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Each of our tasting notes contains its own numerical rating system. This system, developed by John Lamond and Robin
Tucek, is designed to give you an approximate idea of Sweetness,
Peatiness and Availability for each whisky. It is intended as a helpful guide only and is not meant to be
used as a qualitative or quantitative rating system for malt whiskies. In our opinion, malt whisky is too much of a personal preference to justify any attempt to give rating scores to individual whiskies. After all, one
man's Macallan is another woman's Laphroaig. Some will choose Bowmore and others The Balvenie. We would not wish to position any malt before any other - all are to be respected and enjoyed
for their relative qualities, all are made to similar quality levels and all are aged in oak casks. Only you can decide the whiskies which are your favourites. The scales run from 0 to 10
, with 0 being the driest and least peated end of the scale, 10
the sweetest and most pungent. The ratings are a statement of fact; a guide to help you find these malt whiskies which are most akin to your own taste. If, for example, you like a malt with a Sweetness factor of
7 and a Peatiness factor of 4, then those other malts which have a similar rating should be of interest to your palate. Most bottlings from the independents are of limited availability. We have
given such bottlings a maximum Availability rating of 4. If the vintage listed is finished, then they normally follow up with the next vintage which will usually, making allowances for individual cask
differences, be very similar to its predecessor. The Availability factor 0 means that this whisky is no longer available, 1 to 3 mean that these whiskies are difficult to obtain; 4 to
6 are available from the more specialist shop, 7 to 10 are increasingly more widely available. The Availability rating is based on the UK market, including Duty Free. Following the success
of the independent companies in marketing single cask and cask strength whiskies, several of the major brand owners have now followed suit, making some very interesting whiskies available. These whiskies are often
bottled with little or minimum filtration and it is increasingly frowned on to add caramel colouring to them. Such limited edition bottlings are an important and growing market but, because of the extra production costs
involved, these whiskies are very much a specialist interest. Because each single cask of whisky can be such an individual product, they cannot possibly have the same consistency of style and taste as the more widely
available malt whisky brands, each of which is bottled after blending together several carefully selected casks from the owner's warehouses of maturing whiskies. The popularity of single malt whisky today owes much
to the efforts of the specialist bottler in making such whiskies available when, with one or two notable exceptions, the brand owners showed little interest in producing malt whisky for anything other than blending.
With the growth in interest and availability of single malt whisky, certain brand owners have let it be known that they do not like the independents bottling casks filled at the distilleries as single malts. This is a
pity, as distilleries' own bottlings are always clearly identified for what they are, while the independents recognisably make their own name a clear endorsement of quality as part of their own label design. Some
independent bottlings can be quite superb, with each cask bottled having its own differing and interesting personality. However, the better and rarer of these bottlings usually carry a price premium. With today's
consumer increasingly wanting to know exactly what he is drinking, it is clearly neither realistic nor fair to the consumer to expect such whiskies to be bottled without their origin being disclosed. Some distillery
owners keep all of their cask fillings for their own use and this would seem to be the sensible approach for those distillers not happy about other companies bottling their own distillery's product Labels In some cases, the labels depicted above the tasting notes are not the vintage tasted.
This is usually because of the bottler "following" on with the next vintage - which has not yet been tasted. The current vintage should be very similar to the previous vintage when the whisky is bottled at a
similar age. It is only when there are much greater older, or younger, age differences that these nuances become more noticeable. |
