I don’t know if you knew this about us, but we have quite an incredible number of whisky bottles in our cupboard. My personal favourite is the always-controversial Laphroaig… just in case you ever happen to being me a whisky in some smoky Scottish bar.
We decided to route our drive from Glasgow to the Mhor hotel via the Glengoyne distillery, hoping to join one of the tours. The website had boasted that it was the most beautiful distillery in Scotland, and indeed in the snow it looked rather lovely (bad dark does-not-do-justice photo).
We arrived to discover that the distillery itself was closed for renovations for a few days so no tours were possible. Sigh. But the lovely man who broke the news to us told us that we could do a whisky tasting instead or they could offer a cut-price whisky blending session. Um, yes please?!
There was one other family there hoping for the same tour who opted to do the blending with us, so we were all shown into the blending room where glass cabinets housed bottles and bottles of different whiskys from all over Scotland. (Interesting fact: Glengoyne is classed as a Highland whisky, although the official line runs along the road in the picture above. So the whisky is made in the Highlands but stored across the road in the Lowlands. Funny huh?)
(us with random other woman. she was nice)
We were each give 50ml of cheap whisky (the type the mass producers like Jack Daniels use) and then encouraged to make up the other 50ml using the different whiskies arrayed in front of us. We were meant to do all the blending just using our noses and only occasionally tasting. Only slight problem: Rasmus was battling a horrible cold and could smell nothing. Still it was a lot of fun pretending to have a clue what we were doing and mostly just making it up.
At the end of the session we got to bottle our 100ml, get a signed certificate stating I was now a master blender (scoff!) and got to taste the 10 year and 25 year Glengoyne whiskies. Oh my, the 25 was good.
