The Malts-L’s favourites

The Malts-L’s favourites

Alex Kraaijeveld

On December 9 2002, the British newspaper The Independent featured “The Ten Best Malt Whiskies”, by Michael Jackson. The specific list of 10 single malt whiskies prompted quite some discussion on Malts-L, until a few list members challenged those participating in the discussion to present their list of 10 best single malts. As I basically started the discussion by posting Michael’s “Ten Best” on the list, I agreed to collate list members’ nominations for their 10 favourite bottlings of single malt whisky, and/or their 10 favourite malt whisky distilleries.

Some basic stats first: voting closed on January 17 2003 and out of around 390 list members, 75 responded; some gave a list of bottlings, some of distilleries, some gave two lists. In the ‘favourite bottlings’ poll, 299 bottlings were nominated, from 73 different distilleries. In the ‘favourite distilleries’ poll, votes were cast for 61 different distilleries. Not unsurprisingly, the vast majority of votes was for Scottish malts and distilleries, but six non-Scots picked up a few votes in one or both polls: Cooley, Bushmills, Yoichi, Lammerlaw, St. George and Mackmyra. The latter was the only distillery voted for without even having a product on the market (yet), thanks to one list member who was lucky enough to have had had a ‘sniff’ of the whisky.

Let’s look at the results of the ‘bottlings’ poll first. As you might expect, with so many different expressions around, voting was spread quite thin. Nevertheless, the Malts-L's favourite single malt whisky is Springbank 21 y.o., narrowly beating Lagavulin 16 y.o. and Ardbeg 1974 Provenance! The diagram below shows the top 15 of the poll. A couple of things to note are, first of all, that although an Ardbeg bottling did not win the poll, Ardbeg has five bottlings in the top 15. Second, the top 15 contains ten Islanders but only two Speysiders; and third, 13 of the top 15 are OB’s (= owner bottlings). More on these latter two issues later .....

As voting was spread over potentially many different bottlings per distillery, what would the picture be if we combine the votes for all the different bottlings from each distillery? Ardbeg has the highest number of bottlings in the poll (26; Springbank comes second with 24, Caol Ila third with 22, Talisker fourth with 16 and Bowmore and Laphroaig shared fifth with 13), so given this and the fact that lots of the 26 Ardbeg bottles got high numbers of votes, it is not surprising that Ardbeg now emerges as the clear winner, followed by Springbank and Laphroaig; the diagram below again shows the top 15. Note Caol Ila quietly sneeking into fourth place, despite not having a bottling in the top 15 (or even top 30).

  Voting for favourite distilleries looks more at the overall reputation of a distillery, potentially taking not only consistent quality of the whisky produced (rather than one outstanding bottling) into account, but also things like customer relations and other issues that are not directly taste-related. Ardbeg scoops this award, just pipping Highland Park and Springbank to the post. Below again the top 15 of this poll. It does show the same 15 distilleries as in the ‘bottlings’ poll, but with some changes in order. For instance, Highland Park and especially Lagavulin now come out higher, whereas Laphroaig and Caol Ila have dropped down the order.

When I posted the very first results on the list, a case was made for excluding closed distilleries, or at least separating them from operating and mothballed ones. Removing Port Ellen and Brora from the top 15 sees Mortlach and Glenmorangie move up to 14^th and 15^th place. The flip side of the separation, the ranking of exclusively closed distilleries, is given below.

Back to the ‘bottlings’ poll. The top 15 contained only two independent bottlings. In total, only about one third of the votes in this poll were for IB’s, as shown in the top half of the diagram below. To me, that was quite a surprise as I would have expected indie bottlings to have a higher share of the vote. But given this, is there a favourite independent bottler? The bottom half of the diagram below shows the top 10 independent bottlers emerging from the ‘bottlings’ poll, with Douglas Laing clearly beating off Gordon & MacPhail and Signatory.

The top 15 bottlings contained ten Islanders (of which 8 were from Islay) and only two Speysiders. Bottlings from other regions don't even appear before 20^th place or lower: the highest bottling from the Eastern Highlands was a 1968 Glen Garioch (shared 20^th), the highest Midlands bottling a Blair Athol 25 y.o. which shared 36^th place with the highest Lowland bottling: a Rosebank 20 y.o. On the distillery list, Glen Garioch was the highest Eastern distillery, sharing 21^st place with the highest Lowland distillery, Rosebank (Auchentoshan was the highest ‘living’ Lowland distillery at a shared 26^th place). The highest Midlands distillery was Edradour (shared 32^nd). So it looks as if the list has clear regional likes and dislikes. To look at this in more detail, I combined the votes for all bottlings per region. Obviously, regions with more distilleries are more likely to score high even if there is no regional preference, so I divided the number of votes for each region by the number of distilleries in that region (for numerical reasons, Campbeltown was grouped with Western Highland). Here's what the results look like; regions which got more votes than you would expect if there is no regional preference are shown in red,  regions with less votes than expected in blue

Very clear picture, I'd say! Strong preference for Islay and Island malts (Islay malts got 6 times more votes than you would expect) and Springbank (the preference for Western malts is virtually all due to votes for this one distillery). Northern malts received about the amount of votes expected, Speyside malts got less than half the expected votes, Eastern and Lowland malts about a third and Midland malts just over a fifth.

So is this the final word on what’s the best single malt whisky or distillery in the world? Of course not. This survey represents the combined preference of 75 members of an internet whisky group, nothing more, nothing less. Or maybe I should say ‘snapshot of preference’ as several people said, “Ask me next week, and I’ll probably come up with a slightly different list.” Incidentally, only two bottlings in the top 10 of this survey (Aberlour a’bunadh and Highland Park 18 y.o.) also feature in Michael’s “Ten Best”, which triggered this survey in the first place. And three of Michael’s “Ten Best” got no votes whatsoever in this survey.

Trying to sum up the results of this survey in just a few words is probably best done by saying that the malt list is a bunch of peatheads! I wonder, should Malts-L be renamed Peat-L?

Many thanks to all who participated!

© 2003 Alex Kraaijeveld