https://youtu.be/WhSxnq8_iOw

WE’RE HERE! Whisky of the Year! If you don’t want spoilers, don’t expand this box.

So many great whiskies to choose from in 2018. Scotch, Bourbon, Irish, Indian, Taiwanese, the list is endless. But one thing is for sure, we’ve got four unbelievable examples of the best of the best above.

Balblair 1991 Vintage

High West Midwinter Nights Dram

Maker Mark Private Select Batch 001 TWS

Glen Scotia Ruby Port Cask – Cask Strength

My top 4 of the year! Some stunning styles, all seeing me through into the later years of my life. Thank you all for a sensational 2018, here’s to 2019 and all the booze it’s going to bring us! Cheers

SCOTLAND: Isle of Raasay Distillery’s Burns and Whisky Weekend package – £339

The Isle of Raasay Distillery is hosting a Burns and Whisky Weekend a stone’s throw away from where the poet, Sorley Maclean, was born.

The offering includes a two-night stay for two including all meals, checking in Friday 25th January and checking out Sunday 27th January 2019. Guests will dine at the distillery on Friday evening and enjoy a hearty lunch on Saturday before an exclusive whisky tasting and warehouse tour with the distillery’s co-founder, Alasdair Day.

The weekend will finish in style with a traditional Burns supper on the Saturday evening, featuring traditional Scottish dishes, from traditional haggis to rhubarb cranachan with homemade shortbread and whisky fudge.

Rooms will be allocated on a first come first served basis, early bookings are advised to secure an idyllic Cuillin view. Bookings can be made here or  email: bookings@raasaydistillery.com or by calling: +44 (0) 1478 470178.

Littlemill 26 Year Old 1988 vintage Lowland single malt Scotch whisky. Single cask refill sherry hogshead distilled November 1988 and bottled March 2015 by Hunter Laing & Co. for the Old & Rare Platinum Selection. Selected and bottled Exclusively for The Whisky Barrel. Just 150 numbered bottles from this lost distillery. Nose: A light gold whisky with a nose of vanilla custard powder giving way to apples, pears and slightly leafy notes of butterscotch coming through late. Taste: On the palate it has a creamy mouthfeel with butter shortbread at the start, followed by apple skins and a cinnamon note. Finish: The finish is long, dry and slightly fruity, with a hint of oak.

Littlemill Distillery was established in 1772 to the west of Bowling by the north shore of the River Clyde and on the main road into Glasgow. Subsequent modifications during the 1930s resulted in a number of novel features including double ventilation towers which sat over a single drying kiln and pot stills with rectifiers rather than the traditional swan necks. The combination of pot and column stills in Littlemill Distillery was designed to produce malt whiskey which was expected to mature quickly. When production ceased in 1992 Littlemill Distillery was the oldest working malt whiskey distillery in Scotland. Closed in 194 and demolished in 2006 and now Littlemill is a lost Scottish distillery although the shell of the manager’s house remains.

BOOK NOW

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, The Vaults, 87 Giles Street, Leith EH6 6BZ

Contact: sales@smws.com or call 0131 555 2929 (Mon-Fri 9am-4.45pm). Visit the Society at here for membership information

This is your chance to join and to take advantage of their great offers!

Spot the SMWS bottles in this amusing You Tube video

ralfy.com malt-marks with . ralfy review 758 – Glenallachie 12yo @ 46%vol

GLENDRONACH

26 YEAR OLD 1992 EXCLUSIVE #8314

£269.95

ABV: 52.0% AGE: 26 Year Old VINTAGE: 1992 CASK TYPE: Pedro Ximenez Sherry Puncheon CASK #: #8314 BOTTLER: Distillery REGION: Highland TYPE: Single Malt Scotch

GlenDronach 26 Year Old 1992 vintage Highland single malt Scotch whiskey. Single cask Pedro Ximenez Sherry Puncheon #8314 bottled June 2018. Specially selected and bottled exclusively for The Whisky Barrel. 706 numbered bottles. Nose: Dark chocolate, sultanas, dried apricot and figs. Palate: Roasted chestnuts with figs and Christmas spices. Apple and pear compote.

Glendronach Malt Whiskey Distillery was established north east of Huntley in the Highland whiskey region by James Allardice in 1826. The malting floors at Glendronach Distillery closed in 1996 and it was the last distillery in Scotland to heat its stills directly with flames from a coal-fired furnace, until it had to comply with new regulations in 2005. Glendronach Distillery is resplendent with a traditional cask iron mash tun, wooden washbacks, four stills. Famous for its well-aged and top quality sherried single malt, for example Glendronach 21 Year Old Parliament, and single cask releases. The distillery is now owned by Brown Forman of America.

Celebrate the best of Scotland: taste and explore the soul of its spirit with this evocative diversity of new single casks. We sat down with our spirits manager, Euan Campbell, to unearth his favourite drams from this month’s Outturn – there are some fantastic bottlings to set you up for the perfect Burns Supper.

VIEW BOTTLINGS              READ OUTTURN

The Scotch Malt Whisky Society, The Vaults, 87 Giles Street, Leith EH6 6BZ

Contact: sales@smws.com or call 0131 555 2929 (Mon-Fri 9am-4.45pm). Visit the Society at here for membership information

This is your chance to join and to take advantage of their great offers!

Spot the SMWS bottles in this amusing You Tube video

WATCH LIVE AUCTION

Get watching, and good luck!

The Whisky.Auction Team

info@whisky.auction     +44 (0)20 8838 9381         whisky.auction

The Whisky Exchange Blog Review of 2018

Happy new year everyone. With a simple transition from Monday to Tuesday, the falling ball of fate has been triggered and it’s time for the yearly TWE Blog round-up of the year.

A Good Year for the Roses

While 2018 has been “interesting” for many reasons, in the whisky world things have rolled on as usual. Macallan opened its shiny new distillery, Jura, Glenrothes and Old Pulteney relaunched their entire ranges, our friends at Elixir Distillers announced their plans to build a distillery and Daftmill *finally* released a whisky.

Expect the next releases from Daftmill very soon…

Here at The Whisky Exchange, we had a lot of exclusives – more than 30 according to my big spreadsheet. We’ve had everything from rich and dark sherry-matured Old Pulteney and a 2000-vintage Caroni (both now long gone) to an incredible 1973 Speysider . Our second Black Friday whisky sold out in an hour and the final bottle of our Christmas Malt was bought, appropriately, on Christmas Eve.

You can find all of our current releases over on our Exclusive to The Whisky Exchange page.

We’ve got loads more to come in the new year, with the first three already raring to go, but we also teased one a couple of weeks back: Rosebank Jealousy. The 2018 release – Innocence – flew off the shelves, and we expect Jealousy to do similar. Set your alarms for Valentine’s Day…

Crawling to the USA

But it’s not all been about Scotch whisky. With a pair of exclusive American whiskies, another brace from New Zealand and a veritable polo team of Irish drams landing on our (virtual and physical) shelves through the year, there was some very tasty whisky from overseas – you can find them all on our Exclusive World Whiskies page.

When the winner of our Whisky of the Year turned out to be a whiskey – congratulations Michter’s Sour Mash from the USA – we weren’t entirely surprised: it’s been a year for great whiskies from around the world.

Everyday I write the book

Over here on the blog we’ve been busy. Newest addition to the team, Tom, survived his first Whisky Show, Caroline got to meet the man behind Johnnie Walker, and I found out I was wrong about sherry solera casks.

Jim Beveridge – master blender, Johnnie Walker curator and man with the best name in the drinks business

As ever, our most popular post of the year was due to Jim Murray, master of The Whisky Bible and judger of all things whisky. His list of winners emphasised again how good American whiskey is these days, although he did sneak in a nod to one of our favourites closer to home – congratulations to The English Whisky Company for its European Whisky of the Year award for The Norfolk Farmers.

In other “winning” news, let’s not talk about the World Cup ever again…

Pump it Up

We’re only on day one and already 2019 is looking to be busy. We’ve got The Whisky Show: Old & Rare in Glasgow in eight weeks – make sure you grab your tickets if you’ve not got them yet – a Royal Lochnagar ballot on behalf of the Prince’s Foundation live now, and we’ll be getting loads of great new releases up on the website over the coming months.

As ever, if there’s anything you want us to write about, let us know. But for now, thanks for reading and see you all, at least virtually, in the new year.

This year I have mostly been listening to the songs of Elvis Costello.