The Porróncast
A Wine, Spirits, and Non-Alcoholic beverage podcast spotlighting the stories of people that share the Porrón.
A De Maison production.
The Porróncast
Naguelann: French Whisky with a Celtic Soul with Mike Aloi
Michael Aloi (insta: @porronthebar), Spirits Portfolio Manager at De Maison joins us to explore Naguelann, a distinctive Breton distillery of Celtic-style whisky.
We dive into Brittany’s culture, the state of French Whisky through the lens of Whisky Breton and explain “cask-started” aging while tasting the Naguelann lineup -- each whisky that turns the artistic and explorative intent of the talented distiller, Lénaîck Lemaitre, into deeply balanced flavor.
As promised and for your listening pleasure, here is a link to the album Lénaîck Lemaitre composed, and his distillerie website.
Remember, if you #findtheporrón, it’s De Maison.
The Porróncast is hosted and produced by Ryan Looper - @iamlooper
Follow us on IG: @demaisoneast @demaisonselections
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For deeper information on any producer featured on this episode click here and search producer name
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If you find a Porrón on the back label of a bottle, it is imported to the USA exclusively by the spectacular importer and team at De Maison Selections
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Original Music by @juliantamers
Michael Loy. So so you want to you want to get a little radio voice. Spirits. Spirits. Sivalants. Welcome to the Perone cast. I'm your host, Ryan Looper. Today's guest is Michael Loy, the National Spirits Portfolio Manager from Demaison, and we are going to break down whiskey from Brittany, specifically the oceanic singular Celtic whiskies of Nagalon, a small distillery in San Malo. Need I say more? This is gonna be a great one.
SPEAKER_01:Here we are on dreary Wednesday afternoon. Which burgundy was good today. What did we have? Don't remember the vineyard. Pretty good?
SPEAKER_00:Pretty good.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:I forget the vintage on the Arlo. 14. 14. They're already talking about it.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_00:That was showing very nice and you know, great value. And where can you say that about Burgundy on a list, anyways? That's true. Something that is accessible. Artisan whiskeys.
SPEAKER_01:Underappreciated artisan whiskeys from France.
SPEAKER_02:So Michael Loy, you're the new national spirits portfolio manager at Demaison. And you happen to not only have a lot of experience with all the Demaison stuff, but you've actually been to Brittany to visit Nogalon, which is a let's call it a long-term and yet jump start whiskey producer. And I just want to go through and and kind of get a feel on Brittany and a little bit of French whiskey and this producer Nagalon. So why don't you just bring me into your world? What's it like? Where the hell is Brittany?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, to say it's off the map is sort of like the beginning, you know, of the journey to get there. It's a place, you know, it's it's technically part of France. It's a it's a department in France, you know, along the coast, then you're talking about the northwest of France, but it has a lot more in common with, you know, its friends across the Channel in the UK. You know, Brittany was one of the original Celtic kingdoms, you know, culturally, a lot more cultural exchange with England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland. And with that comes a tradition of whiskey making.
SPEAKER_02:Nice. And so this is if you're in Muscadeland, not you're driving north, and then you're tipping a little bit west towards the coast, and that's Brittany.
SPEAKER_00:And that's Brittany. Um, so this is, you know, it's this is south of Normandy. So you're going further away from apple country, not quite in grape land. Uh, and you know, then there's there's a lot of barley. I mean, there's a little bit of everything. There are some apples, but this is cooler, this is coastal, this is gray most of the year. Uh, we were lucky in the beautiful city of Saint Malo, which is basically a fortress on the sea. It's a it's a walled city. There's a beautiful little wall view. Crazy. Yeah. It's really, it's really something else. It's, you know, a step back in time at at any point of year, but especially like when it's gray most of the year. It's whiskey land. It's whiskey land. Uh, we we caught one beautiful sunny day that was atypical, and everyone we talked to told us that. But yeah, no, it's Whiskey Land. They're famous for their oysters and seafood, uh, which is a funny junk position. But as soon as you drive off the coast, you see these like rolling kind of meadows. It's a little bit hilly, but full of like literally just grain fields.
SPEAKER_02:Incredible. So Nagalon. It's owned and operated by Lenaik Lemaitre. And Lenaik is a musician, he's a whiskey nerd, he's a distiller, he owns a store. He's a bit of kind of a renaissance guy. It seems like he does a lot of things.
SPEAKER_00:What is he like? I mean, he's the quietest Renaissance man I've ever met. I've never met someone so, you know, prolific in so many different disciplines who is so, not to say reticent to talk about them, but he's fairly reserved. And I think he's someone, it seems like, especially getting to know him in this project and learning more about what he's involved in. He likes to, you know, let his work do the talking, which is uh something I think that comes through, you know, meeting him, seeing the place, and then actually, you know, tasting the literal fruit of his labor. There are stories in these bottles that it's not that he doesn't want to tell them, but he sets it up. He's not the narrator, but he's gonna give you the prologue.
SPEAKER_02:Amazing. In the spectrum of French whiskey, there's whiskey d'Alsace and there's Whisky Breton or Whiskey de Bretagne. Those are the two GIs, right? And then of course you have a burgeoning and growing whiskey culture in France because they also happen to consume a lot of whiskey. It's just it hasn't been from France. It's been from other places. So we have this growing industry, and we're in Brittany. There's a historic distillery, I believe it's it's Werenheim Armorick is what it's the one.
SPEAKER_00:That's the one that that's the one that I, you know, I know and is the most well known, which is to say not known at all outside of Spirit's nerd circles. You have some other whiskey projects. There's a lot of whiskey aging, you know, cover down in Burgundy, but with his scotch, age in a burgundy cellar. One of our own producers, Jackalot, is the same thing, finishing Highland Scotch in Marte Burgon casks. But true French whiskey, it's it's emerging, but there isn't a lot of it. And outside of France, it's hardly known, just because the global spirit scene is dominated by these big players and they're not covering this up. But, you know, the French and characters like Lenake aren't raising their voice to draw attention to them. But I guess that's where we step in. Uh, find someone with a story to tell and help bring that out. That was what we've been fortunate enough to do. Uh, this guy, he started down this road, literally, like many people, like myself, maybe like yourself, uh, behind a bar, selling whiskey, learning about it, and really taking that to the next step, increasing his knowledge, buying small lots and barrels and blending things himself. That's where this all began. And eventually it led to him renovating the old stone house of his neighbor in this little village that he grew up in into a distillery and making an aging whiskeys. And he's been the project itself is over 10 years old. I think when I visited in 2024, he was that was about the 10-year mark of this project.
SPEAKER_02:Was he blending before and then transitioning into distillation?
SPEAKER_00:That I think even the so like the sort of buying and blending was went even further back than that. It's my understanding that the distillation and aging project was 10 years old. Incredible. At that point. And he'd so he'd been, you know, blending and buying and blending for much longer, which is a tale as old as time. Uh, but it's also he'd not to say backwards, but a lot of things about this whole project have happened in reverse. They're counterintuitive to how most people do this. Because most of the time, if people want to make whiskey, they're gonna start with a clear spirit. You're gonna pump out vodka or gin or something else at the very least, while your whiskey is in barrel. And most people also skip ahead to the good part. You know, if they want to make whiskey, they're gonna start buying a barrel from LDI or MGP and put it in a nice bottle and put their name on it and say, We're a whiskey company. But hey, if you could buy some gin or some vodka while you're here, while you're interested, while the stuff we actually made is getting ready, that'd be nice. He didn't do any of that. He went in with a clear vision of making whiskey, of making whiskey breton and having it have a unique identity. So he wasn't interested in buying someone else's barrels and putting his name on it.
SPEAKER_02:I feel like that's very edgy, especially in the world of whiskey. I feel like that is an edgy proposition. He's jumping off a cliff and hoping there's water down there because this is not normal.
SPEAKER_00:It's certainly not normal. Even in just the expressions that he tasted and how he makes the there's no baseline recipe. There's no mother sauce here. These are specific grain bills that are destined for barrels. There is no baseline couvet that then gets put into different barrels or put into a barrel age and then finish something. Uh, he had this little line over there that I loved. You know, these aren't cask-finished whiskies, they're cask-started. Even if they go through a progression, there is a very clear vision from the beginning. So it's not just seasoning something, but it's a it's an evolution, which again, completely counterintuitive to the whiskey landscape where the sherry cask finish, the rum cask finish or whatever, is just putting not lipstick on a pig, but it's, you know, it's it's a different model and it's a lot more about not appropriation, again. You know, I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum there, but it's it's dressing things up. Where he said, no, like I want to like sew a very, very unique tapestry from the start and I know where it's gonna end. And he sort of figured out how to do it along the way.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, for sure. When I first tasted these, I had an image of someone in front of an easel who was like, I'm not going to start with anything in particular to try and create a base for all of this. I'm just going to paint. And I'm going to utilize beryl not as the thing, but as a color in the painting. And that's what it expressed to me. I was totally blown away by these. They were they're crazy to taste. Before we get into the whiskey nerd side of Nogalon, what is your take on why French whiskey is a slow but steady, still in the shadows part of the whiskey world? Give us the Michael Lloyd hot take.
SPEAKER_00:It's not something entirely new. You know, this has been happening for a while, but I think it's been it's been in the shadows. When you think about France, when you think about alcohol from France, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? Wine.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:What are the first five things that come to your mind? They're wine or they are wine adjacent. They're usually from grapes. It's wine, it's wine, champagne, burgundy, whatever you want to call it, the big categories, wine in general, then maybe cognac. Then if you're a nerd, maybe it's Armagnac. If you're some kind of very strange, well-traveled nerd uh and francophile fiend and married end of the conversation. But all of those things, you know, cider and calvados might, again, might make it in there. And this is for someone who is branched out. You never really got to whiskey because there are these huge loud voices in whiskey, from a you know, the brash American voice to Scottish and the Irish, which is where these traditions came from. But there have not been champions of this category, and there's an appreciation for it, I think, but it just doesn't have the market cachet yet. And it didn't certainly hasn't had the dollars behind it. I mean, we're talking about real people in small towns doing something they're passionate about, and that, you know, thankfully, we can shine a spotlight on that. But up to now, the whiskey world, not that they weren't interested, but they didn't, you know, it just didn't make it into the mainstream discourse.
SPEAKER_02:I think you nailed it with there a lot of loud voices. I think that there have been very dominant aspects in the whiskey world that have not shifted dramatically over the last 20 years. Maybe Japan throws a little bit of a curveball in there, but it's been pretty consistent and it's large house, large uh voice brands that have dominated the whiskey world. And France, it's hard to name a big whiskey brand in France. Most people that aren't into this would have a hard time with that. And so I think that one could say that's a some sort of deficit, or they could say it's a huge opportunity. I'm in the opportunity camp, especially with what's available in France in terms of grain, water, know-how, from distillation perspective, history. It seems like it's kind of inevitable.
SPEAKER_00:It's just when. It's just when in the global commons is so much broader and there are so many, they're not hacks, but the rise of the blogosphere, which we are in the, I don't know, the what the teenth iteration of now is what allows these things to to make it out into the world once someone, someone with some sort of knowledge and or a reputation for knowledge, whether it's real or not, uh says, Hey, look at this. And that's how we got to where we are with Japanese whiskey.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, my whiskey, MySpace never took off. I don't know why.
SPEAKER_00:It was overshadowed by your various other projects and and blogs at Champagne Tales, I imagine.
SPEAKER_02:Let's take a quick break and let's come back and do a little nerd out with Nogalon. You're listening to the Peronecast with guest Mike Veloy. And we're back. Okay, Mike. So we have a group of these whiskies that we offer in the US that are about as specific as it gets. They have a Celtic-looking label, they have a Celtic sounding name, Nagalon. And some you speak fluent Breton, right? They have some Breton names that we are, if we please uh comment on our pronunciation on all these. It's very hard to figure out how these are supposed to sound, but we're I think we're close. Give us like the the New York minute Nogalon. This is the producer, and then let's walk through the the bottlings.
SPEAKER_00:You know, Breton single malt. That's really what it comes down to here. This is barley from Brittany. It's being grown, harvested, malted locally. They are using some peat, is bringing in some Scottish peat uh for that process. Uh that is sort of the the Celtic sort of touchstone for whiskey in general, but especially these. Um, and doing all that with you know, X wine barrels. Uh, St. Amelion casque is the big part of the color palette of these, but there is a red wine influence, which I think ties this sort of separatist area with its own identity of Brittany to the rest of France and these whiskeys to the broader sort of you know beverage landscape uh in France. And the water cannot be, you can't downplay the influence of the water here. Uh, that is something that, you know, people wax poetic, especially about the Japanese whiskies. And I think that, you know, is something that really comes into play here. Local artesian well water is underlying through thread in all of these that really contributes to that unique identity. But what is an artesian well? I mean, it's basically a well that feeds itself. You don't need a pump. There's enough water that percolates up to close to the surface that it doesn't require intensive drilling and extraction and inputs of energy, whatever that is, mechanical, horse drawn, electrical, uh, to get that water up to the surface and have it be usable.
SPEAKER_02:So we're talking about single malt, we're talking about local stuff, we're talking about very specific water. And he makes stuff that he puts in various types of barrels. Let's start with the one that's right in front of us. Maybe we should just taste this.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:What's up with that?
SPEAKER_00:This is the uh, I think you know, start start with the best, or at least my favorite of them, and I think the one that speaks the most to the project. Um, it's the one that's not a single mole, ironically. In contrast to what we were just talking about. Um, this is the mesque tentade. So mesque means blend, tent means burnt, and he has several of these whiskies that have this sort of qualifier where it's uh whatever uh whiskey, but then how he chose to age it, he said gives it a burnt character. And that's really talking about, you know, smoke and spice and an element of char. Um nothing is carbonized and unpleasantly burnt. Um, it's the romantic side of burnt. It's that piece of toast that's just perfect. Uh, it's on the edge, and you know, you live dangerously with it, but it's rewarding in that character. And so this one I mentioned, yeah, being a blended whiskey. So this is not just malt, this is also buckwheat.
SPEAKER_02:This is the famous blé noir of Brittany, which they make the galette from. Correct.
SPEAKER_00:So this nice this one speaks very much to that area. You know, when we visited, we had galettes for lunch and a giant magnum of Brittany cider. Don't rub it in. Uh, you know, we'll we gotta go back. But you know, you know, buckwheat is important culturally. Uh the galette is huge. And it this being 25% of the mash bill here gives a there's a richness and a broadness.
SPEAKER_02:That is an insane nose. That is effusive. It's got fruit, it has focus too. There's no heat on the nose, absolutely none.
SPEAKER_00:And these, and these are not, you know, they're not cask strength. I know that's like a big thing in the whiskey world, but these are bottled at 45%. I mean, this is not light, this is not downproof, this is not whatever latest iteration of maker's mark watered down iteration of of a conventional whiskey. Um, these are these are, you know, pretty, pretty high test. There's a clarity here. That's what, you know, jumps out of the glass to me. Is there's no manipulation, there's no recipe, there's just something that that speaks, and it speaks very clearly about what it is and where it's from.
SPEAKER_02:That's incredible. I believe in whiskey brett's on you're allowed to add some coloring, but I don't believe Nogalon does that, correct?
SPEAKER_00:No. But they're definitely they're you know, they're not adding any kind of coloring or caramel to like round it out. Uh, they're not chill filtering. So you end up with things that for how this one is the richest, I think, in you know, in flavor profile, but to just look at At it, it seems like it's going to be a little bit lighter because it is fairly pale.
SPEAKER_02:How do you handle the the age statement question? That's that's one of the other classic whiskey nerd questions with regard to this style, this kind of artisan clear style of whiskey. What's your answer to that?
SPEAKER_00:It's culinary. It's a culinary approach. I mean, this one being a blend specifically, uh, you know, it's a couple of different base whiskeys that are age and a progression and then put together. But it's very much that they're ready when they're ready. That that would be, I think, his answer and my understanding of it is it's there are minimums. You know, he's spending uh everything's spending a minimum of three years in barrel, but they're they're ready when they're ready. This one, you know, being an assemblage, you have a little bit more room, I guess, to wiggle. But between three and six years is where he is. In ten years of a project, it makes sense that you know you have a solid stock of whiskey that age. But uh in whiskies like this, the age statement uh is just not as important when you have intentionality in how you're making it aging. If you're just putting juice in a, you know, you're putting neutral distillate in a charred or toasted barrel, and that's it. Then age statements are important. Yeah, what do you bench?
SPEAKER_02:That's what it comes to. What do you bench? Everyone's gotta be higher. That's why the age statements has been have become such a thing. I'm glad you said that.
SPEAKER_00:And you know, that's also the I mean, there's a biz there's a funnier joke here, I'm sure, but it's like using free weights or a BoFlex. You know what? I'm a big Boflex fan.
SPEAKER_02:I'd like to just hear you give us uh the Michael Lloyd take on each of these bottlings, and you can go as deep as you want.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, this is the one I could wax poetic on uh for a while, and we've already kind of done that, uh, being the blend of a peated whiskey and an unpeated uh barley and buckwheat whiskey that's gonna the cease and time in those Saint Amelion casks, and that is what's important, uh, I think here with some some other French oaks, some toasted French oaks, some X Isla casks. The next one is actually all about a Saint-Amilion cask. It's called Ruse, uh, which means red. And this is one that was not initially going to be part of his lineup, and he was he was making a whiskey that he knew that he thought would blend into something else, but he wanted to have he needed to do something to prepare these freshly emptied Saint-Amilion casks. So it wasn't like he was just using it to like wash the barrel, but he said, I think I can use this as a component. This will be part of a color palette for something, but I need it also to prepare the canvas. This is part of that treatment. I'm thinking about like the Bob Ross, like titanium white under layer, you know, beneath the sky before you put any blue. You need the right white underneath it. And I think that that's sort of what he was doing with this. What he ended up with is something lovely that screams of beautiful red wine fruit and a supple of cigar box tannin and uh you know spice profile.
SPEAKER_02:A little bit of that ozone, the Sentimillion harmonics all over that whiskey.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's it's gorgeous. It is a wine drinker's whiskey, and it's it's things like it's bottling like the ruse that have brought me back to spirits from my long languishing wine stupor. So those are the two that sort of stand on their own of the bottlings we have now that have distinct identities and their own sort of story. The other three uh are part of like a it's a trio. It's a triptych of whiskey, if you will. A triptych of whiskey, I like that. And this gets back towards the a little more, I think, the Celtic influence here. I mean, that's a through line with all these, but these are really about these are, you know, peated single malt whiskey de Breton that you can give to your Scotch-loving uncle. Um, I mean, all of these are appropriate for that. Uh, but the die uh uh triptych of whiskies speak a little more clearly to uh the Isla influence here. So you're seeing all Breton barley, it's peated uh with Scotch peat to 35 parts per millionth, which someone out there that means something to them. The serious whiskey heads for sure, aging minimum of three years, but usually closer to six, um, in X Isla whiskey barrels. And the first is super pale in color, it is light and surprisingly smoky, like an Isla whiskey should be.
SPEAKER_02:That happens to be my favorite one. It's called Scalare. I find that one I used to drink a fair amount of scotch a really long time ago after I would finish my shift at Carmines. I would go to this whiskey bar in Times Square, and it reminds me of that time, and it reminds me of the stuff that I was drinking, which was aromatic, clear in the glass, and didn't have the the of a feel of wood on them. They were they were pretty direct. I loved it.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so that's the that's the scler, that's the the clear representation uh there. So then it gets into the the Tantad expression, as I was mentioned before, means burnt. So this is getting a little bit of different barrel treatment. Um Isla casks, uh, but he starts in the St. Amelion cask. So he he kind of puts it in um it's one batch that's just it's a and also from his really small stills, he uses these really small uh Portuguese stills that basically one run, one fermentation and one distillation run gives you about a barrel's worth of spirit. Crazy. So it's not about the single barrel or the one thing, but you take one batch, uh Cynamelian cask first, then the X Isla cask, and he puts it in into these uh super chard. I mean, I think we're beyond bourbon at this point, uh, French oak barrels. He calls them alligator chard. Um, this is the inside of this barrel has turned to mostly charcoal at this point. And that is what really imparts that that burnt character uh to the smoke. And then the last one in that series, Pevar Chod for Woods. Um, so this is uh basically he there is a progression, but a little bit of blending here. So it's kind of the best of both worlds where you're seeing that combination of French oak, Saint-Amilion, hard char casks, and some just old kind of neutral barrels laying around that he puts all together. And that one is bought a little higher, that's 49%. Uh, so it it it packs a punch and uh is really uh something that speaks to two sides of the whiskey world that I really like, where you have in a different influence of different barrels kind of coming together and producing something that's greater than the sum of their parts. That's incredible.
SPEAKER_02:Which order do you like to taste these in? Do you have a particular order that you like? If one had to?
SPEAKER_00:If one had to, which I have to on a somewhat regular basis. It definitely, I think it depends on how well I know the person I'm tasting them with. But that trio that I just mentioned, the uh trio, I start with the scalar, then into the tentad, and then the the pevocho, the four woods, and then I do the other two, uh, the mescant and the ruse. So sort of the reverse order than we talked about them. You can either put the two more unique, I'm holding up air quotes as I say that because they're all it's great for podcasts. Rather unique. Um, this is being video cast too, right? But uh, you know, the two that are the oddballs, the ruse and the mesque tentade, those can either go first or last. And then the other three, because they have similar base and more in common, I like to present in like that linear order together.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, one of our colleagues, Russell Agonas, who's a a very fluent Beeritz guy, he's distilled. He said to me recently, don't just think of them as French whiskies, think of them as Celtic whiskies. And I think that's a very insightful comment because they're both. And it's a unique situation to be able to say that and have this kind of pure expression across the board.
SPEAKER_00:For sure. And that's that's really well said by Russell. And it's something that once I learned that about the Celtic heritage of that region, then these whiskeys made a lot more sense. You know, you can say French whiskey and that conjures up some notions because there are some out there. Uh, but these be are are actually Celtic whiskey. Um, they're from a Celtic tradition. And I've had people put them on menus like that, just kind of on their own. I'll tell them the story and they say, well, how can I communicate this to my guest? And calling them Celtic whiskies has been the most effective way I've seen it done.
SPEAKER_02:Killer. Before we cheers and have a little bit more of this whiskey. How do you like to serve these? Do you have a particular take? Are you a couple drops of water person? Like what's what's your vibe on serving Nagalon? Or is it just whatever wherever the moment takes you?
SPEAKER_00:These I think the little bit of water is probably my favorite. It's that or neat. I don't drink a lot of spirits neat anymore. The occasional very old rum and a marrow. When it comes to whiskey, I've gone soft as someone who used to drink a an unholy amount of rye whiskey. I have a different sort of taste for the stuff now. But these, despite their proof, uh, they do drink really well neat, but I also think a couple drops of water really do open them up. They can handle a big rock, but these have so much nuance that too much dilution just kind of gets in the way. One cube, if you're really like that style, a couple drops of water, I think, is ideal. If you're really looking to get to the heart of it, straight up is probably the way to go.
SPEAKER_02:Love that. Mike, thank you very much for joining us. That was really informative and it's a very in-depth look at Nogalon, and I really appreciate your time.
SPEAKER_00:No, it's been a pleasure to be here. Uh, I obviously love these things and love talking about them. And, you know, these are stories that need to be told. I'll also throw in one more plug. We mentioned he's a composer. On our website, on the Nogalon page, you can find a link to the album he composed uh during the dark months of 2020. Worth a listen, especially on a dreary evening with a bottle of Mesquis Breton. I love that.
SPEAKER_02:We'll link it in the show notes. Thank you very much for listening to the Peronecast. I'm your host, Ryan Looper. Big gratitude and appreciation to today's guests, the full team at Demaison, all of our producers and all of you. If you want to keep track, hit follow on Spotify, Apple, or your favorite podcast platform, or follow us on the Instagram at Demaison Selections. And remember, if you find the Perone, it's Demaison.
