Comments on: Your most memorable whisky story?

By: Barry

Barry — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:06:33 +0000

During September 2009 my wife and I were lucky enough to visit Islay and all its distilleries. The highlight of our stay was without doubt a tour at Bunnahabhain. John McClelland himself conducted our tour (we were 5 in total) and he finished the tour with a tasting of 22 year old Bunnahabhain from the cask while he regaled us with stories of the Islay and Bunnahabhain, it was magical. The first night we stayed at the Port Charlotte Hotel, the food the Port Charlotte was exceptional and they have a great whisky bar. We also stayed at The Monarchs Guest House for a few days. Ronnie and Marie are the perfect hosts and Ronnie and Marie were a mine of information about the island and its people. I would recommend The Monarchs unreservedly to anyone looking for a place to stay on the island.

By: Todd

Todd — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 04:28:44 +0000

A few years back I was visiting one of my favorite distillies, whose name will remain undisclosed to protect the truthful. The character of whisky produced by this particular distillery has changed considerably over the years and I have been fortunate to have tasted examples produced over a near fifty year period. But whenever I asked distillery representatives about the causes of these variations, I invariably was answered that no such change existed and that the process of producing whisky at that distillery was constant. While visiting the distillery, there were no guides for tours, so I walked into to see the stills unaccompanied and while admiring the stills, the stillman came by and we struck up a conversation. He had worked there for many decades and when noted that it was my perception that the whisky had changed over time, he replied that this was for good reason, then recounted process changes that had occurred over the last forty years, including changes in peating levels, grain sources, mash times, and other factors. Not surprisingly, major process changes coincided with ownership changes. A much younger distillery worker joined us, and he listened carefully as well, and joined in with questions of his own. It was clear that they were both immensely proud of the distillery and were keen to know as much about the distillery as possible. I was very grateful to the distillery workers and felt privileged to witness a substantial part of the oral history of this distillery, and particularly the passing down of this history within the distillery.

By: nicolas vaughn

nicolas vaughn — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 04:26:19 +0000

Here is my most memorable moment in the short history of my whisky journey. My first trip to scotland was 2006 and my wife and had planned a two week stint centered around the Feis Ile on Islay and I was so excited to i couldn’t stand it. We spent the first week in edinburgh and then took a train, bus, and ferry to Islay only to realize when we disembarked at Port Ellen there was no one in sight! Oh yeah there are only 3000 people on the island and only 3 taxi services and they were somewhere else as well! My wife was ready to get back on the ferry and go home, but after a few phone calls on a pay phone and about an hour later a taxi arrived and we were on our way to ballygrant. The next few days were amazing. Distillery tours, whisky tastings, meeting the incredible workers at the distilleries, eating great food, etc., etc. But the day i was really looking forward to was the bruichladdich day. It was an incredible day, a great tour especially checking out the warehouses and getting to sample whisky straight out of the cask, the dancing, the food! The best part of the this day was hanging out with Andrew Gray who was one of the original investors and who i’d met the previous year at whiskyfest new york. We spent the day knocking back bruichladdich after bruichladdich, cocktail after cocktail talking about everything and anything. The day came to an end and my wife and I were reluctantly walking out of the distillery wondering how we were getting home AGAIN! Then I ran into Andrew and his wife in the parking lot, he asked me how we we getting home and i replied “I have no idea!” and so he offered to drive us home and it was a good 45 minute drive back to the cottage! We were incredibly grateful and that will be my lasting memory of Scotland and Islay, the whisky, the culture, and of course the generosity and kindness of its people. Slainte Andrew and thank you

By: JC Skinner

JC Skinner — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:06:17 +0000

I could talk about the time I accidentally entered the Australian SMWS’s annual tasting and came fourth, while Gordon Ramsay gatecrashed the event at the Sydney Opera House.
But my favourite whiskey memory was when I tracked down a long-sought bottle of Comber for my Dad who’s from Comber but tragically was underage when the distilleries closed and never tasted his native dram.
I got the bottle from a lovely old couple of gay guys living at the tip of the Ards peninsula in county Down, who were sadly emigrating to France in their Seventies after experiencing sustained homophobia for the first time in their decades living together in Northern Ireland.
They were packing up their worldly goods and selling off what they didn’t need, including the whiskey.
They had a second bottle already open, and gave me a small dram (I was driving) to taste.
Then they handed me a bottle of armagnac from the village where they were moving to and insisted I share it with my father.
Lovely people, and they’re toasted each time the bottle’s open, for minding it for us for so many years.

By: John Hansell

John Hansell — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 15:51:55 +0000

Sam K, thanks for sharing that with us!

Let’s keep the thread going.

By: sam k

sam k — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 05:10:50 +0000

I’ll do what I can to keep this incredible thread going. A few years back, I connected via the internet with John and Linda Lipman, American whiskey historians extraordinaire (http://www.ellenjaye.com/hist_mono4ryewhiskey.htm), and we met for the first time on my home turf, western Pennsylvania’s Monongahela River valley.

We explored the remains of a number of silents, including Dillinger Distilling in Ruffs Dale (home of the only post-Prohibition pot still operation constructed in the U.S.), and Frantz Distillers of Somerset County, where single-story iron-clad warehouses still stand, then rendezvoused at a hotel that evening to sample ancestral American whiskeys from each others’ collections.

A couple of years later, we met again in Baltimore with other whiskey aficionados, including preeminent Maryland distillery historian Jim Bready and his wife Mary, then both in their eighties, to explore the mysteries of Maryland rye, including century-old specimens provided by the eight or so attendees that day.

Today my wife and I met again with the Lipmans in Bedford PA, the home of the Whiskey Insurrection of 1794, and shared whiskeys (old and new) with friends (old and new), people who are now part of our ever-growing circle.

It is an incredible experience to share whiskeys that were distilled when our grandparents were born, next to the great whiskeys that are produced today, and to bring others into that fold.

I am a richer man for these experiences.

May you all someday enjoy the camaraderie that my wife and I experienced today with friends that I know only because OF my love of whiskey, only FOR the love of whiskey!

By: patrick

patrick — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:41:18 +0000

Hi Wolfgang,
I have to say it varies a lot on the sfaff available at the time of your visit.
I had enjoyable memories of Islay, including Lagavulin, on in the highlands. Lagavulin is getting slightly stricter, but they are still very permissive.
On the other hand, the Diageo distilleries are very resctrictive, at the exception of some Dufftown distilleries during the whisky festivals.

By: WolfgangU

WolfgangU — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 16:49:43 +0000

Patrick, I am sorry for your experiences with picture-taking. After having visited a total of 22 malt distilleries in Scotland over the past 2 years, I can say their policies differ as vastly as their reasons for restricting photography, which sometimes border on the absurd.
My impression is that the larger, better known and more visited a distillery is, the more restrictive it tends to be.
My best experiences were at Lagavulin and Balblair, with no restrictions whatsoever. The latter was the most generous of them all, especially with samples (the Assistant Manager let me fill my three 50ml plastic bottles plus gave me two miniatures, all for free).

By: patrick

patrick — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:17:10 +0000

A different style of memorable stories:
A few years back, while waiting for the tour of the Clynelish distillery, I took the liberty to move in front of the distillery to take some photographs. Within a minute, the distillery manager rushed from his office, came to me and asking what I was doing on these private grounds. When I told him that I was waiting for the tour to start, he cooled down and let me continued taking photographs.
Not the best impression …

In 2006, before preparing my trip to Scotland, I contacted the Tomatin distillery for taking photographs. Quite a few e-mails were exchanged, but every time, it became more restrictive.
When I arrived at the distillery, even though it was not in production, I was informed that I was only allowed to take some photographs from outside for safety reasons (well, the BBC was recording on that day, with all its staff and lights !?).
The staff at the reception center did try anyhow to help me as much as as they could, but the assistant Director was very restrictive. At the end of the tour, I was served a few drams and since I was driving, I poured my dram into my glass vials. The assistant director came, asked me what I was doing and requested that I emptied my samples! Then I asked him kindly if I could take some additional outside photographs, this was not anymore allowed. His tone was most unpleasant, we exchanged a few glances with the staff and I left. This was apparently not enough, since he followed me until I was in my car and continued watching me until I crossed the gate of the distillery. Well, that was a very memorable event that I will not forget.

By: lawschooldrunk

lawschooldrunk — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 17:27:17 +0000

Both my most memorable, yet unremarkable moments involve clean, cold, crisp winter air.

In one, I (a cold weather junkie) checked the thermometer and saw it was in the low 20s F. I grabbed my down parka, filled my Glencairn with Laphroaig cask strength, and stood in the middle of the residential street in front of my house. It was around 2AM, with a full moon, absolutely no wind, some deer walking around, totally still and quiet, the smell of firewood wafting from a neighbor’s fireplace, and it was just magical as I sipped the Laphroaig.

In the other, I attended a wedding on the outskirts of Toronto. Towards the end of the wedding, I took a tumbler filled with Glenmorangie 10yo, fled the stuffy, hot wedding hall, and enjoyed my dram outside in the night air. After driving up from where it was in the 40s F, the 12 F Canadian air was quite refreshing, especially after being in a bus that day for 10 hours. It was just the mellow point of a hectic day.

By: Sjoerd de Haan

Sjoerd de Haan — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:53:31 +0000

My most memorable was more or less about not-whisky.

A couple of friends and I planned to go to Scotland for a few days as an autumn break, and we had booked tickets and a few nights in hostels in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

We looked up the route to the airport that was stated on the airline provider and drove there on a very misty Thursday morning. By the time we got there, ten minutes before check-in closed (after a two hour traffic jam near Brussels).

‘Where is the check-in for whatever’? Well, about 70 kilometers south of here, at the next airport…

Long story short, Google maps sent us to the wrong airport, and we didn’t double check. 70 kilometers, in 10 minutes, with our car still in the parking lot…

We drove home, laughed about it after an hour, and dumped all our holiday budget at the local whisky specialist retailer…

By: two-bit cowboy

two-bit cowboy — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:08:44 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen!

Wonderful stories. More interesting by far than the one that set John’s reply record. Let’s recall more memories and run this one higher still.

In the winter of ’94 I was on assignment at a remote Air Force outpost on the Korea’s west coast. My Spartan billet offered no more to drink than brackish, brownish reservoir water.

Snow to the knee. Damp Yellow Sea gails sliced through six layers of togs as I hiked to the base’s package store. Blended whisky, that’s all. There was, though, an interesting brown ceramic decanter nestled atop a velvety brown bag behind a locked glass door.

Pushed by a tailwind and the desire to taste the contents of my new brown jug, I hurried the ten blocks back to my room. Warmed, and to Tom Scott’s Saxopella, a friend and I savored the last drops as we exchanged a Royal Salute.

By: Amit

Amit — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:33:44 +0000

I have more than a few memorable whisky stories from my 25 years of whisky drinking ranging from the first time I tasted a single malt at the very mature of age of 11 (it was a Glenfiddich) to the time I ended up teaming up with someone making a whiskey presentation to over a hundred people at a social event. But I’d like to talk about the very first Whiskyfest that I went to in San Francisco three years ago. I got there with plenty of time to spare and ran in to many people that I recognized from the industry. One of them was kind enough to take me in before the doors opened to the public and I did get to sample a few whiskies before hand. I met many of the folks from the distilleries whom I had met and got to sample a whole host of whiskies that were not poured during the event. A couple of really old Bowmores (including the black), Glenrothes 1968 and 1971, a shot of the Pappy Van Winkle 23 with Julian himself, a new expression from John Glasser, new-make from Laphroaig that Simon was kind enough to get to the event, the Lagavulin 12 and many more. Some from the exhibitors and some from folks like you and me just attending the event. I got invited to an after party where each one of us had brought something unusual or rare (I took a bottle of the Leapfrog) and someone cracked open a bottle of the Glenfiddich 50 for a bunch of strangers. It was a night that is deeply imprinted on my mind and perhaps my soul.

By: John Hansell

John Hansell — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 21:25:04 +0000

Well done, Lew. Well done. A most memorable moment indeed.

By: Lew Bryson

Lew Bryson — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 20:14:29 +0000

Whiskey makes the moment…but sometimes the moment makes the whiskey. My most memorable whiskey moment was with John Hansell and Mike Haering, Brown-Forman brand director, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in an ice-fishing hut on Lake Simcoe. B-F had us (and other writers) on a junket to Canadian Mist, and after the tour and blending was over, we retired to a resort on the Lake…in February. The ice was still about 15″ thick, so John and I decided to take them up on their offering of ice-fishing. We climbed in the fishing guide’s Jeep and Mike pulled out a bottle of Jack. We used the plastic cups on the short ride to the lake, but left them in the Jeep and started necking the Jack once we got in the sno-cat. We roared 2 miles out across the ice, the guide set us up in the hut, and we started telling stories and passing around the Jack. At some point the tackle got tangled and we realized we weren’t going to be catching any fish, but we kept passing the bottle and talking. It was cold, it was starkly beautiful outside the hut, we got to know each other, and we killed the bottle. There was some excellent Old Forester Birthday bourbon waiting for us back at the hotel, but that afternoon…there was just nothing better than that bottle of Jack.
Whiskey makes the moment…but sometimes the moment makes the whiskey.