About Gordon Muir, why me?

There has to be a top whisky professional in the worlds leading malt whisky retailer and that seems to be me. For seventeen of the last twenty three years I've worked for a drinks retail company in the UK called Oddbins. For the last six years I've also been working preparing and presenting malt whisky tastings. Every industry has its awards and the drinks industry in the UK is no exception. There are various categories of award and an overall winner. In the fifteen years the drinks awards have been running Oddbins has been overall winner twelve times. In 2000 we had an internal competition to find out who knew most about whisky. Three rounds with eight whiskies blind and twenty questions on whisky. I came first in every round. Not because I have the best sense of smell or memory, but because I have a logical system for describing whiskies. This means I can remember them much more easily. This is the system I'll teach you.

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Whilst most of us have a comparable ability to smell things, unless you have lots of practice it is quite difficult to describe what you smell. There are tricks to make this easier. We are good at picking up the differences between smells. With this in mind I have chosen six malts whose differences and similarities will make it much easier to build up your own whisky language.

Everything Bar Culture

Industry statistics prove we are drinking less alcohol but of better quality. Meanwhile, the renaissance of Scottish culture (which is about 47.6% malt whisky by volume) continues apace and bar staff all over the country are answering punters' eager questions with blank stares. One man had the foresight to put all of this together and carve himself a niche drinking malts and getting paid for it. Gordon Muir starts his tasting evening with a broad introduction to the production of malt whisky and how each factor can affect the finished taste. Then it is time to smell each of the malts, again with hints and guidance, and finally to taste, and no you don't spit into a bucket. Muir uses a fairly simple set of references for taste and smell, which even the jaded palate of EBC's reporter was able to get the hang of. If you tend to be put off by the somewhat stuffy image of tasting then don't be. This is one tasting with a total lack of snobbery. Throughout, the atmosphere is informal although obviously more informal as the evening progresses. Having done many tastings over the years, Muir reckons that, of all alcohol, only champagne and whisky are capable of consistently cheering people up, although "cheering up" doesn't quite do justice to the feelings of warm contentment and cheery sociability that comes with a few good malts.

Mark Meiklejohn, The Scotsman.