When we started Woven it was always our intention to blend with whiskies not just from Scotland, but from right around the world. The origin of this desire was the fact our love affair with Scotch was peppered with encounters of incredible whiskies from elsewhere. From the established names from familiar whisky territories like the USA and Ireland to the emerging wave of Japanese whiskies that went on to take over the world, the whisky world for us was always larger than Scotland.
Over the past two decades we’ve seen a new wave of producer emerge from almost every country in the world that drinks whisky. Free from the traditions that so often dictate how things should be, they’ve challenged perceptions of what whisky can be and incorporated shape shifting ideas at a liquid and philosophical level that, as curious whisky lovers, we find hugely exciting. All of this added up to us feeling that such was the potential for new flavours, new perspectives and new connections to distillers everywhere that we had to seek to blend beyond the borders of our home, Scotland. SUPERBLEND is our first expression in this ‘world whisky’ space, but there will be more.
The project to get these liquids, and get them into a bottle legally has been a genuine challenge. But, now that we’ve navigated the process once and found a partner (which had to be) outside of Scotland who can marry together our recipes and allow us to bottle the product legally, we can’t wait to share more of these incredible flavours from right around the world and hopefully, play a role in shining a light onto the produce of these passionate distillers found… well, everywhere!
The name Superblend came from a comment that Pete made when exhaling the joys of blending with a multitude of different styles of whisky from multiple origins. He felt like he had whisky maker superpowers - the palate of flavour he could access suddenly became much greater. This euphoria had to be kept secret and whilst we’ve been spending the first year of our existence producing and speaking about exclusively whiskies from Scotland the weight of this clandestine excitement and the work going into this journey felt like a second whisky blending identity that had to be kept secret. We joked he was the Clarke Kent (Superman) of Whisky. Hence Superblend!