Hi all!
Not much going on in this NG for the time beeing, so I thought I would share some more general thoughts on tasting and scoring. I know: I've mentioned some of this in earlier postings, but I feel it's nice to sum up. (This is going to be a long one, but reading it is voluntary!)
I've been interested in whisky for at least ten years, but it's really just the last two or three that this interest has sort of become "serious". For the first seven years or so, I just differed between three or four malts, but these last years I've been through nearly forty. I've started taking notes, I've participated here in this NG from time to time, and I've been reading a lot on different whiskyrelated sites on the internet - particularly the Malt Madness/Malt Maniacs site.
Taking notes can be a bit difficult. A lot of things can affect what I'm able to detect in the nose and on the palate at a particular time. There are of course precations to take (avoid hotly spiced food etc. etc.), but even so, I tend to discover different aspects of the whisky from tasting to tasting. This, of course, also affects the score I give. Please don't get me wrong, I don't look at this as an unwanted problem, on the contrary, all of this actually increases my fascination for whisky! But given these facts, I usually don't concider my notes and score to be final before the bottle is finished - and that can sometimes take months.
As it happens, I now fill up a 25cl sample bottle for storage from every almost new bottle I crack open. My main intention with doing this was to begin with to be able to compare different batches of the same whisky head to head later on. But it has also given me the opportunity to "revisit" an old bottle if I want to. And when I have done so, I have often come to change or add to my old notes, probably mainly because I've become somewhat more experienced since last time.
Of course, as one becomes a more experienced taster, one will be able to "analyse" a whisky quicker and with more certainty. But I believe that even for the most experienced ones, a certain whisky will still taste a bit different the next time, on a different occasion, perhaps on a different location. I like that, it adds to the fascination.
Then there is the phenomenon of oxidation, which I find often hugely affects the whisky over time. This varies a lot from one whisky to another, an exactly why that is, is a big, interesting topic by it self. But generally, I find that once a bottle has been opened and through the weeks gets slowly emptier, things - good things to begin with! - start to happen: The whisky tends to open up, show more complexity, generally simply become better. This can go on for weeks, sometimes months. Then the prosess slows down, and sooner or later it will go the other way, the whisky will eventually (maybe after a year or so) become duller and flatter. My experience, allthough limited and subjective, tells me that in points on a 0-100 scoring scale, a whisky often gains around three points, sometimes even up to six points, from freshly opened to, say, a month or so later. So I take my time before I concider a whisky "seriously sampled" - to loan an expression from J. van den Heuvel's (Malt Madness) Liquid Log.
What I am slightly worried about, is the notes and scorings of the "professionals", and how we might tend to read them. I'm thinking about writers like M. Jackson and J. Murray, but also the writers on the internet, like the before mentioned Malt Madness/Malt Maniacs. I really enjoy the MM/MM site buy the way, and find that it offers a vast collection of information and insight; and it's mostly a good read too. But when a person samples a hundred ore more expressions through a year, however experienced that person may be, he can't possably take into account all these variations. There simply isn't enough time, and there is a liver to be payed attention to too.. So: Was it tasted at it's peak, or from a freshly opened bottle? At home, or during a visit to the distillery, or maybe at the local bar?
Of course, all of this simply tells us that notes and scores shouldn't be taken all that serious. And after all, whoever is doing the tasting, the outcome will allways be a subjective and personal view. But I feel it's something to bear in mind. Numbers have a particular tendency to present themselves as objective to us. (Experts too, maybe).
Gunnar
Oh, buy the way: Got a bottle of Laphroaig Quarter Cask last week! Fabulous stuff in my opinion, It's going to score about 90 points in my book!