I try not to get upset about $1000 per dram whiskies. There are going to be one’s I can never try, either because of price or availability. Good for the multi-millionaire enthusiast who can drop that kind of money on it. I hope he/she appreciates it though and it doesn’t go to waste on someone that would just as easily enjoy dewar’s with soda.

Ken

your message reflects my point of view as well. I was reading it and thought that I had wrote it!!

My respect to you

Affordability is a topic near and dear to my heart, as you can’t enjoy something if you can’t afford to buy it. So there are a couple of ways of looking at things.

Let’s say someone can afford to lease an Accura TL. He/she can also downgrade to a Honda Accord, and enjoy a nightly dram of GF 30 with the lease and insurance savings. Now someone else might just buy a few bottles of Very Old Barton’s bourbon at $12, and dollar cost average the 30 year old scotch into the budget.

Another option is to normalize the price of whisk(e)y to wine. You get 27 servings out of a bottle of the former, and five for a bottle of wine. A $10 bottle of wine, hardly an extravagance, translates into $2 per serving. That’s a $54 botttle of SMS, actually a bit more than most of us would want to spend on a ‘daily dram’. Now a $300 bottle of SMS eqates to a $50 bottle of wine. That’s seriously into the luxury category, but not insance for a special birthday, anniversary, etc.

So there are ways of affording the occasional high end bottle, while remaining fiscally responsible.

Slainte.

Louis

All well and good…the bad part is that I find my attitude has become a bit jaded, and that tends to color my postings here and elsewhere. I look at other enthusiasts’ exuberance with a cynical eye, and snort at the newbies who are all atwitter over Islay, as I was some years ago. Intolerant of me. We are all in different stages of the journey–in fact, we are all on different journeys altogether–and there are as many different ideas about what’s worthwhile as there are about how much it’s worth. One man’s everyday dram is another’s fantasy bottle. And it occurs to me that this must be one of the most difficult things about what you do. When you acknowledge that Glenfiddich 50 is something 99.9% of us will never touch, and mention the 30 as something more easily attainable to regular folk, some smart-ass comes along and says, “‘Regular folk’? Who does Hansell think he’s kidding?” Keeping us all engaged, or as many of us as possible, wherever we are on the spectrum, is no easy thing. This jaded and cynical observer will admit that you’re doing pretty well under the circumstances.