By Richard Thomas Rating: B+ “Bunnahabhain” is quite a mouthful, especially if you try to put a proper Gaelic accent on it. The word means “foot of the river,” and is the name of a village on the famed Scotch-making island of Islay. That village hosts a distillery, also named Bunnahabhain. Built in 1881, The Bunnahabhain is noted for being ...

By Kurt Maitland Rating: A- Late this summer, Johnnie Walker released their newest expression – The Platinum Label. It’s more than potential replacement to the soon to be departed Green Label. In their lineup it’s a position that is a rung below Johnnie Walker’s classic Blue Label, long considered one of the world’s best blends. The Platinum is an 18 ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: B With whiskey-making spreading so far and wide that even Taiwan has gotten in on the act, that distilleries are making malt whiskey in Australia ought to surprise no one. Yet Australian whiskey-making is hardly new. Down in Tasmania, some outfits have been in the whiskey distilling business for quite a while, such as Sullivans Cove, ...

By Richard Thomas Rating: A- Those finds of special barrels of scotch by Wemyss Malts just keep on coming, and coming out in their Single Cask releases. From the 2013 batch we have 294 bottles of the Wemyss Candied Fruit Single Cask. Distilled in 1998 at Auchentoshan (and therefore a 15 year old single malt), this release is Lowland example ...

By Ben Kelly Rating: B In 1992, Australian federal legislation was relaxed to allow for whiskey distillation (previous legislation was enacted in the 1830s by people with no sense of humor to prevent Aussies from having any fun. Now there are nineteen such distilleries dotted across the Australia, with a good number of those existing in the island state of ...