Ep. 245: Woven Whisky with Pete Allison and Nick Ravenhall Show Notes

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Jul 21

Woven Whisky: Blending Beyond Borders with Nick Ravenhall and Pete Allison

This episode is not with a distiller. It is with a blending house, one about which I’m quite excited.

I’m joined by Nick Ravenhall and Pete Allison, two of the founders of Woven Whisky, a relatively young blending house based in Leith that has already become one of the most interesting voices in whisky. Woven was established in 2020, released its first whiskies in 2021, and has spent the years since making a very clear argument: blending is not the cheap seats of whisky. Done well, it is one of whisky’s most creative acts.

That idea runs through everything Woven does, from its Scotch-based blends to its blended world whiskies, from Homemade and Hemispheres to Pure Malt, Superblend, Pastures New, Friends in the North, and WXC, its coffee-and-whisky spirit drink. Woven’s world is not built around the usual hierarchy of single malt above blend, Scotland above everywhere else, or age statement above experience. It is built around flavor, texture, connection, curiosity, and one extremely useful guiding word: yummy.

That may sound simple.

It is not.

Woven Whisky and the Return of Blending to Leith

Woven is based in Leith, which gives the whole project an immediate historical charge.

Leith has a deep history in whisky blending, rectifying, warehousing, and merchant culture. The Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s Vaults sit nearby. The old whisky district left its marks. Port, trade, blending, and movement are all part of the neighborhood’s story.

But Nick and Pete are careful not to frame Woven as an attempt to “bring Leith back.” Leith never left. The point is not nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake. It is a forward-facing continuation of a place that already had blending in its bones.

That matters for Woven’s identity. The name itself speaks to blending, but also to people, memories, ideas, and experience. Some of the best whisky moments are not the ones where everyone is buried in tasting notes, arguing over ppm or cask types. They are the moments when the glass becomes part of something larger: conversation, food, friendship, place, music, texture, memory.

Woven is trying to put that idea into liquid.

Why Woven Became a Blending House Instead of a Distillery

Like many modern whisky dreamers, the founders did at least look at distilling.

That did not last long.

A distillery requires capital, time, space, equipment, patience, and then even more patience after the first patience has run out. Woven came together at a moment when the new distilling scene already felt crowded, and for Nick, Pete, and fellow founder Duncan McRae, blending offered a more immediate and more natural way into whisky-making.

More importantly, blending was the part that excited them.

All three founders came through bars, hospitality, brand work, and drink-building rather than a formal whisky-making apprenticeship. That background matters. A bartender learns balance, structure, texture, dilution, service, context, and the small difference between a drink that works and one that merely contains ingredients. Woven takes that same logic and applies it to whisky.

The result is not “we could not build a distillery, so we blended instead.”

The result is “blending was the better tool for the story they wanted to tell.”

From Hospitality to Whisky Making

Pete, Nick, and Duncan were not trained as traditional blenders.

That could have been a weakness. Instead, it became part of the method.

They came from hospitality, where drinks are built through combination. A cocktail is rarely about one ingredient alone. It is about how components interact: sweet, bitter, acid, texture, length, aroma, temperature, dilution, glassware, occasion. That mindset gives Woven a slightly different entry point into whisky.

Pete’s blending approach, as he describes it, is part logic, part intuition. Over time, he has built an internal memory of how different whiskies behave, but he still returns to a grid system when something new or strange lands on the table. The grid is not romantic in the old whisky sense. It is not a mysterious nose-in-glass oracle act. It is structured, iterative, and practical.

Try combinations. Eliminate what fails. Build around what works. Adjust. Test. Marry. Revisit.

Then ask the only question that really survives the whole process: is it yummy?

The Woven Blending Philosophy: Texture, Clarity, and Balance

One of my favorite parts of this conversation was Pete talking through blending as a process of structure rather than sorcery.

He is not looking to stack five whiskies on top of each other and leave the seams showing. His goal is one whisky. Not five layers. One finished thing.

That is where texture becomes so important. Pete thinks about mouthfeel early. He wants the blend to have shape and movement before the final aromatic and flavor details lock into place. He also wants clarity. Not simplicity, necessarily, but a clear peak of flavor where the blend knows what it is trying to say.

That comes directly from hospitality. In a well-built cocktail, one element should not obliterate the rest. The same is true here. If a component only shouts, it may be useful in tiny amounts, but it cannot be allowed to run the meeting.

The trick is not finding loud whisky.

The trick is finding where loud belongs.

Experiences, Not Expressions

Woven initially called its releases “experiences” rather than expressions.

That might sound like marketing varnish until Pete explains the thinking behind it. The team had a shared document full of ideas: feelings, memories, places, moods, and sensory sketches. A whisky might start with something like being lost in woods near the sea, or the comfort of a pub with your dad, or a feeling of happiness that cannot be reduced to “vanilla, orchard fruit, and baking spice.”

Those concepts helped guide the final stages of blending.

The consumer’s experience may not match the founders’ original one, and that is part of the point. A whisky called Modern Nostalgia can mean one thing at a table full of friends after dinner and something entirely different alone by a rainy window. Woven does not try to control the whole emotional outcome. It gives the whisky a point of departure.

That is a subtle but important shift.

Tasting notes tell you what someone found in the glass. Experiences ask what the glass becomes once it leaves the lab.

Homemade, Hemispheres, Pure Malt, and WXC

Woven sent over several bottles for this episode: Hemispheres, Homemade, Pure Malt, and WXC.

Homemade stood out to me immediately. It is inspired in part by Bailie Nicol Jarvie, the old Leith-connected blend that Pete’s father drank and that still clearly holds a place in his own whisky memory. It is rich, approachable, textured, and just strange enough to avoid feeling like a museum piece.

Hemispheres makes Woven’s world-whisky argument in a very direct way: New Zealand single malt from Thomson, with Manuka smoke, meeting Scotch grain whisky. Pete described that Manuka-smoked component as bringing orange oil, clove oil, coconut oil, wood smoke, barbecue, and meaty smoke into the blending room, flavors that simply do not appear in the same way from Scottish malt. That is where Woven’s blending gets exciting. The point is not to make New Zealand taste Scottish. The point is to let New Zealand bring something Scotland cannot.

Pure Malt takes a more malt-forward route, looking at the old idea of blended malt through a more global lens.

And then there is WXC, the coffee-and-whisky spirit drink I did not expect to enjoy as much as I did. It is not coffee liqueur. It is not dessert syrup pretending to be whisky. Pete describes it as the result of working with Assembly Coffee Roasters and Colombian coffee from the Caturrita Estate, using coffee’s natural sweetness rather than adding sugar. It is a flavored whisky adjacent idea, except done in a Woven way: technical, flavor-first, and far more serious than the category usually gets credit for.

Blending Across Borders

Woven did not begin with world whisky as the master plan.

At first, the team stayed inside Scotch. They wanted to learn, earn trust, and prove that their blending approach worked. Then samples began to arrive from friends and producers around the world. A New Zealand whisky here. A Nordic whisky there. Something unusual from a distillery with a different climate, different grain, different technique, and a different idea of what whisky could be.

Pete described Scotch as an IMAX cinema of flavor, which is a lovely image because it gives Scotch full credit. But then world whisky adds another dimension. It is not replacing Scotch. It is putting on 3D glasses.

That is the heart of Woven’s cross-border blending philosophy. Scotland remains incredibly useful, especially because Woven is based there and has access to excellent grain whisky and strong infrastructure. But world whisky brings colors that do not exist on the Scottish palette in the same way.

That does not make one better.

It gives the blender more to paint with.

Friends in the North, Pastures New, and Superblend

Some Woven releases make the cross-border argument especially clearly.

Friends in the North looks to the Nordic whisky scene and brings together producers whose commonality is not a single flavor profile, but a shared willingness to define whisky on their own terms. Pete expected to find a red thread running through Nordic whisky. Instead, he found distilleries with distinct philosophies, techniques, and local identities. That was more interesting.

Pastures New focuses on English whisky, a category close enough to Scotland geographically to benefit from whisky infrastructure, but far enough creatively to move in different directions. English distilleries can borrow, adapt, and ignore in ways that make the category feel alive.

Superblend takes the super-band idea globally, pulling from different countries and asking what happens when the “band” is not a single dominant lead singer with backing players, but a set of strong personalities made coherent by the blend.

That is the constant tension in Woven’s best work: you want to know the parts, but the goal is still the whole.

Transparency Without Turning the Bottle Into a Spreadsheet

Whisky drinkers love asking where things come from.

I do too.

Woven understands that curiosity and tries to be as transparent as it can. Sometimes names cannot be shared. Sometimes naming rights cost money. Sometimes a producer does not want its name attached. Sometimes the information is available through QR codes or deeper supporting materials instead of being plastered across the front label.

But Pete and Nick are also pushing back against the idea that components are the main event.

That is especially tricky for a whisky like Friends in the North. If a blend is built around Nordic whisky, then of course I want to know which Nordic distilleries are involved. But if I only drink it as a set of components, I miss the point of the work. Pete does not want someone drinking five whiskies layered together. He wants them drinking one Woven whisky.

The information is useful. The blend is the destination.

Or, put another way: transparency should support the drink, not replace it.

The Problem With the Word “Blend”

A huge part of Woven’s mission is rehabilitating the word “blend.”

That word carries baggage. Generations of inexpensive supermarket blends trained drinkers to hear “blend” and think “cheap,” “industrial,” or “lesser than single malt.” At the same time, single malt built its reputation around place, prestige, distillery identity, and premium pricing.

Woven is not pretending that reputation gap does not exist. It is attacking it directly.

Blending, in Woven’s view, is not a shortcut. It is whisky making. It requires selection, proportion, structure, patience, sensory skill, and a willingness to make something new from existing pieces. In many ways, it may be the most creative part of whisky, precisely because the blender can work with distilleries, countries, grains, cask types, and techniques that would never coexist inside a single distillery’s production cycle.

The challenge is consumer trust.

Woven is building that trust one bottle at a time.

Price, Accessibility, and Whisky for Drinking

One of the things I appreciated most in this conversation was how seriously Woven takes price.

That may sound odd in a category increasingly comfortable with three-figure “limited” releases, but Woven is clear-eyed about the route to market. A bottle may need to move from Woven to importer to wholesaler to retailer to drinker. Every step adds cost. If the starting price is already high, the final price can become a dare.

Woven wants quality to overdeliver for the price.

That is why the core range is structured to bring people in rather than scare them off. It is also why the bottles feel meant to be opened. Woven is not making whisky as a stock certificate with tasting notes. The point is to drink it, share it, mix it, highball it, pour it for someone, bring it to dinner, or use it as the thing that starts the conversation.

There is a lot of whisky right now being marketed as too good to drink.

Woven is quietly, cheerfully, stylishly rejecting that whole cursed little altar.

GIs, World Whisky, and Letting Categories Breathe

One of the bigger philosophical turns in the episode came when Nick talked about world whisky and governing rules.

His view is that younger whisky-making countries should be careful not to create restrictive rules too early. A geographical indication or formal definition should protect quality and identity once the category knows what it is protecting. It should not prematurely tell distillers what they are allowed to become.

Japanese whisky is an example where formal standards became necessary because the category’s credibility needed protection. American single malt is another example of a definition helping producers name something they were already making. Those rules can protect quality and make the category legible.

But in newer whisky regions, Nick argues, creativity still needs room.

Pete added a useful layer from the Nordic trip. He expected the Nordic distilleries to share some kind of regional profile. Instead, each distillery was building its own internal logic and pushing against its own self-created boundaries. That seems much healthier than forcing a national character too soon.

Whisky needs rules.

It also needs oxygen.

Woven’s Leith Blending Rooms and the Next Phase

Woven is also becoming more physical.

The company now has blending rooms in Leith, giving people the chance to work with Woven’s flavor library, build their own blend, bottle it, label it, and take it home. That is a logical extension of the whole project. Woven has always been about experience, participation, and making blending visible. A blending room takes that from idea to actual table.

The company is also looking outward. Duncan is based in Australia, and Nick talked about Melbourne as a likely first step for a more local blending-room or satellite-style presence. Australia makes sense. It has an energetic whisky scene, a strong community of producers, and an audience that has responded well to Woven’s approach.

The goal is not only to ship whisky around the world.

It is to make whisky in conversation with the world.

WXC, Highballs, and Returning Whisky to the Bar

The final part of the episode came back to bars.

That feels right because bars are where Woven’s founders started. Nick talked about the Edinburgh cocktail scene of the late 2000s, a time and place full of creative energy, but one where whisky was not always central. Woven wants whisky back in that space, not as a dusty prestige object, but as something bartenders respect, use, pour, mix, and reach for.

That is where highballs come in. That is where WXC comes in. That is where the idea of selling glasses over bars, not just bottles on shelves, becomes important.

Nick mentioned brands like Fortaleza and Michter’s as examples of bottles bartenders respect and love to use. That is the kind of place Woven wants to reach: not just admired by collectors or discussed by whisky obsessives, but poured because it works.

For a blending house, that may be the perfect ambition.

A blend should live in the glass.

What Woven Whisky Is Really Asking

At its simplest, Woven is asking one question:

What can whisky be?

That question can sound vague until you hear Nick and Pete talk through the details. It means blending Scotch with New Zealand Manuka-smoked malt. It means making a 100% English whisky blend. It means looking at Nordic whisky without assuming a Nordic flavor profile. It means making a coffee-and-whisky spirit drink without sugar. It means caring about price. It means resisting the idea that “blend” means lesser. It means being transparent without letting the component list become the whole experience.

Woven is not trying to replace single malt. It is not trying to cosplay as Compass Box. It is not trying to turn world whisky into a gimmick drawer.

It is trying to show that blending can move whisky forward.

That is a much bigger project than putting good casks together, though it starts there. It is a project about flavor, people, place, logistics, trust, hospitality, and the hard work of making something complex feel easy to drink.

In the end, Pete’s North Star may be the best one.

It has to be yummy.

Everything else can argue its case after the glass is empty.