Whisky of the Year Award and myth dispellation
Colin Joliat I know most of you aren’t willing to drop $80+ on a bottle of whisky, but I would be remiss if I didn’t at least inform you of the latest winner of the Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible “Whisky of the Year.”
The honor went to “Old Pulteney 21‐Years‐Old,” of which you’ve most likely never heard. I don’t mean to denigrate your whisky knowledge; I hadn’t heard of it either. I knew the name Old Pulteney because they make some good blended whiskys, but I wasn’t even aware that they made single malt. As it turns out, they do, and they are quite good at it. It scored a 97.5 out of 100, tying the record set by Ballantine’s 17-Year-Old blended scotch last year. It’s a little suspicious to me that the two highest scores ever have come in the past two years. There must be some payola or steroids involved somehow.
I think the most interesting thing to note from the Whisky Awards is that perception isn’t always on par with reality. If I asked what people considered best type of whisk(e)y, the majority of the casual drinking community would probably answer “single malt scotch.” It has this notoriety of being a fancy, high class whisky and the top of the class. In reality, that’s not the case. Scotch doesn’t mean a thing other than that it comes from Scotland, and it gets aged so long (another go-to source of pompousness) because the lack of climate change makes it take much longer to extract flavor. As it turns out, single malts have only taken the top prize 3 times, and this is only the 2nd time a scotch has won. Just booze for thought.
He [Jim Murray] said: “I was on the home straight after four months of continuous tasting. By that time I was pretty sure I knew what the winner was going to be. With what I still had to taste it needed something exceptional to knock the leader off its perch. But that’s exactly what happened. To be honest, I was amazed. I knew the Old Pulteney 17-year-old was likely to be exceptional, and it was. However, I had never come across a Pulteney 21-year-old like it. Talk about coming out of leftfield…
If you’re wondering what was in the lead before this fateful trip to the highlands, it was Buffalo Trace’s “George T. Stagg.” I actually have an open bottle of that in my apartment right now, and it’s well worth the cost. Thankfully, though, I received my bottle as a gift because they are going for about $150 on Ebay right now.
Whisky Bible press release, Pulteney press release
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