Elusive Umami: a chef’s vocabulary enters whisky

What happens when a blender borrows a chef’s vocabulary? Johnnie Walker Blue Label Elusive Umami began with that question, using a term associated with savoury taste to frame an exchange between whisky and cooking.

WAYFARER’s October 2023 account described master blender Emma Walker’s collaboration with chef Kei Kobayashi. Their subject was not a recipe added to a bottle, but the interpretation of a sensory idea through the material and methods available to a Scotch blender.

A language shared across two practices

Umami is commonly discussed alongside sweet, sour, salty and bitter. Familiar examples in food include aged cheese, soy sauce and tomatoes. The original article used those references to introduce a taste that can be easier to recognise than to describe.

Kobayashi supplied the perspective of composing a dish. Walker’s role was to consider how that perspective might inform the selection and combination of whiskies.

The collaboration’s name therefore functioned as an editorial brief as well as a product identity. It invited attention to savoury character rather than only the more conventional tasting language of fruit, smoke or sweetness.

This adaptation does not claim a new tasting or reproduce the promotional quotations as independent findings. Its interest is the exchange itself: two practitioners working with different ingredients but a shared problem of balance, texture and recognition.

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Adapted from the WAYFARER Brazil archive, first published 2023-10-17. English adaptation: 6 October 2026. This is an archival account, not a report of a new visit. Exhibitions, collections and menu details are described in their original context, not as current availability.