Book Review: The Whisky World Tour
By Richard Thomas
Rating: C-
World Whiskey has five traditional and major producing nations (note I did not use the word “countries”): Canada, Ireland, Japan, Scotland and the United States, and it is on this point that I first found something in The Whisky World Tour that irked me. In his table of contents, author Joel Harrison folded the US and Canada together into “North America.” I’m sure Harrison knows about the five major regions: he has written about whisky for newspapers and magazines for almost twenty years.
It was an odd choice, even for a book that is built around the idea of being a guide to touring noteworthy whisky distilleries around the globe. Harrison is quite right that none of the major Canadian distilleries offer tours anymore, so consequently the only one he addresses is Forty Creek. But he made exceptions for tasting rooms in the case of Johnnie Walker and Chivas Regal, brands from his backyard of the Scotch Whisky industry, any yet couldn’t find a way to give Canada its due. It feels dismissive, and I’m not even Canadian.
The Whisky World Tour follows a format of offering a brief summary of the distillery’s background with perhaps some notes about what makes it special, plus a couple of expressions to serve as examples of what gets made there. Taking the notion that this is supposed to inspire visits to these places, I thought the summaries too brief and was soon left wondering if it would not have been better to spend more time with fewer distilleries. Doing so may have avoided some of the factual problems that crept into the book, especially in the American section: Rabbit Hole started its initial products by producing under contract at New Riff and not, as stated, from their own equipment; that Uncle Nearest is not an operational distillery is something I am certain anyone thinking of going to Shelbyville, Tennesseee might want to know, and their horse farm is for Tennessee walking horses, not thoroughbred race horses. Most parts of the book are much better than that, but even so those were not the only flaws.
Finally, the production design of the book is sometimes just plain bad. Several times, photos that would only make sense in a large, sweeping format appear in a 2 inch by 4 inch format, like one of the Yamazaki Distillery in Japan with the forested hills behind it. Other photos choices are bland, such as the one of chairbacks in a room with a window with a view of nothing in the Kanosuke entry.
Books of this type are a crowded field; only last year, Dave Broom updated his The World Atlas of Whisky. Keeping that in mind, I think an author needs to make a compelling, well-written and informative case to stand out of what is a stuffed bookshelf. Sadly, I must report this book does not.
