Scotland: Single malt whisky through the producing distilleries: history, making and tasting

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Whisky:

Quality-Price Rating

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About ratings 

A table of ratings, and a list of whiskies, ranked by quality-price rating is available by clicking one of the bottles,
on the left or on the right.

I try to give a honest quotation to each bottle of my collection. To be able to do this, some whisky experience is needed, because some points of reference are necessary in order to give the most objective quotation.
But, even with experience, the exercise is sometimes very difficult.

Not only it is difficult, but this exercise is really time consuming, not to drink and evaluate an individual bottle, but to give a quotation to each bottle. My collection tells at this moment about 200 bottles from 90 different distilleries, and I oblige myself to drink no more than one dram a day, just to avoid being influenced by the preceding dram, and also, to be honest, because it is not really easy to evaluate a whisky when alcohol has been drunken before.

In fact, believe it or not, my whisky collection greatly contributed to a strong decrease of my alcoholic consumption. When whisky is considered as a pleasure before being considered as a strong spirit, it has strange effects on its adepts....

Quotation method 

 

The method I generally use is as follow:

Tasting happens each day at the same time (in the evening, before sleeping)

  • Blind tasting whenever possible (you need help from somebody who serves each evening a different whisky), because it avoids to be influenced by the prestige of the name or the age of the whisky.
  • Tasting happens in a special glass with a lid
  • Never more than one dram per evening
  • Tasting follows the traditional scheme of a tasting(I rarely recognize a bottle, but I recognize very often the production area)
  • Quotation has to be pronounced before confirmation of the name of the bottle
  • Before giving an objective quotation, each bottle must be tasted at least 3 times, and the final quotation will be the average of all tastings...
  • At the end of the tasting (or next morning), a description of the impressions (because I'm not able to produce professional tasting notes) are written, and this site is updated.

At that rate, it could take some time before each bottle receives an objective quotation, all the more since my collection continues growing.

This explains why not all the bottles have an individual quotation yet (for instance: 18/20)

Quality-Price rating 

 

The quotations (on 20) reflect the pleasure I had drinking the dram. Because of the rating method, the taste is the only criteria which tells. All others are excluded. This makes it possible that a relatively cheap whisky gets a better quotation than some more expensive ones or vice-versa. For the quality-price rating, I use a formula in which the relative importance of the price is less than the one on the quality. Some other considerations are also taken into account, as for instance the rarity of the whisky on the market. Quotation of whiskies from closed distilleries are corrected on this way.

Expensive bottles have a bad rating. For instance, a Port Ellen which got is very low in the table, because it costs more than 150 Euro for one litter.
 
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