A good friend of mine, a whisky expert, asked why I go to these Whisky Live events?
The answer is so basic. As I said to my wife, as I got off the train, I felt like a little boy heading off to his first football match with his dad. Full of enthusiasm. Full of adrenaline. Not entirely sure what was coming, but certain it was going to be good.
Simple as that.
Because once you’re in the arena, that’s exactly what happens. You bump into people. You fall into conversation with total strangers who, five minutes earlier, you’d never have exchanged a word with, and somehow you both want to keep talking. You taste some genuinely excellent drams. And before you know it, six hours have gone and you’re still there.
What I thought made a genuine difference this year was the spacing. There seemed to be real thought put into how the room was laid out, more room to actually mingle, to stop and talk to someone rather than getting jostled past them. That matters more than people give it credit for. A tasting event lives or dies on whether people can stand still and talk.
I was accompanied throughout by my good friend Tony Nachshon, and yes, we paced ourselves. Tried to stay hydrated. Made sure we ate something so we were not tasting on empty stomachs. Lessons learned the hard way over the years.
Along the way we bumped into Tony’s mate Paul White and his wife. Paul pointed us towards a pour of an Old Pulteney 17 from an independent bottler he’d tried and rated. We never quite worked out which one he meant. We found two candidates on the day and can only assume we covered our bases.
I caught up with Hedy Ben Eliahou, who’d driven to the event. He confessed that he has a close relative living nearby, which meant he did not have to worry about consumption levels. Wise planning.
Julian Weiss, a real pal of both Tony and myself, had been holed up in the VIP lounge carefully working his way through a Springbank 25. That earned him a hefty number of jealousy points from me, and rightly so.
A special mention for Andrew Wilson from Fruitful Spirits. A real gent, in Israel for the first time. He still had oodles of time for us despite his stand being overrun with wellwishers.
We also bumped into Tal Chotiner and M&H’s Head Distiller Tomer Goren. Clearly in a rush, as you would be, but generous with their time nonetheless. We got talking about their recent podcast appearance with Ron Draper.
And I can’t finish without talking about a tasting session from the Loch Lomond and Glen Scotia team,, two distilleries under the same ownership, and who are amongst my favourites. Tony and I had already put away a properly serious dram of the Loch Lomond 16 from the Waypoint series before we even sat down for it.
Sitting round a table with people, talking rather than just tasting and moving on, is a different experience to standing at a stall, and a good one.
But if I’m honest, I think the presenter missed a trick. He whipped through five tastings quite fast, without much enthusiasm behind any of them. I didn’t feel that he had thought through how you get someone from tasting a dram to wanting to walk out and buy the bottle. It just seemed a bit weak.
So what did we drink? That’s for the next post.
What I can tell you now is that this was fun. Tremendous fun. Possibly the best event I’ve been to in several years. Whether you’re a potential visitor weighing up whether it’s worth the ticket, or a distillery wondering whether it’s worth the stand, the answer is the same.
If you weren’t there, you missed out.
