Today’s post is one I never quite expected to write: the 1,000th spirit tasted and reviewed for this blog. What started on August 8, 2019, with a Balblair 1979 has become, over seven years and hundreds of evenings with a glass, a record of the spirits that shaped my palate and the stories behind them. There have been detours into cognac cellars, discoveries on Islay and other famous places, and far more independent bottlings than I could have imagined back then.
Today’s drams are seven Taliskers, all very special bottles. Over the last few years, I’ve found myself wanting to review several spirits in the same blog post so I can have proper comparison points. It also makes rating them easier, because I’m not judging each dram in a vacuum but against a few peers that helps bring out its strengths and weaknesses. That’s really what I wanted for this milestone post: not just a line-up of special bottles, but a set of drams that could speak to one another.
Tasting them side by side gives me context, and context matters when you’re trying to write something fair and honest. It helps me see what a whisky is doing well, where it falls short, and whether it stands out for the right reasons. That approach has become more important to me over the last few years. I don’t just want to taste a spirit once and move on; I want to place it in a small conversation, with a few other bottles around it to sharpen the picture. It makes the notes more useful for me, and I think it makes the article more interesting to read as well.
This article is part tally, part retrospective, and part tasting session — seven drams lined up to mark the moment, with the thousandth dram last.
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