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End of Summer Review

Winter is coming, and the whisky is still flowing!

Well its been a very awesome summer here in Winnipeg, and we had a couple real excellent tastings to show for it. June was a wonderful event featuring yours truly as host, and an incredible assortment of absolute sherry bombs picked by our board member Ian (he knows his sherried whiskies) and all were headliners. If you forced me to pick a winner, it would be hard, but I suppose I’d love to drink that Glendronach single cask every day for the rest of my life, so I’ll pick that.

July was hot! It hardly rained. Our leader Mark was still in Korea and forced to quarantine, and the Bourbon BBQ was set a few days after my birthday! We had an absolute mound of Bourbon to enjoy and we saw many new faces for the first time. Since it was our first meet in months to be held in person, it was so amazing to see all our members and guests enjoy themselves. And we didn’t have to add to our ever growing sample vial pile! We had some much appreciated help from our friends Jennifer Li, and Greg Ollson of Beam Suntory, who provided two bourbons for our event and so much swag I was breaking a sweat just handing it all out. We had a fun drinking game, so much food, good conversations and laughs, and a few cigars were enjoyed also. A very special thank you to Brendan and Erin for donating a bottle of Old Grandad to the event and Flavia for dropping off two bottles of whisky barrel wine, even though she could not attend. And most importantly thank you to Carla for hosting the event and cooking at her beautiful home. A very memorable night indeed. And I think my favourite whisky was The Stagg Jr. with a close second going to the Knob Creek Rye.

August we kept rolling! But, we felt it was necessary to host the meeting on our online platform Zoom. This pesky virus is no doubt cramping our style, but at least we had Japanese whisky and Scotch to make things better. It was also great to have Mark back in the mix and hosting our meet again. It was very cool to dive into some really incredible Japanese whiskies this month. Things we will likely never see on the shelves here in Winnipeg. The winner of the night for me though was a Scotch, that Deanston Cream Sherry was just too good.

SEPTEMBER! This month, we have planned a very interesting and hopefully educational event featuring ALL blended Scotch whiskies. Some are blended malts, and some are blended grain whiskies, and our headliner may be the oldest age stated whisky we have sampled to date at a club event. Blended whiskies are sometimes looked at as inferior to single malts, which cannot be more far from the truth.

First of all, most single malts are actually a blend of different casks coming from one distillery in order to keep a consistent profile to their core range expressions. There is simply too much variance in casks to be able to bottle single cask expressions all day. So a master blenders job is never done. Poor guys…..Jealous!

Secondly, what would happen if you take whisky from Talisker that has a nice smoky, salty and peppery profile to it. A whisky that is delicious all on its own? Theeeen, you make it even better by adding a sweet and fruity whisky fully matured in a sherry cask from Glenrothes. Just enough to compliment the sweetness with the smokiness. Have you made two single malts even better, now that they have married together? I think you did. Good job! Lets try some blends!

The end of the month can’t come fast enough, and even though this months event is likely to be on Zoom again, we promise to deliver another excellent tasting and a good time had by all.

Join us on Whisky Wednesday September 9th where we will reveal our whisky lineup for this month and hangout for a chat. Details and Zoom link will be up in a day or so.

Bring a dram with ya!

James WWC VP