Ten Years of Whisky Reviews

I’d planned to clear out a couple more of Delhi restaurant reports this weekend, but I’m being told that I should do a bit more to commemorate the blog’s 10th anniversary (see Friday’s post for a maudlin recap of the last 10 years). I’ve decided to do this by highlighting some of my posts from the last 10 years. I’m going to begin with a list of 10 whisky reviews; later I’ll post 10 restaurant reviews; 10 recipes; 10 other pieces of food writing; and 10 posts that don’t fall into any of the above categories. I do also have whisky posts that aren’t reviews—but I’ve already highlighted a number of those in Friday’s post. As you’ll see, the reviews I’ve chosen to highlight here are all taken from the first five or six years of the blog’s life—back when this was, as I noted on Friday, decidedly a whisky blog. Indeed, the list slants particularly towards reviews from the first year of the blog. This is not because I didn’t review any whiskies worth remembering after 2018. But I did put a little more effort into the introductions/preambles I wrote in those days; and also, let’s be frank, into the reviews themselves, which were less brief than those from more recent years.

The reviews I’ve chosen to highlight aren’t necessarily of the best whiskies I’ve had over the life of the blog—though I have included my review of the whisky I’ve given the highest score to so far. It’s more that these were reviews I myself enjoyed re-reading for one reason or the other as I quickly sampled my back pages. And I’ll admit that some of them are here because of the opportunity they gave me to have fun even as I did not enjoy the whiskies themselves. And one of them also gave me the opportunity to make fun of Sku.

Here they are in chronological order:

I may not write very many long or more than functional introductions to my whisky reviews anymore but my method for reviewing whiskies hasn’t really changed in 10 years. I am a slow reviewer. I usually take notes over 90 minutes with 2 oz/60 ml of whisky. Whether tasting from my own bottles or from samples, I will usually pour 30 ml first. I nose the whisky, take a small sip; then let it breathe for a bit and then nose it again and take a few more small sips. Then I let it sit again for a bit and repeat. When there’s about 10 ml left I’ll pour another 30 ml, take a couple more sniffs and small sips and then add water; and then nose and taste again over another length of time. I know there are people who are able to take detailed notes on multiple whiskies in one session but I am not one of them; and I rarely drink more than two 60 ml pours of whisky in an evening—and usually not even that much. Not that you really wanted to know.