s published collections of Greek and Roman antiquities, whose illustrations became source material for Josiah Wedgwood and helped shape the fashionable neoclassical style of late 18th-century Britain. Pincus teaches ceramics at Rochester Institute of Technology, has built courses around its history and technology, and has taken the obsession far enough to have historic ceramic designs tattooed up his arm.
“I found ceramics when I was a junior in high school and it changed my life,” he says. “I’ve been doing it seven days a week, all day, every day, forever.”
Pincus had already studied how color and ceramic whisky vessels could convey status and value beyond the ceramic world itself, while his fascination with utilitarian ceramics goes far beyond their usefulness as objects designed to hold something. He describes ceramics as “the first form of journalism,” because a vessel can become a record of the people who made it, what they valued and how they lived, carrying that story across borders and generations long after its original purpose has disappeared.
“At some point, whether it’s one day after people buy, two days, two years, 20 years or 2,000 years, that bottle will be empty,” Pincus says. “The ceramic will exist, and the ceramic will carry this story throughout history.”
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What survives in an archaeological dig is rarely what a vessel once contained. The wine may have been poured at a table and passed between friends, the oil used for cooking, lighting a room or dressing food, while honey or mead was stored, shared, and consumed by people whose names have long disappeared. Some of it may have been spilt onto the floor or soaked into the earth, some simply drunk and enjoyed, but the ceramic can remain for thousands of years after the liquid and the people are gone. Its shape, decoration, materials, and craftsmanship then become part of the historical record, carrying a message about the people who made it and the time in which they lived that can still be read, interpreted and studied millennia later.
Peter, Laurie, and their studio spent more than three years developing new molding techniques and dozens of bespoke pigments inspired by the whisky, eventually creating 149 porcelain vessels designed to come together as a single tessellated artwork, Together in Spirit. “It gave us a chance to turn flavors and smells into colors,” says Laurie, who explains that even the pale gray surrounding the bottle was chosen to keep the whisky itself visible within the composition. “With certain lighting, it almost glows.”
Each piece carries its own arrangement of stripes and color, so the 149 objects work together as one artwork while remaining individual enough to stand alone. The installation will now be broken apart, with each piece leaving to find a home of its own.
Asked whether the final object is sculpture or something utilitarian, Peter prefers the word “dwelling,” because ceramic, glass, wood, metal, and whisky were all designed to live together, although Lumsden admits that success may create one unintended problem.
“It’s a bittersweet experience for me because it is such an amazing piece of art that it makes me sad to think there probably will be people who will never drink the whisky,” he says.
Lumsden and Pincus both say they would rather the bottles are enjoyed, although the fact that anyone might hesitate is perhaps the clearest answer to the question the project poses: the whisky inspired the artwork, the artwork changes how the whisky is experienced, and neither feels entirely complete without the other.
