From the category archives:

Whisky Philosophy

Bible Lessons

by Oliver Klimek on February 22, 2010

Thoughts on Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible 2010

At the Finest Spirits Festival in Munich last weekend I had the chance to have a few words with Jim Murray who had been placed in a rather forlorn corner of the basement. I took the chance and bought one of his Whisky Bibles which he was kind enough to sign for me. Unfortunatlely I did not have the time to attend his “Jim Murray Gives it to You Straight” masterclass scheduled very late at night.

So far I had only read second-hand reports about his ratings for some particular whiskies, most notably his repeated choice for an Ardbeg as Scotch Whisky of the Year. This move had provoked a lot of criticism in whisky world – especially on the internet in blog posts, forum threads and Twitter tweets – culminating in accusations that Jim Murray was on Ardbeg’s or LVMH’s payroll. I have to admit that I wasn’t immune to such thoughts myself. But I accepted Jim’s blog comments denying any affiliation and that the reason was merely that he liked Ardbeg very much.

Now that I have had a thorough look through the book, I am assured that his explanation was genuine. There are so many other whiskies with extremely high scores from many other distilleries that it is hard to believe that any money was involved in this.

The High Score Mystery

But this plethora of high scores has left me very thoughtful nevertheless. So many whiskies have extremely high scores – including some quite simple ones – that I am having a have a hard time to align my own impressions with those of Jim Murray. I know I am not alone with this feeling because Jim tackles this issue in his book where he admits being critizied for marking too highly. He defends the fact that 50 out of 950 score 95 or better, stating that this percentage of about 5% “sounds about right” to him.

I’m afraid I have to disagree on this. If you take culinary guides like Michelin or Gault Millau that rate restaurants, 95+ scores for whisky would be comparable to the top restaurants with three Michelin stars or a Gault Millau rating of 19 or 19.5 out of 20. Now would you expect 5% of all restaurants to be temples of ultimate culinary delight? Certainly not. Paris or London have thousands of restaurants, but only a handful have top scores. Most are not even considered to be included in these guides because they are just not good enough. The rate of top restaurants will probably be around one in a thousand, if at all. The underlying statistical law is the Gaussian distribution with a big bulge at the median value and very flat tails at both extremes.

The Whisky Bible takes a holistic approach and wants to list as many whiskies as possible. So we can expect a statisically relevant cross-section. 5% of all whiskies in absolute top positions would mean that the overall quality of whisky is extremely much higher than the quality of restaurant food. Is this really true?

The Dangers of the Compound Score

I think the answer to this mystery can be found by looking closer at Jim Murray’s approach to rating whisky. Jim’s ratings are diveded in four sub-scores for nose, palate, finish and balance. Each component is scored separately on a 25 point scale and then added together. His marks for each of the components are 20+ most of the times. So whenever a whisky is at least “decent” in Jim’s opinon, he is left with only 6 marks for each component.

This is effectively a five star rating which he strongly disapproves as a rating system for whisky in the introduction to the book as being too inaccurate, and rightly so. This is indirectly proven true by the introduction of half points because with only full points there would be too litte possibility to fine-tune a score.

And there are three more important things to consider with Jim Murray’s compound ratings:

  1. The “Balance” score is not independent from the other three. In the author’s own words: “For a whisky to work well on the nose and palate, it should not be too one-sided in its character.”

    If this is to be taken seriously, an unbalanced whisky will never be able to receive top marks for nose and palate (and certainly also finish). So in a way, this fourth score only pretends to give additional information.

  2. Because it’s a human who does the scoring and not a gas chromatograph, there is always a margin of error involved. Sampled on another day, any whisky might get a point more or less. Four scores mean four margins of error. 21/19/22/22 on day A could well give 20/18/21/21 on day B or 22/20/23/23 on day C. The resulting score would be anywhere between 80 and 88.
  3. All four sub-scores are weighted equally. Does this hold true for everyone? I for one tend to weigh the nose far less than palate and finish. But in my experience, more whiskies have a better nose than palate than vice versa. And dow does the calculation take into account that the balance score is connected with the others?

Where is the Calibration mark?

The “continuous” 100 point rating system I adopted from the Malt Maniacs and that was also used by Michael Jackson to my knowledge (correct me if I’m wrong) uses 75 points as a sort of calibration mark. This would be a run-of-the-mill whisky that you can’t really call bad but that has nothing to write home about either.  When scoring a whisky using this system, the final score will be an assessment on how far away it is from that generic 75 point dram.

For a compound score to work well, you would need a calibration mark for each of the sub-scores. I would never accuse Jim Murray of not having some sort of neutral point for his scoring. But I tend to think that it is placed rather at a sub-score of 20 than at 18.75 (75/4). This would explain why his ratings are often significantly higher than other people’s.

But perhaps Jim’s ratings just reflect that he is generous with his scores because he likes whisky in general so much. Which is not a bad thing at all, mind you.

Does 95 Alwyas Equal 95?

But there is yet another thing that struck me browsing the Whisky Bible. A simple Irish blend like Jameson receives a score of 95 and – even more astonishing – the Swissky Exkusiv-Abfüllung from Switzerland gets 94.

What would Jim Murray say if presented with a head-to-head sampling of a Jameson and lets say an Ardbeg Airigh nam Beist that he scored 95 points as well. Or how about the Swissky and a Glenfarclas 17 (93 points)?

I can’t help thinking that these scores are not comparable. Coming back to the restaurant guide example, I guess giving the Jameson 95 points means something like “Here you can get the best Fish & Chips in town” while the Ardbeg score compares with the two star restaurant serving truffled lobster mousse with scallops.

Is this Book any Good Then?

Yes! The Whisky Bible is a great collection of tasting notes and scores for thousands of whiskies, and you really have to love Jim Murray’s writing style.

But you should be aware, that these are just one person’s opinions, worth as much or as little as any other’s. Just because a writer has a big name, it does not mean that you will like what he likes. I have found out that Jim Murray’s ratings have a very erratic correlation with my own, but this does not keep me from enjoying his book.


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Whisky and the Web 2.0 – A Clash of Cultures?

by Oliver Klimek on February 9, 2010

This is a topic that has been simmering in the back of my head for quite a while now. There have been some discussions on the German The Whisky Store Forum that have raised interesting questions that I decided to tackle here.

The spark for finally putting it all together was John Hansell’s decision to give the 2010 Malt Advocate “Pioneer of the Year” Award to us whisky bloggers. Some of the comments on his blog showed a bit of concern that the blogging phenomenon as a whole was not very helpful for the whisky industry because it allowed each and everyone to trumpet out their views into the world, whether they may be well-thought and accurate or not.

Being part of the so-called blogosphere, my opinion differs from this view, of course. I believe that this view voiced in the comments is at least partly caused by an incomplete knowledge about blogs and other modern features of the internet.

From Web 1.0 to Web 2.0

In the beginning, the World Wide Web – commonly mistaken for the internet as a whole, by the way – was nothing more than a means to display information in a decentralised way, allowing hyperlinks between documents to connect the information sources.

As time moved on, more and more companies and private persons wanted to be present on the web in order to feature themselves to the public, with reasons ranging from advertising and marketing over “missionarism” to plain personal narcissism.

This early phase – now called Web 1.0 – way basically a one-way road in terms of communication, especially on the commercial level between companies and their customers. It was classic push marketing that had been transferred from the classic media to the internet. The basic principle of Web 1.0 was that content was created by only a few active participants. The vast majority of internet users were passive consumers of this content.

Over the years, more and more websites invented ways how the formerly passive users could participate in creating content. In many startups, user participation was the core of the business model. Let me just mention one big example: eBay.

This trend was followed by social media and social networks that gave internet users the opportunity to create informational content on their own and allowed them to build virtual groups and networks based on their interests. Blogs are just one of these new forms of communication and content creation. Discussion forums, wikis, networks like Facebook, mircoblogs like Twitter, bookmarking sites like Digg or Stumbleupon – all have in common the concept of decentralised distribution of information paired with elaborate concepts of communication.

And this is the present Web 2.0 that we sort of live in.

What’s this all got to do with Whisky?

Of course, whisky stuff is just a tiny fraction of the massive amount of information on the internet. But the number of whisky related blogs, Twitter users, Facebook pages and whatnots is constantly growing, and it would already require a full time job, should you want to stay up to date with all that’s new on the Whisky Web.

And this is part of the problem that some have with this whole new concept. The amount of information is so huge that it has to be sifted and skimmed. And they also seem to fear that inaccurate informations propagated on the net could have a negative effect on the whisky industry.

Of course this problem is real, and I don’t want to talk it down. A great example is the recent Taiwan vs Scotch stunt where the result of a contest between apples and oranges so to speak was thoughtlessly repeated without taking a closer look at what actually happened.

But this very incident also shows that this is not not just an internet problem. This news was also printed by many newspapers and probably reached more readers on paper than on screen. Information overflow takes its toll on all media, nut just on he internet.

The signal to noise ratio on the internet is certainly lower than in peer reviewed print publications, but I honestly think that it is not very difficult to recognize rubbish as rubbish and gems as gems. And I also believe that the impact of unqualified drivel form disinformed bloggers on the whisky industry will be largely outweighed by the good things the Web 2.0 has to offer.

Why is the Web 2.0 Good for Whisky?

The objections about blogs in particular are rooted in the Web 1.0 view of things. A blog is viewed solely as a manifestation of one person’s opinion. And if his opinion is wrong, then he’d better shut up.

But there is much more to blogging. Blogs are interconnected by links. Modern blog platforms inform the author when another blog has linked to them. This creates a very tight network – the blogosphere – , as most bloggers will be interested who linked to them and what they have to say. In addition to that, comments open up the opportunity for discussions between readers and bloggers and also among the readers themselves.

Now let’s take a look at the whisky industry. Blog articles, Twitter messages, Facebook pages etc. supply the industry with a wealth of feedback to their products that would have been impossible only a few years ago. It would be foolish for them not to take a look at the opinions the buyers have about their products.

And then there are those industry members who turn around the table. All of a sudden, they are starting their own blogs, begin tweeting on Twitter and invite people to become friends of their Facebook pages. A clever move indeed. Because they have learned what Web 2.0 is all about.

It’s about turning the informational one-way street of Web 1.0 into a bidirectional highway network where producers, journalists, dealers and customers can exchange information at an amazing speed.

Let me give you just one real world example of the power that Web 2.0 can have. It’s the story of the Macallan 18yo sherry cask bottlings that you might remember from a recent article.

German whisky online retailer The Whisky Store reported they had learned from Macallan representatives that there won’t be any more sherry cask bottlings of the 18yo and older expressions. As Macallan just recently had joined, I took the liberty to ask them via Twitter, if this indeed was true. They replied within 20 minutes stating that in fact this rumor was wrong, and later they even published a post on their own blog dispelling that false rumor.

So within just a few hours, a disturbing rumor could be dispelled that otherwise could have caused The Macallan distillery a serious image problem.

To conclude,  the recently developed internet features labelled as Web 2.0 have the potential to create a much closer relationship between the industry and its customers than ever before. And provided that producers honestly listen to their customers, this will surely translate into even better whisky in the future.  And if that’s not a good thing, then I don’t know what is.

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Laphroaig and Lagavulin: One Mile of Distance but Worlds Apart

by Oliver Klimek on February 8, 2010

Perhaps it’s only a personal thing, but there is one strange phenomenon about those two Islay malts that I have encountered several times now: Whenever I taste them one after another, the second will always taste not as good as the first.

And this happens regardless of the order. Laphroaig first: Lagavulin won’t taste good. Lagavulin first: Laphroaig won’t taste good.

Both are excellent malts, and I if you pointed a gun at me, I would not be able to pick one as a favourite. But somehow they seem to be incompatible, at least for my personal taste. The in-your-face peat and medicinality of the Laphroaig and the fruity sherry character of the Lagavulin repel themselves like identical poles of two magnets.

The two distilleries are only one mile apart on the south coast of Islay. Both malts are heavily peated, and  yet it seems that they are like cat and dog.

Do you feel the same or is my experience utterly subjective?

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How Much Room Is There for Whisky Experiments?

by Oliver Klimek on January 31, 2010

Experiments have always played a role in whisky making, especially since the single malt boom took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s. With about a hundred distilleries in Scotland alone, it became neccessary to stand out from the crowd, if the ditstillery had higher goals than just to produce anonymous spirit for the blend industry. Turning a distillery name into a brand requires that the own products are perceived as different (and of course better) than the ones of the competitiors.

It All Started With Finishing

Until recently, most experiments were on the field of finishing which means refilling the whisky from its original maturation cask into another cask that previously been used to mature any other alcolholic drink for a relatively short period just before bottling. One of the pioneers in finishing were Glenmorangie whose early success was to be copied by many other distilleries and independent bottlers. Even American Bourbon distilleries now are more and more inclined to test the limits that restrictive US legislation sets to the maturation of bourbon whiskey.

The State of the Art

The last years have seen a broadening in the field of experimentation. Apart from the ever-popular finishing there are now

  • Single Malts matured in fresh oak casks, like Bunnahabhain Darach Úr
  • “Finishing” with heavily toasted cask components, like Compass Box Spice Tree
  • Vattings of peated and unpeated malts of the same distillery, like Jura Superstition
  • Smaller casks used for faster maturation, like Laphroaig Quarter Cask
  • Releases of “underage” sprits and newmake, like from Glenglassaugh or Kilchoman
  • Extreme “peat monsters” that push the phenol content to new levels, like Ardbeg Supernova or Bruichladdich Octomore

For some distilleries, notably Bruichladdich, this has led to a portfolio of bottlings that can only be described as “flamboyant”. But as long as the whisky lovers back up this trend by buying these experimental bottles, I see no reason not to take experimenting a step further.

Just as a side note, the diversification of product portfolios is absolutely not restricted to the whisky industry. I think it is a general global trend. Just recently I counted the number of different varieties of 100 g cocolate tablets from renowned Swiss manufacturer Lindt at our local supermarket. There were more than 50, not taking into account other Lindt products like variety boxes and other confectionery.

Ideas for the Future

With a bit of imagination, it is not difficult to come up with ideas for new experimets in whisky production.

1. Pushing the Limits

There are quite a few possibilities for exeriments that are compliant with the current regulations on making whisk(e)y, like for example:

  • Why not try a peated single grain?
  • Make a single blend from 50% pot still grain and 50% malt whisky and let it age for 12 years or more.
  • A Scotch rye whisky from a sherry cask could be very intriguing (legal as long as there is also some malted barley involved).
  • Let your cooperage rebuild casks with alternating staves from sherry and bourbon hogsheads for combined sherry/bourbon maturation.
  • Use other fuels for malting like beech or wood from fruit trees.
  • Americans could try hickory or mesquite smoked malted corn or barley in their mashes.

2. Beyond Whisky

For distilleries that are not afraid of not being allowed to label their spirit as “Whisky”, there are even more options:

  • Use different types of wood for casks, like hickory, chestnut or cherry. Perhaps as additional staves in oak casks.
  • Use 100% malted grain other than barley
  • Re-distill your newmake after letting it infuse with botanicals or other ingredients (“Ginsky”)
  • Make “whisky grappa” from the mash residue and let it mature like whisky

Of course none of these ideas is guaranteed to work, but hey, that’s why they are experiments.

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Batch Variation and the Validity of Whisky Ratings

by Oliver Klimek on January 17, 2010

Most if not all whisky lovers with a certain experience level will have noticed that the taste of any single malt bottling can vary over time. Changes may be only subtle but can also be significant. After all, whisky is a natural product juste like wine and its taste is deternined by many many different factors.

I just was reminded of this phenonomenon when I discovered a forgotten sample of Ardbeg 10 in the uncharted regions of my cupboard. The sample I tried for my tasting notes and rating is long gone, but I had enough memory of its taste that I immediately noticed that this expression tasted significantly different. I rated the Ardbeg 10 with 84 points, but this sample was so much better that it would have deserved a rating in the high 80s.

Now, especially hardcore Ardbeg fans have the habit of cataloguing each and every L number that is etched into the bottles. Because I neither have the number of the first nor the one of the second sample I will refrain from adding a new tasting note and rating because the bottlings are unidentifiable.

One might well smile about the L number “fetishism” of the Ardbeg community, but in all fairness this is the only way of keeping track of the different bottlings that look totally identical in any other respect.

To my knowledge, all recent whisky bottlings have an L number (by Europan law, I guess), but only Ardbeg fans seem to take notice of it.

And of course there is a lesson to learn from this. The uncertainty which bottling a specific rating or tasting note is based upon is just another factor that makes a whisky review so subjective. If you can’t find the flavours that Mr. or Mrs. X have described in their tasting notes, it just might be because you tried a different bottling.

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Will Scotch Single Malt Become a Luxury Item ?

by Oliver Klimek on September 7, 2009

The launch of the new “Manager’s Choice” line by Diageo was only the latest in a series of whisky releases that left many whisky lovers dazzled by the attached price tags. Two notable examples are:

Black and White Bowmore (€ 3000)

The first two releases of this legendary 1964 whisky in 1993 and 1994 were priced at less than a tenth of the price for the new releases. Even when taking into account the higher age, the price rise is immense.

Ardbeg Double Barrel (€ 12000)

In 2008, Ardbeg released two 1974 single cask bottlings in a handmade guncase with 8 silver drinking cups. The regular price for a bottle of Ardbeg 1974 single cask is around €1000.

Are Distilleries Becoming too Greedy?

The Ardbeg Double Barrel clearly is the brainchild of the LVMH involvement in Ardbeg and Glenmorangie. The French luxury goods company wanted something very special for their uber-rich clients, something to show off to their friends who thought they had seen it all. For this purpose, it is very important that the price be extremely high, otherwise it would not be regarded as valuable. Where money does not matter, the price tag makes all the difference. Almost anybody could buy a bottle for a thousand bucks, so it must be significantly more expensive. If the whisky is really “worth” that much, is entirely unimportant.

Things are different with the Black Bowmore. This a perfect example how the collector’s market for whisky can influence the pricing of distillery bottlings. After the original release, prices continued to rise into four-digit territory. So Bowmore decided that with the next release the money spent by the collectors would be better off on their bank account than in the purse of some speculators.

The Diageo release seems to be in the same line. The occasional Diageao Manager’s Drams that found their way onto the free market fetched similar prices as are now demanded for the new series. For those who are not familiar with the Manager’s Drams: Every year Diageo chose the best cask from one of their distilleries to be bottled as presents for their top staff.

The Danger is Real

As long as distilleries are offering their basic drams at an affordable price, I can happily live with the LVMH approach. Give the rich what they want, but don’t forget the poor. The danger I see here is that the concept of “overpriced added value” might also be applied to the standard bottlings. A new bottle design, a new label, slightly higher ABV or an additional finish might be reason enough to crank up the price by more than the added value would justify.

Even more dangerous is the “cash in on the collectors” approach. By setting the prices for special bottlings too high, chances are that they will only collect dust on collector’s shelves instead of being opened and enjoyed. But as long as collectors are willing to pay these prices, this seems to be unavoidable. But distiileries should be aware that happy consumers are always a better source of income. When they like the whisky they might buy some more. A collector is happy with only one or two bottles.

I want to reiterate that it is of vital interest to the whisky industry as well as to the consumers that entry level bottlings stay affordable. This is not as self-evident as one might think, if for example you look at the development of the price for Lagavulin 16 over the past years. This is the base of the pyramid, and fiddling around with it just might prove fatal.

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Paralyze your taste buds to enjoy whisky?

by Oliver Klimek on August 13, 2009

In the German TWS whisky forum there is currently a debate about the best way to enjoy the new peat monster from Ardbeg, the Supernova. I have not tasted it before, but the discussion highlights a point that I think is imortant to whisky tasting in general.

One user came up with this idea to get the best out of the Supernova: Before tasting, you have to cool down your mouth with iced water “until your tooth fillings are hurting”. Then drink it quickly (but not gulp it down) withought letting it stay in your mouth too long. This way, the strong peat would not totally dominate the other aromatic components in the whisky.

Two things struck me immediately:

1. He only ever tasted one 2 cl sample and decided to use the aforementioned method. How can you possibly say that this method works best when you haven’t tried it in a normal fashion before?

2. Freezing your mouth paralyzes your tastebuds. If a whisky tastes best with handicapped tastebuds, what does this mean for the quality of the whisky? Is this the way it should be or does this mean the whisky is flawed?

As mentioned before, I have not tasted the Supernova myself (yet), so I can’t comment on the success of the iced water method. But I would be interested to read your comments on this topic.

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