Red, I agree generally that awards are “pretty lame”, but my reaction is, I think, quite opposite to yours. Frankly, I don’t pay much attention to awards at all because I don’t really think they’re relevant to anything I care about. (One reason I let my sub to That Other Magazine lapse is because it seemed like every other issue was an awards issue of some kind…just seems like cheap filler to me.) What I meant was to survey the field for whoever you think is worthy of recognition, for whatever reason, and give them an award for whatever it is they’ve done to deserve it, rather than trying to create more pigeonholes for more awards (Best Peated Coastal North Highlander From A Warehouse Not Directly On The Foreshore With Six To Nine Months Of Finishing In A Hungarian Wine Cask, etc).

But, next year we will see many others imported (Nikka, Mackmyra, Sullivans Cove, etc.,) so we will implement that category for 2010 releases.

Another thought though, along the lines of examining the categories? how about a best single cask whisky– no category specified: so it could be bourbon, scotch, japanese, whatever… just a recognition of something that worked best without being modified in any way after coming out of the barrel.

But perhaps some comfort can be found in the understanding that the sense of injustice in whisky awards or music awards is a microcosm as well as a product of the paradoxical impossibility of sincerely adressing both a broad public and a particular individual at the same time… or perhaps not.

John, is too smart not to understand this. He knows that ultimately, the value of his awards depends not simply on how much prestige they confer, but on how people engage with them. One of the main values of whisky awards is in the critical impulse that they provoke.

All that said, my personal critical impulse is pretty close to yours– it’s crazy that there should be an equal number of awards available for canadian whisky and malt scotch. Though I see tons of potential in all of the categories, at present, scotch whisky has more stylistic diversity than all of the rest put together. And these different styles appeal to different people, each group of whom might be very interested John’s opinion about the best product in that category.