Released in 2021 as the inaugural expression of The Lakes Distillery's prestige Quatrefoil Collection, Salutation is — as the name suggests — a welcome, an opening gesture, a raised glass. Whiskymaker Dhavall Gandhi conceived the Quatrefoil range as the most ambitious articulation of his elevated, marriage-led philosophy, and Salutation is where that ambition first made it into glass.
The quatrefoil itself is a four-lobed motif, and the series is built around the idea of four harmonising elements: spirit, cask, marriage and time. For Salutation the marriage draws heavily on sherry-seasoned European oak — Oloroso and PX at the heart of it — and the result at 52% ABV is an opulent, deeply layered Cumbrian single malt.
The nose is fruitcake fresh from the oven: sultana, glacé cherry, candied citrus, burnt sugar, a whisper of sandalwood. The palate is where the patience of the marrying process truly announces itself — dark honey, dried fig, roasted coffee, clove, dark chocolate truffle — with PX sweetness swelling and then being reined in by tannic oak just before it tips into excess.
The finish is exceptionally long, resinous, fading on cocoa, tobacco leaf and candied orange. Salutation is the kind of bottle you open slowly and return to repeatedly, finding a new thread each time. It is also the moment at which The Lakes Distillery planted its flag firmly in the territory of world-class prestige whisky — and did so on its own Cumbrian terms.
Presented in a heavy decanter with the quatrefoil motif pressed into the glass, Salutation is clearly designed as an object as well as a whisky. But it is the liquid that earns the ceremony: richly upholstered, slow-moving, endlessly generous. For drinkers used to assuming prestige English whisky is a contradiction in terms, this is the bottle that rearranges the map.
