Browsing Posts in: SPIRITS & LIQUEURS

The Cognac world is dominated by four houses – Courvoisier, Hennessy, Martell and Rémy Martin, who control 85% of the industry between them – but for the latest Whisky Exchange tasting at Vinopolis, the focus…

If you have a look at The Whisky Exchange website today, you may notice a few differences. By which I mean we’ve totally revamped the site. We’ve been doing little tweaks over the past few…

For something a bit different, we explored grappa for the first time at our latest Vinopolis tasting, ably guided by expert Nick Hopewell-Smith. It’s fair to say grappa has a bad reputation. At the tasting, we unanimously agreed this…

Despite the growth of using brown spirits in mixed drinks, Cognac has not benefited to the same degree. The same can be said of liqueurs, with Grand Marnier and Domaine du Canton the only two Cognac-based examples that…

While most of the masterclasses at our London shop are focused on the world of whisky, we do like to do something a little different from time to time. With summer most definitely in the…

Every now and then, a new product arrives at TWE that really excites us – unique, with a great back story, or simply an interesting concept. So, when we heard about the release of a…

Pretty much every day of the year is (Inter)national X day for a variety of values of X, from pillow fights to mine awareness and osteoperosis to gin. Somewhere hidden in that range is Tequila and…

There are many things that work together. Some need no explanation: soap and water, meat and potatoes or fish and chips; some are a little more obscure – Danny DeVito and Arnie, ham and Coca-Cola,…

The Brazilian football team may have struggled to convince so far in the World Cup, but there’s no denying the spectacle their fans have brought to the tournament – a blast of colour, noise and…

It’s been satisfying to watch the resurgence of gin as a classy, sophisticated spirit, and more so given that this resurgence hasn’t been limited to one particular style or brand – it’s been across the…

I’m a big fan of gin.  Some may regard pasta and milk as essential household items, but my house feels empty without a bottle or two of gin in it.  Recently I’ve been playing around…

While some drinks categories fire out new releases every few days (I’m looking at you here Gin), some are more steeped in history and produce fewer new entries. One that sees little in the way…

One of the ‘problems’ of the whisky world is the frequency of celebrations that require a dram to be raised. Since the end of summer we’ve had holidays and festivals every couple of weeks. This…

Along with our Whisky of the Year we decided that we should also go for a Fine Spirit of the Year as a companion award. Again, there were fights in the office, but surprisingly one…

We’ve been quietly cooking something up for the last few months and today we can reveal our work to the world – The Whisky Exchange Fine Spirits and Whisky Advent Calendar. It’s a fairly simple…

In the latest of our TWE super-features (following on from our great Vodka exploration and follow-up on continuous distillation a couple of months ago), I’ve spent some time discovering the rich history of mezcal, Mexico’s…

So, it’s finally Whisky Show Eve.  This is a day that at TWE generally involves lots of  running around doing last-minute checks, affixing labels to bottles, amending enormous spreadsheets and general fretting about whether there’s…

From time to time we seem to veer a little away from whisky at TWE HQ and this has definitely been one of those fortnights. Along with our TWE Guide To Vodka that went up…