Elegant Oldies Tasting with Tim & Billy

Elegant Oldies, what’s that all about then?

Well, if you’re reading this you’re probably already vaguely aware of two things:

1) The Whisky Exchange is the best online resource on the planet for affordable old ‘dusty‘ whiskies; and

2) Billy and I are geeks of the most clichéd kind imaginable, spending our days hunched over our keyboards, blinking like  shrivelled moles in the Sahara when exposed to daylight and dissolving into sweaty blobs of hot shame when required to talk to an audience any larger than a handful of our closest fellow whisky nerds.

Well, at last the time is right to combine these facts and circumstances into what promises to be an unmissable night of great whisky and personal awkwardness.  Yes, it’s finally happened: Billy & I have been tempted out of our hutches and into the spotlight with the metaphorical lettuce leaf of a tasting of dusty old bottles of whisky.

Your hosts sharing a joke in happier times

This ego-shattering humiliation is entitled ‘Elegant Oldies‘ and will be taking place at TWE Vinopolis on Monday 17th June (the day after Father’s Day – don’t worry there’s still time to pick up something for your Dad if you haven’t done so yet).

Having rooted through Sukhinder’s stash like hungry swine after truffles, we’ve come up with seven interesting old drams that we feel we could probably spout on about for the required length of time, hopefully without the ground opening up and swallowing us. No matter how much we may wish it to.

As the title Elegant Oldies suggests, the theme of the tasting is an exploration of a formerly prevalent style of whisky that isn’t often seen these days: gentle, light single malts.  In these days of cask strength sherry monsters and three-figure ppms, Billy and I will be giving some love to this less fashionable genre, looking back to when 8 years was pretty old for a whisky and distilleries would boast about how light and delicate their single malts were.

The drams in question are:

Glen Scotia 5 Year Old (bottled 1970s)

Knockando 1966 12 Year Old (bottled 1978)

Glenfiddich 18 Year Old Ancient Reserve (1990s ceramic decanter)

Oban 12 Year Old (bottled 1970s)

Glen Grant 10 Year Old (bottled 1970s)

Glen Moray 1962 27 Year Old (bottled 1987)

Talisker 12 Year Old (bottled 1980s)

Feast your eyes (and your tastebuds)

Most of these whiskies were once their respective distillery’s entry-level drams, and we’ll be using this opportunity to throw open a wider discussion of the changes that have occurred to the industry and the single malts themselves since the emergence of single malt as a mainstream category in the 1970s.  In doing so, we’ll be examining the trends in consumer tastes that shape that market and influence the style of whiskies that are being made today.

Will these whiskies really taste the way they would have if you’d popped the cork thirty years ago?  We’ll be looking at the appeal of old whisky bottles to drinkers and collectors, while exploding the myth of batch consistency and discussing the relative merits of the conflicting theories of OBE (Old Bottle Effect) versus whisky’s supposed inertia in bottle.

Well, that’s the plan anyway.  If you want to drink some rather rare and wonderful old elegant whiskies while watching two grown men squirm under the public glare, you’d better get a move on – tickets are on sale NOW at the eminently reasonable price of £45, but spaces are disappearing fast. If you’re lucky enough to live near TWE Vinopolis you can pop in and buy your tickets there; otherwise, please call the ticket hotline on 020 7403 8688. And please be gentle with us if you’re there on the night…