Coldorak's whisky blog.
Two years ago, I was still completely “alone” in my then simple appreciation of whisky. I had only a dozen of bottles (yes, only one dozen), I was sharing a glass with friends that would come at my home but didn’t know about exchanging samples, I was a complete newbie, by myself in this big whisky world.
Read more
This evening, I tasted for the first time an Arran 14 year-old, or any whisky from this distillery for that matter. That is the thing when you’re still quite a newbie in the whisky amateur world: you still have the joy of discovering something new for you, though you may have prejudice, but sometimes you’ll regret starting this late, especially with today’s prices and secondary market. Not that it’s a problem for this dram though, fortunately.
Read more
When I really got into Whisky, I had the opportunity to go on a trip to Scotland for the Spirit of Speyside festival.
We were celebrating Coldorak’s birthday and at the same time planning to enjoy Scotland and its distilleries. And boy we did.
One of the event we attended was Glen Moray’s May 4th 2019. May the fourth anyone? It was cohosted by Glen Moray and the SMWS that I didn’t know before then.
The SMWS is an independent bottler somehow atypical: it’s a club and you need to be a member if you want to partake in the goodies. It releases almost only single casks, cask strength, non chill-filtered whiskies at a very affordable price.
I was intrigued with the SMWS and it didn’t take long for me to commit myself to become a member. Fast forward to August 2019 and I finally did my first tasting session with the Parisian members at Mersea.
Balblair distillery has been having a special feeling for me for a long long time. I discovered this distillery with this very same vintage, at a time when they still released whiskies based on vintage and not a count of age. A long time ago, I was running a few video-game servers for a French geek community so that we could easily play together. When I turned 30, regular players from this community gifted me this bottle, from my vintage, and that’s how Balblair arrived on my radar. Ten years later, I’ve turned 40 several months ago, and I wanted to have that same bottle again. After some search in several auctions, I finally bought it on an auction website for quite an expensive price, but it didn’t matter. I had to have it once more, to celebrate my new decade.
Read more