This article is 40 months old and some information provided may be time sensitive.
Please check all details of events, tours, opening times and other information before travelling or making arrangements.
Onwards and upwards,says Dominic Roskrow,as Whisky Magazine gets a new look
There’s always a temptation when you hit a milestone to sit back and participate in some indulgent back-slapping. But it says much about the healthy state of the world of whisky that I have to say that quite frankly we just don’t have the time to.
Fifty issues is an impressive number, given the fact that many predicted the subject would exhaust itself in a year. But with so much going on in our industry we’ve had to put a limit on the amount of looking back we can do.
We haven’t ignored the past totally – we have selected a quote from each of the previous issues and we have published a selection of 50 great whisky drinking moments.
But this issue is all about moving forward, and if you compare those very early issues with the current one, you’re looking at a very different beast in terms of style, content, design and attitude.
Much of the change has been evolutionary, but this issue has been redesigned to make it even more relevant to today’s market and today’s reader.
What we’re most proud of in this issue though, are the results of the first ever Independent Bottlers’ Challenge.
The independent sector has had a love-hate relationship with the trade but has established itself in recent years and played a key role in attracting new drinkers and stimulating existing ones.
In recent years a group of top quality companies with a passion for whisky and the knowledge to recognise an outstanding dram when they taste one, have flourished. So we felt it only right that we recognise them in some way.
The question was: how? It’s not easy because unlike distillery bottlings, independent releases sell out and are gone forever. This means we have not included them in the Best of the Best Dominic Roskrow because what’s the point of telling our readers of great whisky that they can’t get any more?
The solution was to concentrate our tastings in a short period of time so that when the results appeared much of the whisky was still in the market place. So the whisky was tasted over the summer, with each judge given a few weeks to taste the samples at home.
There was another purpose, too – to identify the independent bottlers that excelled in different categories, so that even if a particular whisky wasn’t available you’d know and trust certain companies for specific regions.
It’s perhaps the most ambitious project we’ve undertaken so far, because more than 175 bottles were entered in to 24 categories, but we are confident that it has achieved all that it was meant to.
The event will become a regular one, to add to the other awards and competitions we do, and we are proud that the results were first announced at Whisky Live Glasgow, now in its second year and on a much bigger scale than the first one.
That event is fast becoming the celebration of Scotch whisky that the country so much deserves and is rapidly carving out an identity all of its own.
All of which means that like the world of whisky in general there is no time to sit still.
Nice as it is to reminisce, it’s exciting to look forward too.
