Ruminating on whether to start a proper whisky collection

Purchasing a cheap blend called Jim McEwan’s Symphony No 1 (which you can read a bit more about here and here) on a trip to Islay, started me thinking about people who collect whisky. For me, having a whisky collection is essential, but only from the perspective of wanting a selection of whiskies to choose from whenever I want a drink (and perhaps to some extent for the purpose of learning about whisky), but some people collect whisky for other reasons.

Buying a new bottle of whisky is one of my favourite things at the moment, which sounds a bit sad, so it would be a shame if I only allowed myself to buy one at a time rather than maintaining my collection or allowing it to grow (slightly). Given the amount that I’m learning about whisky, could I put that learning and enjoyment to a more useful purpose, I wonder? That’s one of the things I’ll be asking in this feature.

My main motivation in buying whisky is that I like to drink whisky, and I want to know what they taste like – let’s say with a view to experiencing the pinnacle of what distilled spirit can offer (for some reason – why distilled spirit and not tea or something cheaper and non-alcoholic is a question for another day). I don’t know yet if one day I’ll feel like I’ve achieved that – presumably it is possible that I’ve already enjoyed a glass of whisky more than I ever will again (it certainly feels that way from time to time - and what is the greatest it, or any sensory experience can be anyway?), but for now my journey continues.

Until very recently then, I literally couldn’t imagine me purchasing a bottle of whisky for any other purpose than to drink it. If I buy a bottle with the intention of not drinking it, then I’ll always need to purchase another bottle for drinking, and I don’t have that much disposable income.

To be fair, my collection method probably doesn’t even really count as a collection any more than having four different types of pasta in your cupboard counts as having a pasta collection. If it does, I’ve got one of those too. No, I buy whiskies (special and not so special), I cherish them, I open them, I drink them, I don’t cherish them as much as I did before I opened them, I buy more (but different – I ver y rarely buy the same bottle twice).

People like to collect things, so for some, having an impressive collection is an end in itself, but when it comes to whisky, that’s something  I actually have trouble understanding – what are you keeping it for? It is at odds with the essence of what whisky is; that, as a distilled spirit – it is for drinking, unlike you know, people who collect pigs or whatever – those items are made for collecting; they have no other purpose (not real pigs, items in the shape of pigs). Even a collector of cars presumably drives his cars occasionally.

What I can understand though, is the value of actively collecting whisky as an investment. Rare bottles can sell for thousands of pounds, so with a little long term planning, smart buying and a lot of luck, in 20+ years even I could be making profits in the thousands… maybe… assuming whisky will be valuable in 20 years time. It probably will.

Presumably some whisky collectors don’t ever even drink whisky, though I expect there is some crossover for most people. They enjoy whisky, become intrigued by all those rare, expensive bottles, then maybe they realise that they could have one in the future if they start a collection now.

 What intrigues me about those expensive bottles though is what does it taste like? I’ll never actually find out – unless I buy something now, keep it, and get lucky enough for it to be rare and expensive in 20 years. However, it will only taste the same in 20 years as it does now, so in reality, I could already know what it tastes like, I just don’t know what those bottles that are already vintage and expensive now taste like – and some collectors will never know despite owning a bottle. So isn’t it still better to buy it and then drink it? Yes, but then of course, I haven’t made any money. But nor will I have had to keep something for 20 odd years.

It just brings me back to how good can it be? In some last minute research before posting this entry I looked up the most expensive bottles that are available on The Whisky Exchange and found an Ardbeg at £3500 (not the most expensive by a long way, to be fair, but I chose to focus on Ardbeg that day) that Jim Murray had supposedly raved about… giving it 96 out of 100. But the ordinary 10 year old Ardbeg that you can buy for around £40 scores 97 out of 100… so there’s really no point, is there?

The ultimate, innocent ideal in terms of collecting is probably someone collecting whisky for fun, as a child does, and then one day realising their collection is worth a staggering amount of money. Overall though, there can only be three purposes behind collecting whisky; drink it, sell it, bequeath it to a loved one. You can’t take it with you, so collecting for the sake of it doesn’t make sense. One day you’ve got to decide am I going to drink it, am I going to sell it? And if neither… well your heirs might appreciate it, or they might just have a party and throw it away, all the while shouting, “Chug! Chug! Chug!” and going, “Woooooooo!”

And that would be a massive crime. On your part.

Or if you haven’t got heirs, you could have a massive house made of scratching posts constructed for your cats and feed them fresh trout for the rest of their natural lives. Or get someone else to.

Buying whisky for investment isn’t all that attractive to me anyway. It begs the question, if a bottle of whisky can be sold for thousands of pounts… what is the motivation of the person who buys it? Presumably doing so is no longer an investment, so must surely be a vanity project – to own the most expensive whiskies.  

It’s been a while since we had an imaginary conversation on the blog, so imagine you met someone who told you they had an impressive vintage whisky collection, and took you to see it:

wow, this is amazing! I’d love to try… this one… and this one… and in fact, all of these…

Well you can’t.

Have you tried any of them?

No.

Do you think you ever will? Cos if you do, can I come?

I probably won’t open them.

[collective sadface]

An acquaintance of mine tends to buy two of everything – one for drinking, one for collecting. That’s all very well, but not all whisky is cheap, and it seems likely that a good proportion of the whisky that one day is going to be valuable is already fairly expensive, so in the short term, that £70 you’re indulging yourself with… just became £140 [yes dear, we can still go on holiday… it’ll just be Clacton-on-Sea this year.]

Of most potential value is going to be anything that isn’t widely available, and particularly bottles from closed distilleries and limited editions – where the bottles might be numbered, or from a single cask, and generally particularly old. That stuff don’t (necessarily) come cheap, though it is useful as a guide for whether you should buy two bottles of something.

My thinking at the moment is that I would rather have had a rare bottle and drank it, than to have one and never find out how it tastes. So maybe one day I’ll be perusing expensive bottles and find one I’ve already drunk. And then I think I’ll feel smug rather than upset that I didn’t save it. Perhaps some collectors reach a point where it doesn’t matter how the whisky tastes – it is in fact purely a commodity and no longer an example of one of life’s finer pleasures.

Nevertheless, THIS interesting and informative website has some interesting points to make on the matter of tasting and collecting – two of which are very good pieces of advice.

Firstly, if you are serious about starting a collection, you should agree an investment budget with your partner per year. That sounds doable, and I have even mooted this possibility with Mrs Cake. I reckon that for £200 a year  I could select between 2 and 4 bottles that might give me some chance of turning a profit a number of years down the line.

But what if you don’t live long enough to either sell it or enjoy it? That brings me to the other suggestion which actually deals with the dilemma of collecting versus drinking. The solution? Not buy two bottles, buy three. Then you drink one, save one to sell in the medium term in order to accrue more funds for investment, and keep the third indefinitely to accrue maximum value – except then you have to triple your outlay… which is frankly ludicrous.

Collecting whisky for investment is obviously a long term endeavour. You aren’t going to make much money for a good while and you’re going to need somewhere to safely keep that growing collection, but if you can keep it up and forget about it, one day you might find yourself sitting on an impressive sum and maybe even afford that yacht you’ve always dreamed of (but still probably not).

For now, I’m content to simply buy and drink. The future’s a long way away and, thinking about it, the potential benefits probably aren’t that significant anyway, once you’re ensconced in the reality of life and money. It’s like recently when Mrs Cake and I were thinking about getting life insurance, and based on how much we were willing to pay each month, they determined we could have a £150,000 policy, so if I or Mrs Cake died, the other would get that sum. Frankly that just doesn’t seem enough to be worth bothering with. It would help if we had kids, but since we don’t (Operation Impregnatron pending), I can’t see an Aston Martin or a paid mortgage or a lonely holiday in Asia and a few years off work mending a broken heart (aw).

So with whisky, clearly I’d have to be making a profit of lottery jackpot proportions in 20-30 years if I was going to consider it worthwhile and, given that so many bottles have a price in the thousands for age, vintage and rarity when released by the distillery is it actually going to be those that I can’t afford in the first place that are more likely to increase in value to astronomical levels rather than my modest £50-£100 efforts? Probably. I’d want the return on my investment to be life-changing, not representative of a fairly large drop in a cosmic sized ocean. I’ve never really been motivated by money anyway.

So I think I’ve talked myself out of it for the moment. Don’t let me convince you it isn’t worth your while though. Perhaps you can justify the kind of investment required more than I can. You have to speculate to accumulate after all, they say. It’s just that my speculation leads me to thinking I’m not really that bothered. You’re not me though, are you? No. Make your own mind up. And just think, if I keep drinking all those bottles that might be valuable one day, that only serves to make yours more valuable (because there will be less of them). You’re welcome.

That’s it for me for another week. Thanks for staying till the end if you did. I’ll be back uh… perhaps not next week as I think I’m going to Amsterdam and Berlin to seek out some beer, jenever, absinthe and possibly brandy but, after that, as ever I’ll be back with something equally as interesting as this week’s post no doubt. In the meantime, enjoy yer week, enjoy yer booze and if you’ve already got a whisky collection, leave me a message eh? I’d be interested to hear what your motivation is, how it’s going, how you got started and, more importantly, what’s in it?

Poker Night... Part 3

Happy Sunday, everybody! You join me today as I reminisce on another poker night that I really should have told you about earlier, but life got in the way. So without further prevarication, I give you... poker night part 3.

Another Saturday, another poker event, another haze of drunken tomfoolery, and very good it was too – and not just because I won two of the rounds and finished second in the other. To be fair, I should have won that one too, but I got a bit carried away on the penultimate hand and betted when I should have gotten out.

Poker sure is fun, and we had a great old laugh, but one of the things I look forward to at least as much as the poker and the laughter… is the booze. I almost said there that it is an unwritten rule that you need to bring some special hard liquor with you, but frankly not everyone does. David brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate his new job appointment and a bottle of RuaVieja – which oddly enough has featured on these pages before (twice in fact) while Chris and Dave just took care of cider for themselves. I decided on a few bottles of whisky for everyone to try – Jim McEwan’s Symphony No 1, a blend which continues to go down very nicely, a Glenmorangie Original that I hadn’t opened yet, and… the one I’d been waiting to open for about a month… the Suntory Hakushu 12.

I’d also requested that Dave collect a few bottles of Double Maxim from his local Morrison’s, which he was kind enough to do.

So it was straight in with a beer, and the beginning of the poker.

The first game always seems to be a bit cagey, as the various players try to feel out the parameters – how cautious should you be? What effect are the specific blinds going to have? What are the playing styles of each player?

I won the first two or three hands, and it was looking good. We all betted cautiously, but I started to grow bolder as I saw that I seemed to be the only one getting decent hands. Chris was folding almost straight away every time, and Dave was bluffing when he had absolutely nothing. He won one or two like that though, and in the end it came down to me and him.

I’d almost finished my second beer by this point, had started a glass of the Symphony (no 1! 46% ABV), and was alternating sips of that with gulps of David’s champagne. So as we reached the closing stages of the first game, I realised I was on the way to being drunk – this was before dinner, of course. Three to four pints of water were in order.

That worked a treat, but not quick enough to prevent me betting big on the penultimate hand when I had nothing. A minute or two after that it was all over, and I knew it had all been my fault.

After popping out to the local curry house for tea, I went on to win games two and three [bit of poetry there for you]. I can’t recall any details about these, but I know there was a great deal of raucous laughter and smutty humour. I haven’t laughed so much and so heartily in a long time. David tells me that as we were clearing up afterwards, Chris mistook pictures of playing cards on the box of the poker set for real cards, and tried to pick them up. He then put on his glasses and went to sleep on the sofa. Dave and I joked that he had put on his glasses so that he could see his dreams better.

Game two was preceded by the opening of the Glenmorangie Original, which is 40% ABV, and 10 years old . I’d only tried this once before, and hadn’t been impressed, but there was a possibility the contents of that bottle had been compromised over time, since I was told the cork had atrophied. My bottle was an impulse buy when I saw it at £6 off on a trip to Tesco. I was never going to pay full price, and that discount gave me just enough incentive to give it a go. At first taste it seemed thin and uninteresting, but since the poker night in question was some time ago now, I can inform you that it became an example of another single malt that I came to enjoy more thoroughly by the glass.

It is fruity and sweet, and one that I’d encourage you to pick up if you see it on a £25 offer again. I probably will. It scores a remarkable 94 in Jim Murray’s 2013 Whisky Bible, though I wouldn’t quite rate it that highly.

The nose revealed pleasing orange notes while the palate brought sherbet and sweet, sweet barley. Far from being something to write off as an everyday drink, it came to be a treat that I actually preferred most times to the Talisker 10 (read more about that in the coming weeks), that I picked up the next time Tesco had some offers on. It doesn’t place all that highly on the all time single malt rankings, but for a malt at the very lower end of the price spectrum it punches way above its weight.

Back to the poker night, and finally it was the moment I’d been waiting for: the opening of the Suntory Hakushu 12 (43% ABV). I had toyed with the idea of not bringing this along at all, since my bottle of Maker’s Mark had lasted only two poker nights, proving so popular that people just inhaled it. Nevertheless, what’s the point in buying something a bit special if you keep it to yourself? (and anyway, the faster you drink it, the sooner you can buy something else…)

Suntory is the oldest Japanese distiller, and actually owns three distilleries – Yamazaki, Hibiki and Hakushu – each producing their own highly regarded single malts. I’ve tried the Hibiki once before, but this was my first purchase of an actual bottle of Japanese malt, a decision I took based on reviews and scoring from a number of experts and review sites.

The bottle certainly looks the part, but I was a little disappointed to find that it is sealed by a screwcap – a better class of screwcap, I’ll grant you, than the standard one you get with a blended scotch, but still… this is a single malt -  and I was hoping to hear that sound I love so much – you know the one; the squeak and the pop.

Luckily, the contents make up for that one moment of denial. I know Japanese whisky is renowned for its quality, and here I can see why. It reminds me a little of my favourite malt, Caol Ila – though I don’t think it’s quite as good as that. Even so, it reaches a pretty high standard. There’s a lot going on, with a good deal of complexity and drinkability, so was looking forward to getting to know it a little better over the next few months before I come to decide what I’m going to get next.

If you’re looking for some amateurish tasting notes, I’d say it’s soft and fruity on the palate, with a little bit of peat and a slightly bitter finish – which is where it fails against the Caol Ila.

In the end, Suntory Hakushu 12 did not develop into the favourite dram that my over excitable anticipatory gland hoped it might be. Sure, it was fresh, clean and sweet but that bitter finish continued to let it down. It was however my second favourite out of 5 when it made an appearance at the Manchester Whisky Club’s Japanese Whisky Night. It remains to be seen what that says about Japanese whisky in general. I remain keen to try more and, as ever, look forward to the next poker night.

Spirits of the Year... 2013

No, I don’t believe in doing an annual review post or anything like that. If you want to know what happened in the year, look back over the blog. Nor do I think I try enough of everything to be able to make sweeping generalisations about such and such being the year’s best single malt or whatever. I would though, just very quickly, like to pay tribute to what I’m going to call my Spirits of the Year. Without getting too formal or anything, these are bottles that I enjoyed massively over the course of 2013. There’s only three, and you’ll notice that there isn’t a single malt amongst them. Single malt is probably what I drink most of, but the reason there isn’t one here – despite some excellent drams this year – is that nothing came out of nowhere and surprised me. Yep, Ardbeg 10 is great, yes, I definitely enjoyed the Caol Ila Distiller’s Edition and the Glenfarclas 10… but I kind of expected all that. So just put that aside and let's pay tribute to the unexpected… in no particular order, other than that in which I thought of it.

Vodka: Stolichnaya 100 Proof

You know that I love Stolichnaya, right? Course you do. I’ve been singing the praises of the 40% ABV red variety for years now, so it is undeniably to the blue variety’s credit that it absolutely rocked my world when I finally got around to buying a bottle. You’ll be able to read more about it in the coming weeks, but let’s just say for now that it is all the red variety is and more – with an extra 10% of ABV thrown on top. Awesome.

lended Scotch: Jim McEwan’s Symphony No 1

You might remember this from my Distilgrimage adventure. This one makes the cut because it was an absolute bargain (£13) and whether you factor in the price or not, it was a delight; the first time I’ve enjoyed a blend so fully – though not the last in2013 (shout outs but no awards, to Ballantine’s Finest and White Horse).

Grappa: Mille Lune

Another spirit that delighted and amazed in equal measure, and that you will be able to read about in more detail in the coming weeks. Despite trying it at the vineyard prior to purchase, it still surprised me on opening at home. Clean and beautifully balanced, this rocketed right to the top of my grappa league table.

So, here’s looking forward to another fun year of fine spirits and heavy drinking. I’ve already got some single malts, blends, and Canadian whiskies to open, and have just broken the seal on another grappa… Then there’s plans for trips to Florida, as well as to various countries within the EU that should yield some interesting purchases.

All of the above were so good that for me, they represent the best that their spirit genre has to offer so let’s hope 2014 brings some examples that challenge their supremacy. I don’t know what the year will bring yet, but you can be sure I’ll be telling you all about it. See you soon for the first proper post of the year and, in the meantime, you can tell me about your favourite spirits of 2013 in the comments.

Spirit Log: White Horse Blended Scotch

I had a pleasant surprise one Saturday, when a visit to my parents resulted in receiving a new bottle of whisky. Apparently my dad had been emptying out the pantry because they needed to find storage space for some things that had been displaced by the arrival of a dishwasher, and he found some booze hidden away in there – you wouldn’t get that in my house. I was invited to take a look – like one of those experts they get in on Cash in the Attic.

First out were 20cl bottles of Gordon’s Gin and Smirnoff vodka. Pretty standard, and no more than I had expected. I would have been happy to take these off their hands – I’m not a big fan of Smirnoff, or the whole genre of gin, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have requirements – nevertheless, my mum laid claim to those, for drinking with orange or tonic or whatever – she doesn’t normally, and actually had to ask me what she could mix vodka with. The answer? Nearly anything.

Far more interesting than those anyway, was what came out of the pantry next: White Horse blended scotch (40% ABV). It’s not a brand you hear much about, being as it is, more popular and readily available in overseas markets. I had heard of it though, from a brief perusal of sub-£20 blends on The Whisky Exchange (£18.55 + P&P, btw). Reviews were exclusively good so I’d made a mental note to keep an eye out for it next time I was looking to buy a blend.

It scores an impressive 90.5 in Jim Murray’s 2013 Whisky Bible, is made up of 40% malt whisky, and has as its base, the excellent Lagavulin single malt. I read somewhere though, that it is actually blended from around 40 malts in total. Does that mean each malt comprises only 1% of the resulting blend?

Where did this buried treasure come from? Apparently it all used to belong to my granddad… who died about 15 years ago. None of the bottles have been opened, so it should be fine – despite the fact that there looks to be a lot of air at the top of my bottle – perhaps some of it had evaporated? I’ve read before that whisky will taste as good as when it was bottled for hundreds of years, as long as the bottle remains unopened. And now this particular bottle belongs to me and there is no longer any chance of it remaining unopened for hundreds of years. I give it a week or two at most.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but when my grand parents learned they were not much longer for this world, they started asking me if there was anything of theirs I wanted. I said that I would like whatever they specifically wanted to give me. The person is more important to me than their stuff. A word of advice for you though, if an elderly relative of yours asks you this question, think about saying, “I wouldn’t mind having your booze”. You never know, you might get something valuable. Worst case scenario: some bottles of booze.

Something else my granddad did as the end approached was to try to give me the benefit of some useful things he had learned. One was about changing a tyre, that I’ve sadly forgotten, and the other was about how to emerge from a shower cubicle in winter without feeling the cold.

White Horse, I see, is one of Diageo’s blends, though my internet research so far has not revealed for how long Diageo has produced this particular brand. Diageo was formed in 1997 from a merger between Guinness and Grand Metropolitan, and that’s probably roughly around the time this particular bottle was produced, though nowhere on it is the name Diageo mentioned, and to be fair, my granddad could have had it for quite sometime before he passed on anyway. It remains to be seen then, whether this bottle is representative of the White Horse brand you might be able to buy today, since I’ll need to buy a new bottle to determine that.

Have you ever inherited any booze? I remember now that when my Grandma died, I was given a litre bottle of Teachers so, you know, it would be interesting to know what gets left behind at the end of a person’s life. If you were proper into whisky you’d probably make sure you were finishing the good stuff in your last days – or maybe there are more important considerations for the terminally ill. Would you drink the good stuff, leaving the Teachers, or would you save something special for the end?

A Few Weeks Later…

So, what about this White Horse, then? I broke the seal and gave it a first tasting the night of the Confederations Cup Final, and was impressed right away. In the glass, it looks simply beautiful. There’s something about that rich hue that shimmers invitingly in kitchen lighting conditions. Incidentally, I'm sorry but I don't seem to have taken a picture of the bottle. I don't know how that happened.

As I said, it is supposed to be founded on Lagavulin, and while I can’t say I detect that in there specifically, there is a definite feel of Islay. This is a nice blend – not as great as the Jim McEwan’s Symphony that rocketed right to the top of my blend league – but approaching that level of complexity and refinement.

After a couple of tastings I started to detect vanilla on the nose – like the Bladnoch 10 that I had some time ago. Grainy elements also started to show through on the finish, where I hadn’t been able to detect them before. In spite of that, on the blended scotch scale it sits closer to the delicate sweetness of the Jim McEwan’s Symphony than it does to what I consider standard budget blend fare where sweetness is lacking and instead the spirit seems rough and unpleasant .

Perhaps not one to bring out when the single malt snobs come round, but I wouldn’t use it for mixing. It’s definitely one to consider if you’re looking for a decent blend on a budget.

I see from looking at my stats today that this is my 100^th post. Go me. Thanks everyone that has popped by whether it by to read, look at a picture or whether it was entirely by accident. And apologies for my tardiness. I’ve not been so good at posting regularly of late, but I’ll keep trying. See you next week (or later this week) for something else.

Booze Battle: Dewar's 12 vs Jim McEwan's Symphony

In a slight change to this week’s scheduled post, we have a comparative tasting of two kinds of blended scotch. On the one hand we have Dewar’s 12 year old, “double aged” while on the other it’s Jim McEwan’s Symphony No. 1.

If you’ve been to this blog before, you might be aware that I’ve had the Dewar’s for some time now, having picked up a litre bottle in Duty Free last September. It’s been a bit of a grower. I wouldn’t call it special, but it ain’t bad at all. I’d almost completely finished it, but I decided to hang on to the last dram until I’d procured another blend to compare it with and, thanks to my recent distilgrimage to Islay, I had a contender.

 Jim McEwan’s Symphony No 1 was available in the Bruichladdich distillery shop. Jim is Bruichladdich’s master distiller and is highly respected having worked for 38 years at Bowmore from the age of 15 before moving to Bruichladdich in 2001. I’ve mentioned him on this blog before, way back in the beginning when I was professing a liking for the Bruichladdich Rocks expression. He is probably the first individual I ever heard of in the industry, so I was chomping at the bit to find out what this blend, which is comprised of Islay, Speyside, Highland and Lowland malts, was like. It doesn’t say anything about containing grain whisky in the mix, so I’m not sure what that might mean – because it doesn’t say anything about being a blended malt or vatted malt either.

the symphony

I’ve decided to do things a little differently this time and compare each whisky across a number of categories, just for the sake of variety. In spite of all this, there is only one statistic that really counts, and that is how tasty the whisky is.

The first thing I suppose we should discuss is price. These blends are not equally matched in that respect. The Dewar’s was a Duty Free purchase, and that showed up on my credit card bill at £28.53 for a litre. That’s roughly what you’d be looking to pay in a supermarket for 70cl generally, so it isn’t a cheap blend. I can’t say that it strikes me as much better than your standard Whyte and MacKay Special, but it sure costs about £10+ more.

Jim McEwan’s Symphony no 1 on the other hand comes in at a stunningly wallet-friendly £13 for 70cl. You’ve got to give it a go at that price. In comparison then, you’re getting 5.38cl to the pound with Symphony and only 3.51cl to the pound with the Dewar’s – and that one’s at Duty Free prices.

Price category winner: Jim McEwan’s Symphony No 1

I suppose that while we’re talking price, we should also talk availability. Dewar’s is pretty widely available but as far as I can tell so far, Symphony is only available from the Bruichladdich distillery shop. So while that would potentially make it more sought after, it means you’re looking at a trip to Islay to get hold of a bottle. Not that you would, but if you did go to Islay for the express purpose of buying a bottle of Symphony No 1, that could potentially increase the cost of your purchase from £13 to… well, let’s take the cost of my trip:

Diesel £70

Ferry £80 (for two people and a car – you don’t want to go on your own, do you?)

Accommodation £90

So not including incidental expenses and assuming you live in Manchester, or somewhere £70 in fuel away… you’d be looking at £253. Not such a bargain now, eh? But I’m not going to look at it like that, because my trip was a nice weekend away, and I bought a couple of other bottles anyway – it was more a case of, well, while I’m here, I may as well pick up a bottle of that also…

Since making my purchase, and seeking Symphony out on the internet, I’ve found two auction sites; one where a bottle was sold for £25, and another where the bottle was expected to sell for £75 to £100. Quite astounding, really. It all combines to give Symphony an air of mystique that I hoped it could live up to.

Make your own mind up who wins the availability category. Do you prefer exclusive or readily available? I think it depends. The rarity of Symphony makes me happy because I chose to buy a bottle without knowing anything about it, but if I was you reading this, and I wanted one, I’d find it annoying.

Ok, let’s look at aesthetic considerations:

Does it come in a box? Dewar’s does – 1 point. Yes, bottles are cooler than boxes, but it’s going to come in a bottle anyway, and if your booze cupboard is full, a box gives you further storage options.

Which is the cooler shaped bottle? A tough one, this. Neither is particularly special, but I’m going to award the point to Dewar’s for being a bit stubbier and more robust looking.

Screw-top or cork? Dewar’s is a screw top, but Symphony has a cork, and I think as such, is the first blend I’ve ever owned that has a cork. It definitely gets a point for that.

What about the label? I can’t say I’m a massive fan of that Dewar’s label that has like a cutout section. I’m thinking it would be more at home on a bottle of ale. However, the Symphony label is probably the worst I’ve ever seen. It looks like the cover of one of those £1.99 compilation CDs that you get in Tesco or Wilkinsons. Holy shit; who thought that was a good idea? So… I was tempted not to give any points here, but I suppose it will have to go to Dewar’s.

Aesthetic considerations winner: Dewar’s by 3 points to 1.

Next we have the very important consideration of alcohol content. Dewar’s is a very standard 40%, nothing remarkable there but, wait a minute, what’s this? Symphony is a groin-stirring 46%! I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a blend greater than 43% before. A quick look on The Whisky Exchange confirms that 40% is far more common, though you do get a few blended malts at 46%. Does this suggest Jim McEwan’s Symphony no 1 is a blended malt? Seems highly unlikely at £13 a bottle, but perhaps that’s a reward for making the trip out to Islay. Let’s hope so. I’d like to mention at this point that I did e-mail Bruichladdich to ask for clarification on this issue, and they haven’t replied as yet. I know they must be very busy.

Strength winner: It has to be the Symphony.

So that brings us to the important stuff. Cost and therefore value for money might have some effect on the overall rating but really, it’s all about how good does the whisky taste?

I’m not going to repeat myself too much in regard to the Dewar’s. It was decent, but the presence of grain was as self evident as any of the cheaper blends I’ve tried so far. I doubt I’d spend £25 on a bottle in future. I won’t shy away from trying some of their other expressions though – the Signature is supposed to be excellent I hear, however at £195 at The Whisky Exchange, it must figure way down my list of priorities.

Mostly then, I intend to talk about Jim McEwan’s Symphony No 1.

Ok, to my relatively inexperienced palate, this is quite a unique blend. I’ve tried all the normal ones and one or two of the more obscure ones, but I haven’t tasted a blend like this before. It’s light, playful and well-balanced. I suspect there is some grain in there, but it isn’t as obvious as I have come to expect.

In terms of nose, I’d say there’s white wine vinegar (but not in a bad way), tobacco, marzipan and citrus, while on the palate it’s quite fruity and suggests there may have been some sherry cask aging in there somewhere. There’s also a herby aroma, but I can’t quite identify which one… could be sage, but I think it will take a bit more tasting to be sure.

the symphony

This is very easy drinking, in fact, let’s not beat around the bush; it’s superb – and I never considered adding water even for a second. Why ruin it? I want to say things like ‘for a blend this is superb’ and ‘for £13, this is superb’, but no matter what you prefix it with, it is superb – which is good because it’s ‘super’ with an extra ‘b’. I wish I’d picked up another couple of bottles because it’s cheap enough to drink every day – not that I’m allowed to drink everyday, but I probably would, if left to my own devices. It’s better than that though. I doubt I’ll ever get to buy another bottle of this, but it is going straight to the head of a new list called “buy on sight”. It is actually special enough to keep in the cupboard and pull out for a treat. So I think I may have found it; that special blend that it’s easy to love. Nice one, Jim McEwan; you’ve done it again.

That’s me done for this week, then. If you’ve been in the UK for the last couple of weeks you’ll be aware that it has been drinking weather for a good long while now. We are actually having a summer. Remember it because the last one was seven years ago, and it could be that long before the next one. What this means in the short term is that it’s the weekend and there’s no excuse (aside from being skint) for not getting out and enjoying it. Whether it’s drinks in the garden or out in town, it’s time to get your drink on. Sadly I’ll be spending most of tomorrow in a hot venue listening to heavy music at Sound Control’s Summerjam festival. Ah, but what about Sunday? Sunday afternoon will be spent in various beer gardens, exercising my pint muscles. It’s going to be a good one all round. I hope yours is too. Laters.

Distilgrimage Part 2

Good evening, and thanks for joining me for part 2 of my Distilgrimage adventure. It’s all about a trip to the Mecca of scotch whisky making, Islay. If you missed part one, it was last week, so you can find the necessary link to that on the right hand side. Otherwise, let’s crack right on with the next bit.

Day 2

Mrs Cake had made actual plans for day two, so we had a schedule to keep. It was going to be a good day.

Before we’d set out on this trip, Mrs Cake had wanted to make sure the satnav covered Islay, while I wasn’t sure it would - given that the previous September I’d bought the Spanish map for our device only to find that Ibiza wasn’t covered in it, and had therefore had to buy that one too.

A quick work-time perusal of the Tomtom website failed to bear fruit, since it seemed you had to plug your satnav into the PC to access the map store. I decided it probably wouldn’t be necessary, as there were sure to be only a couple of roads on the island. That pretty much turned out to be true. Our hotel had proved to be immediately on the left, about 50 yards after leaving the ferry, and all that was needed after that was a basic tourist map, the like of which any hotel would be likely to provide,  to make sure you started out in the right direction. Once you’d done that, everything was signposted.

We knew then, that our first destination of the day - the Bruichladdich distillery, where we were booked on to a 1 o clock tour (I think) – was just around the bay from the town of Bowmore (home to the legendary Bowmore distillery of course), which itself was just along the coast from where we stayed in Port Ellen.

that's the Port Ellen malting plant in the distance. Be-yowtiful

 We passed the Port Ellen malting plant on the way, and then tootled inland at high speed down the longest, straightest road you’re ever going to see outside of the US or Canada, through marshland, past giant birds of prey and the airport and beauty salon, and before you know it, there we were, pulling into the town of Bowmore.

Did I mention that you can park literally anywhere on Islay? And that it’s all free? That might not sound that amazing to you but, living in Manchester, I’m used to having to pay everywhere you go, while finding a space at all can be hard enough sometimes. Not on Islay. Bosh. Straight in. I’ll have to tell me dad.

We didn’t have any plans to visit the Bowmore distillery, but we had a little time to kill and figured we could see if they’d let us have a tasting. It turned out that there was only the one lady working there that day, and she had her hands full running the shop, so we just had a look at the various bottles they were selling. There was a good variety, including some rare stuff exceeding a couple of thousands of pounds. One was as much as £7000. I didn’t take a photo as I didn’t want to dignify such extravagance. An item is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, isn’t it? And this bottle was still in stock… I’m planning a post on whisky collecting at some point in the future, so we’ll address that a bit more seriously then, I think.

Off we went, around the bay to Bruichladdich which, on arrival looked to be under construction. The reception and shop though, was warm, spacious and comfortably laid out with a few picnic type tables, and various products adorning the walls. We were still early, so we had a look around. I’d been thinking that I would probably buy a bottle from here, so I was perusing their many different expressions.

The girl on duty said we could taste a few things while we waited to see if anyone else turned up, so naturally we did. She brought out the Bruichladdich Rocks and the 12 year old, both of which I’d tried before, then an Islay Barley variety, which is so called because all the barley is grown on Islay. Islay doesn’t tend to produce enough barley for all the distilleries to source it there, with much of it being imported from other parts of Scotland and (in the case of some of the other distilleries on Islay) even England. I’ve since read that the Kilchoman distillery, which is the newest on Islay actually grows its own barley on site. Bruichladdich on the other hand, deal with a few different farms on the island who grow [some but not all of their] barley for them. Each Islay barley bottling is distilled from barley that comes from only one farm.

Having tasted the wash at Lagavulin, by now I had an idea of what barley actually tastes like, and this particular expression of Bruichladdich tasted more like barley than any other kind of whisky I’d ever had before. It was quite unique in that sense, and was certainly a departure from the heavily peated styles that I’d been trying on day 1.

The bulk of production at Bruichladdich is unpeated. This is apparently because that was the style that was favoured by the previous regime. Once the distillery was acquired in 2000 the new owners decided to remain true to that style, but also started experimenting with different peat levels. I learned on the tour that 75% of production is unpeated, 15%  moderately peated and 10% heavily peated. I could be 5% out in terms of the figures I’ve presented there, but I am providing them from memory. I didn’t make any notes I’m afraid, preferring to see what stuck in my mind, and determining what I wanted to tell you from that.

We were also able to try some of the peated varieties, that Bruichladdich call the Port Charlotte expressions. If you look online for Bruichladdich products, you’ll see that there are a number that come under this title, and I’m afraid I can’t recall exactly which ones we tried. I can tell you that they were good, and would be seriously considered when it came to be time to make a purchase.

Pretty soon we were joined by three Dutch guys and a Scottish couple for the tour, where once again we were taken through the production process, allowed to try the wash and shown the stills, but this time we were allowed to take photographs, both of the two wash and two spirit stills and a unique Lomond still that they use to make their own brand of gin, The Botanist.

Stills! No, not you Stephen. Guh back to sleep

 While in the still room we were allowed to try a sample of the new make spirit, too. It came in at about 69% ABV, was obviously clear, and actually surprisingly tasty. I could probably drink it as it was, tasting as I thought it did, not unlike grappa.

I was hoping once again that we’d be allowed to see the casks, aging away in the warehouse, but sadly not.

After the tour was over, we also had the opportunity to try a few more products, including the Organic expression, which to my nose had a very cheesy aroma that put me right off, despite tasting decent enough. Mrs Cake liked that one. There was also a special variety that they kept in a cask in the corner. We were told that they create a special variety every year under a different theme (this one being Four More Years, inspired by Barack Obama’s success in securing a second term in office), that they keep casked in the shop, and allow visitors to fill a 50cl bottle for themselves for £55. Again, they let us have a taste.

Finally, we got a chance to try the gin, and that was pretty good too. It sure made a refreshing drink with tonic, and by this time, a refreshing change from all this whisky. It was just the thing needed to refresh my enthusiasm before the Premium Tasting Tour at Caol Ila.

On the map it looked like Caol Ila was on the complete opposite side of the island, so it was something of a surprise when we saw the distillery signposted after what couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes’ driving.

Being an hour and a half early, we decided to go into the shop and take a look around – mostly to see whether they had a café or anything to eat. We were informed that there was a tour starting in half an hour, which we could join for free, if we wanted (since we had our Classic Malts passports), and that we just had time to pop down to Port Askaig and pick up some food before getting back in time.

They’d told us the pub would be able to knock something up real quick, but they were fairly unceremonious about telling us we’d have to wait as 20 people had just arrived. We went to the shop across the road instead for chocolate and crisps. The relevance of this might escape you right now, but it will probably make more sense later…

The Caol Ila tour was easily the most technical of the tours we took that weekend, the guide ably filled in any gaps in our understanding and reinforced things we thought we’d learned, but didn’t really understand. We were allowed to try the wash again, but this time from four separate washbacks, each a little less sweet than the last as the sugars became alcohol. They were nearly completely full, so I was encouraged just to stick my finger in (oo-er).

The still room, as you may have heard before, is particularly impressive. The six giant stills stand in a row, by big windows that look out over the glassy water to the Isle of Jura. In terms of scale and production it is easily the largest distillery on the island, working 24 hours a day (if I remember rightly), yet considering its industrial scale, production is eerily quiet.

Given the quite beautiful setting, it would have been nice to have been able to take a photo for you, but again, being owned by Diageo, that wasn’t an option. We did remember though to ask this time whether we could see any of the spirit being aged. We know of course, that Caol Ila is aged on the mainland, but a small quantity of Lagavulin is aged here. The answer was no, but we were told the reason this time, which presumably stands for all the distilleries – unless some do let you see their product; you can let me know about that. Anyway, apparently it is because of tax laws and customs and all that. I said we’d brought our [Classic Malts] passports, but they weren’t having any of that. Ok, I said we were told the reason, not that we or you would necessarily understand it. Just take it from me; you can’t see the barrels.

I asked next about how they ensure each bottle tastes the same, and that is done by chemical analysis apparently, though obviously there is a tasting element also. The guide actually told me that the only expression they make any effort to regulate in terms of consistent flavour is the 12 year old. All the others vary according to what batch they are drawn from.

Finally then, it was time for the event I’d been waiting for… the Caol Ila Premium Tasting Tour. If it isn’t obvious already, I’m a massive fan of Caol Ila – the 12 year old is my favourite and the cask strength is awesome. I’m not put off by the fact that all the product is aged on the mainland (our guide maintained that the insides of warehouses are sheltered from any particular atmospheric conditions and that experiments with aging on Islay hadn’t produced any improvements in quality), that production is industrial and certainly modern in comparison to all the other distilleries we visited, that they are owned by Diageo, or that the vast majority of their product is made into Johnnie Walker. All that bothers me not a jot because their single malt is fucking special. You can age it in Coventry for all I care, as long as it tastes the same.

Nevertheless, some people balk at Caol Ila being called a true Islay malt. If you’re going to go that far, most other Islay malts get their barley from elsewhere, so where do you stop? Just stop, ok? The water’s from Islay, the distilling is done on Islay. Just stop.

Where was I? The tasting, what specific delights would that bring? Well first off, we were teamed up with three friendly Norwegians with whom we had crossed paths at Laphroaig the previous day, and who in fact were making their own Islay distilgrimage, though not for the first time. I think this was their third, as it seems they had a share in a cask at Bruichladdich that they visited every year. A nice, friendly bunch they were. I was a little cagey at first, but the more special Caol Ila I consumed, the friendlier I became. Once again I was in the enviable position of pretty much having two of each sample instead of just one, thanks to Mrs Cake being designated driver. The Norwegians had hired a driver, it seemed for the duration of their stay, who they were constantly tormenting by inviting him to nose their samples.

and you will know me by the trail of empties

We had been led into the big white building you can see in the picture there, and seated at a large table, each behind a row of six ready-filled Glencairn glasses, covered by giant contact lenses to hold the aromas in. We were directed by a nice lady in a hi-vis vest.

So… what did we have? There were five bottles in front of our guide, but 6 glasses in front of each of us, so it transpired that there was a special one in the mix that we wouldn’t be able to anticipate. First up was the clear, new-make spirit, which I can confirm was very nice, and again, not unlike grappa. Then there was your standard 12 year old, the un-peated 14 year old, the Distillers Edition, which is the 12 year old, finished off in Moscatel wine casks (and as a result, delectably sweet), the 25 year old, which was fruity and contained many multiple layers, and then finally there was a sample that had been aging 20 years in a sherry cask, and that had never been, nor ever would be bottled.

I was surprised at the special one, since we’d been told at one of the other distilleries that they don’t tend to age scotch in sherry casks for more than 6 months because it has such a potent effect on the flavour, so to do so for 20 years you would think would be far too much, but no, it was good.

Unlike one of our eccentric Norwegian friends, I wasn’t making any tasting notes, so I can’t give you a blow by blow account, but that’s not what this reportage is about anyway. I can tell you though, the tasting was a fun and illuminating experience – once I had my tasting faculties back after that packet of crisps.

I was well on my way by quarter past three, when the tasting was finishing, and we all headed over to the gift shop to make our purchases and taste a final sample – the Moch expression. I’m usually the least enthusiastic about free stuff, and tend to hang back until last, but the booze had me in buoyant mood, and I was practically elbowing Norwegians out of the way to get there first.

That pretty much ends my whisky travelogue, though there are still a couple of things I want to get through with you. First…

What did Mrs Cake like?

I thought you might like to know how the whole experience played out to someone who isn’t already a whisky enthusiast. I always say, there’s only room for one whisky drinker in my house, which isn’t strictly true – at least while Mrs Cake isn’t as obsessed with it as I am. If she gets to that stage, she’ll have to start buying her own. So she came to Islay purely for the purpose of indulging my enthusiasm. She didn’t get to drink as much as I did, but she did at least try a sip of everything, and she professed a liking for quite a few of the samples – this being from someone who had never actually drunk a glass of whisky before. If I’d had a particularly delicious smelling dram, I might have encouraged her to sniff it, but she rarely did, and when she did she would recoil in horror. We tried a good variety on Islay though, and it certainly wasn’t all peaty.

So what did she like? As any whisky connoisseur might suspect, she particularly liked anything that was finished in a sherry cask. The sweetness that adds transforms the whisky from a purely masculine drink to one the ladies can enjoy. So the first thing to tickle the missus’ fancy was the limited edition Lagavulin. At Caol Ila she claimed to like the new make spirit as well as the Distillers Edition (which I already told you was aged in moscatel wine casks) as well as the special sherry cask aged 20 year old, while she said she enjoyed everything she tried at Bruichladdich, including the gin.

I think the peat of Islay malts is a bit of a stumbling block for Mrs Cake, so it is telling that she enjoyed the lighter peated output of Caol Ila and Lagavulin over the heavier stuff from Ardbeg and Laphroaig. Obviously, most of Bruichladdich’s expressions are unpeated, so that follows, too.

As a result of the whole experience, Mrs Cake is now much more likely to have a sip of anything I proffer while I’m drinking at home. It’s nice to be able to share a little of my pleasure, but also a relief that she hasn’t gone full-blown malthead.

What did I buy and why?

On the drive up, Mrs Cake turned to me and said, ‘no arguments, I’m going to buy you two bottles of whisky.” Honestly; she tells me I drink too much, then she wants to buy me two new bottles. Talk about mixed messages!

I nearly choked. Two! Blimey! I don’t think she knew how expensive whisky was likely to be, but I discovered that, in her head, she had budgeted for £30 each, so a total of £60.

I told her she might struggle to get two, but that would be ok, because I had decided I’d allow myself to buy one, and resolved the issue of being skint by picking one for her to buy me, then if there were any budget left, I’d use it to top up a second purchase.

As things transpired, I actually came home with three bottles, and I’m about to tell you how that happened and what my choices were.

Being a fan of the heavily peated style, and having tried Ardbeg only once before, I had planned all along to get one of that variety. Not only is Ardbeg renowned as one of the best distilleries in the world, its output scores very highly in Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible – one particular variety achieving 97.5 out of 100. My brief tasting experience only deepened my intention, but being that it was the first distillery we visited, I didn’t want to blow any part of my load straight away, and instead decided I’d try a few more before returning to make my purchases the next day.

Unfortunately, Ardbeg isn’t open on Saturdays in the winter (best laid plans and all that), so I would have to distribute my buying power elsewhere. That was never going to be a problem on Islay though, was it? No frickin’ way.

Mrs Cake checked for me whether Ardbeg was open while we were at Bruichladdich. I had already decided I didn’t want to get a Lagavulin or Laphroaig this time though, so there was no need to find out whether they were. It meant I would have to rely on finding something I wanted at the last two distilleries on our tour – Bruichladdich and Caol Ila. I suppose there was always the option of going back to the Spar in Bowmore (called The Whisky Shop), which has the best selection of Scotch I’ve ever seen in any Spar anywhere. It’s got a better selection than most specialist off-licences. That seemed a bit wrong, though.

best... Spar... ever

 Bruichladdich had a wide variety of expressions that I found tempting, but many were outside of my realistic price range. I would have loved to have picked up a bottle of the super-peated Octomore, but at around £95 for the cheapest one, it would severely limit the possibility of future purchases. Correction; there would be no future purchases.

Then there was the special Four More Years, which was nice, but I wanted more than a 50cl bottle for fifty five quid. The Port Charlotte varieties also were tempting but oddly, by the time we’d gotten to the tasting at Bruichladdich, I was starting to tire of wall to wall peat flavours, and was looking for something a bit different.

I opted then, for one of the unpeated Islay Barley varieties. At £38 it seems a little expensive for a malt that has only been aged 5 years, but I did enjoy the sample, and as I say, it was different from any whisky I’d tried up to that point. It’s also a healthy 50% ABV, so that helped cement the decision in my mind.

There was another Islay Barley variety that I had to consider, but I hadn’t tried it and it wasn’t as strong. It probably was a little older, and it was £2 more expensive. It was the strength that made my decision in the end.

I have to say, I was tempted to get a bottle of The Botanist gin, but at £29 I figured it was money I’d rather spend on whisky.

I did make another purchase at Bruichladdich, and I had (and indeed to this point) have no idea what it is like, but they were selling a blend for £13. Symphony no 1, it’s called, and it is attributed to master blender, Jim McEwan. Another guy was already buying a bottle (apparently on recommendation from a staff member), so I figured for £13, you can’t really go wrong – especially when you find out that a bottle went for £25 on Scotch Whisky Auctions.com.

Mind you, if you thought that was surprising, check this out:

Perhaps I should have bought two.

Look at that picture, though! Is that the worst label you’ve ever seen or what? It’s like one of those budget compilation CDs you get for £1.99 in Tesco or Wilkinson. I’ll let you know how the content turns out when I try it.

So my last chance to buy from a distillery would be at Caol Ila. I was almost certain to find something special there, but while I would have loved to have picked up a bottle of the 12 year old, it seemed like a long way to go to get something I was already familiar with.

Luckily, as you’ve already read, the sampling at Caol Ila was exemplary, so it just came down to whether anything was in my price range. I went in the end for the Distillers Edition, which they were selling for £50.30. I would be getting £6 off because they give you a £3 discount with their tour (which for us was free), and I could use Mrs Cake’s discount.

I think there was some confusion because I bought a bottle for my friend too, and they were going to charge me £60 for the two bottles and for the two tastings that are supposed to be £15 each. Being borderline drunk and also an honest citizen, I informed them of the error, and they adjusted the charge. I found later though that instead of a £6 discount, they’d given me an £18 discount, so thanks good people at Caol Ila! Your Distillers Edition tastes that little bit sweeter because of you. And it does taste sweet. In fact, it’s delicious. It’s the only one of the three bottles I bought that I’ve opened so far, and it’s the holy grail for me – a scotch that insists I savour every drop, and want to go back for more. I could probably drink the whole bottle like cola. Beautifully balanced, delicate and sweet – just how I like my women… as I always say – probably too often. But that just makes it funnier… to me. I’ve forgotten what I was saying.

Conclusion

I suppose all that’s left is to throw all this together and give you some kind of conclusion to take away with you.

What would you like to know, do you think? Obviously, depending where you live, it could be further for you than it was for me to go, or it could be nearer. From Manchester it’s 9 hours each way – the return journey we did in one stint. I was pleased to be able to knock 15 minutes off the estimated arrival time that the satnav gave us, but I threw it all away at the last by missing an exit and having to drive in the wrong direction for seven and a half minutes.

Given how far it was, was it worth it? The answer to that is absolutely. It was a very fun and memorable excursion. It would have been quicker and cheaper to have had a weekend on mainland Europe, but that would be something different altogether. A good couple of hours before we reached our hotel on the way there, I turned to Mrs Cake and said, ‘If we’d gone to Barcelona, we’d have finished dinner by now’. And it would have been warm.

Barcelona though, isn’t the cradle of the Scotch whisky industry. If you like whisky and if you can make it, I’d definitely recommend that you go. It’s probably like that film Sideways, only better, and not just because whisky is better than wine. Yes it is.

I asked at the beginning, when it comes to whisky distilleries, how different can one be from another. Well, from the six I have now visited, I would have to say they aren’t much different from one another, and the tours are almost identical. You see the same things, learn the same things (admittedly lots), and while there are slight differences, I think you could get away with visiting one if you wanted to leave it there.

The surprising bit though, is that having been to a few, I’d now be much more inclined to visit more. It’s fun, they are friendly places to visit (if this random sample is anything to go by) and you get to sample some expressions that you might not be able to afford, or necessarily ever get around to buying.

I mean, you get some people who have been to all 92 football league grounds. That’s quite an achievement, so why should you not make it your goal to visit as many scotch whisky distilleries as you can? There are 96 according to Wikipedia, and it’s probably a lot easier if you live in Scotland, but I would definitely like to go to more. It’s better than seeing the ruins of some castle.

It’s an all round enjoyable experience. I was particularly surprised to find that despite the competition between distilleries for market share, the ones on Islay almost seem to work together. None of the ones we visited were disparaging about any of the others, and they all referred to each other in fond ways – no sneering or snarky comments. I suspect this is down to the importance of the scotch industry to Islay’s economy. It’s a small population, they have to rely on the industry to some extent – and they probably all know each other personally.

You hear some whisky enthusiasts for example, being disparaging about Caol Ila, but none of the distilleries led us to think there was anything to be disparaging about. Similarly you hear the Bruichladdich are unpopular because of their slightly unorthodox marketing methods, but again, they were friendly and appeared to fit in harmoniously with the other distilleries on the island.

So in conclusion: Islay – do it; distilleries – do it. Beautiful place, lovely people, awesome whisky. What (other than the likely distance – just forget about the distance!) is stopping you?

That’s it for this week then. I’ll be going to Nottingham tomorrow for a friend’s birthday. His present is a bottle of brandy. Hopefully I’ll get to try it. As for tonight, I thought I might do a taste test between two brands of gold rum, and maybe another between two kinds of brandy. No doubt the results of those will be showing up on this blog at some point, so please keep coming back.

Whatever you’re up to, have fun. See you next time.