The Whisky Exchange BLOG

Okay, so the London transport network is f@cked, there’s more snow due this afternoon and I live too far away from work to risk trying to get in and find myself stuck in Park Royal when I try to get home – nearly three hours it took me yesterday.

I’ve also managed to get myself temporarily barred from remotely accessing my work computer by getting my password wrong too many times (because I’m a total numpty). So in fact the only thing I can work at from home today is Wordpress.

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First things first.  Open a new window and listen to this while you’re reading the blog.  It’ll put you in a good mood, and this might be the last you see of me before Christmas, so I want you to be happy.

Anyway, what recession?!!  It’s been so mind-bendingly busy here at TWE Towers that I’ve not had a chance to do any blogging at all in the last month.  It’s got so crazy that I’ve had to go downstairs and get my hands dirty picking orders 12 hrs a day for the last week.  Quelle Horreur!! Even now, I may be dragged back to the coalface at any moment, so I’m going to make this pretty brief.

So, it’s that time of year again.  Octomore, Bruichladdich’s controversial uber-peated behemoth, is back - still as a 5 year-old – and this time, it’s coming with a twist: it’s been finished in wine casks.

 Well, let’s face it - it’s Bruichladdich we’re talking about here.  This was always going to happen.

But these are no mortal wine casks – the world’s peatiest whisky has been finished in casks formerly home to one of the world’s most expensive wines: Chateau Petrus. Does this qualify to be called gilding the lily?

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Well, after the success of the last prize draw for The Whisky Show, I felt kind of bad for all the unlucky applicants – so I asked for more tickets and they said Yes!

This time the tickets are for SATURDAY 7TH NOVEMBER and the Show is on from 12pm-7pm:

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Thank you all for entering the prize draw for The Whisky Show tickets!  I was shocked with the number of entries received.  More importantly, I only had two numpties who couldn’t follow the instructions, so my faith in your intelligence is largely restored!

You're mostly clever after all!

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Yes indeed, I’ve got TEN PAIRS of tickets for The Whisky Show to give away!!

This is what you get – the tickets are for FRIDAY 6TH NOVEMBER and the Show is on from 4pm-10pm:

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Okay, so last night I was lucky enough to attend the press tasting of this year’s special Release from Diageo, the details of all of which are in my last post.  It was a fairly merry affair, although I wasn’t socialising much – firstly because on paper we only had an hour and a half to sample nine cask-strength malts, and secondly because I’m pisspoor at networking – as a card-carrying whisky nerd I can be quite nervous around new folk and whisky ’slebs, and I’m also very poor at feigning interest if I get stuck with someone really boring, which I find particularly excruciating.  Not that I encountered any boring people at last night’s tasting, I hasten to add – on the contrary, everyone that I did speak to was great.

Now, I like to think of my readers as intelligent types, with a healthy mix of up-to-date bespectacled middle-aged intellectuals perusing their laptops from the comfort of a big leather armchair in their libraries, alongside the thrusting, iconoclastic young whisky troubadours taking everything as it comes and making up their own minds on lots of important stuff. 

How I like to think of you all, reading Kerouac with a cup of java

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Just received the following stuff on the Diageo Special Releases for this year, so thought I’d better share.  I’m going to a tasting of these tomorrow night, so will post my own impressions later in the week.

The full line-up has already been revealed on various sites, so I won’t publish much of the bumf -  just the official tasting notes and photos for starters. 

Benrinnes

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Right, a quick disclaimer first: I’m stuck at home with a rotten cold (that won’t go away, curse it) and a slightly light head after our triumph at last night’s International Spirits Challenge awards bash – where we picked up Best Spirits Retailer (Huzzah!).  The trophy is very cool – it’s a massive Glencairn.

Check it out - ISC champs!!

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Continuing our trilogy of blog posts on noteworthy whisky press releases, let’s have a bit about the new Gold Bowmore:

In contrast to Whyte & Mackay’s media-savvy pi$$-taking audaciousness, as discussed in my previous post and here, this press release is rather more of the preachy, hype-driven old school of whisky PR, where every new release is the most massively earth-shattering whisky ever released (until the next one):

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