Ok I have been critical of the winners in Malts of the
year category in my past posts. Saying that most of the malts of the year by
retailers are purely to move stocks, promote bottles that have higher margins
or to reach contracted volumes. Thankfully in this post I am wrong; yes Malties
"I am wrong".
TWE or The Whisky Exchange has announced fascinating
Malt for their Whisky of the year 2013, here is how they came up with it..........
Initially we went with
the rather general brief of ‘Best Whisky’ but the prospective list of 50ish
that we came up with seemed to be overkill, especially as every whisky had only
one vote. A few discussions later and we came up with our criteria for inclusion.
The Whisky Must Be: Single Malt from Scotland Under £50 Not Cask Strength Not a
Special Edition Another round of asking for suggestions later and we ended up
with another list of 50 whiskies. Some arguing occurred. I may have used the
phrase “I am best and so is this whisky”. A chair may have been thrown. Well,
rolled towards someone in a menacing fashion. Rather than just let Sukhinder
decide (the way most arguments are solved at TWE HQ) we decided to throw open
the decision to the people who should choose – our customers. A whisky tasting
would be held at our shop, a vote taken and a winner announced. [In no way
should this be interpreted as making our customers do our work for us. That's
not what happened at all] we wrangled the list down to a mere eight whiskies
and set up the tasting: 60 people, 8 whiskies – all tasted blind.
Our marketing manager
and, for the night at least, Brand Ambassador Nick Tether took to the podium as
MC, but the focus of the evening was discussion – we wanted each table to talk
about the whiskies and give everyone some fodder to help choose their favourite
dram of the night. After much discussion a vote was taken and, as the geekiest
member of the TWE office team, I counted up the ballot papers. After an
afternoon of voting system research I had settled on a simple AV approach,
similar to the London mayoral elections. Unfortunately, all of my efforts were
for naught and the results in the end were the same as if we’d just counted who
had the most votes. The perils of being an election geek. So, without further
ado the results for The Whisky Exchange Whisky of the Year (with some
constraints) 2013, in reverse order, are as follows:
Last Place:
Glenmorangie 10yo
Joint 5th Place:
Glencadam 15yo, Benromach 10yo, Balvenie 12yo DoubleWood
4th Place: Tamdhu 10yo
3rd Place: Kilchoman
Machir Bay
2nd Place: Lagavulin
16yo
I have to say not only was this a great way of picking
the Malt of the year but also a great Malt from a fantastic distillery. I would
add here one of my favourite distilleries, family owned, sterling quality, no
compromise and very charitable.
So I take my hat off to John Grant and his team and
also to Sukhinder Singh and his team.
I urge any Malt heads out there who have not tried Glenfarclas
to give it a try. I assure you there’s no disappointment and all the bottles I tried
have been very very good.
I will blog about more malts of the year, in future
bletherings so let’s see if the others follow suit and pick in a similar manner
as TWE have done.
Ralfy were looking forward to yours.
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