We had our final whisky tasting of the year on Thursday the 30th. We decided we'd revisit a classic theme, and tasted 6 different whiskies from each of Scotland's 6 different whisky regions.
Technically, there are only 5 officially recognised whisky regions in Scotland: the Highlands, Speyside, the Lowlands, Campbeltown, and Islay. But you’ll often hear people refer to a 6th whisky region, the Islands. This is not yet an officially recognised region, and at present is actually part of the Highlands – but there are calls for the Islands to be recognised as a distinct whisky making region as it's argued that there are enough distinctive differences in flavour profile when it comes to Island whiskies. So for the purposes of our whisky tasting on Thursday, we treated it as a region in its own right... plus it was a good excuse to sample another whisky!
The big question we tried to focus on in our tasting was "does knowing the region that a whisky comes from actually help you know what that whisky will taste like?", and our tentative answer was both yes and no.
Each of the whisky regions of Scotland are associated with certain flavour profiles, so knowing that a whisky is a Speyside or an Islay whisky should, in theory, give you some idea of what to expect from it, flavour-wise.
However, with the recent boom in whisky making, many distilleries are starting to experiment in all sorts of ways, and so there will always be whiskies that are exceptions to what is regarded as characteristic of any given region. So with that in mind, anything you know about the whisky regions in Scotland should be regarded as more of a rough guide on what to expect from a whisky, rather than a set of hard and fast rules.
We have no idea what the future holds, and it's possible that there may well be so many distilleries producing a range of 'exceptions' in the future that any talk of whisky regions will be rendered obsolete, but, for now at least, we think that knowing something about each region can still be useful when you're deciding what whisky you might like to try next.
