As regular readers of this, or indeed (nearly) any other, whisky blog will know, a perk of a whisky critic’s “job” is that you occasionally get sent a free little taster from various distillers. Well, a couple of months ago (yep, I’ve taken my sweet time – sorry, Master of Malt) I received two wee taster bottles from Master of Malt. One was a 13 year old Highland Park, the other a 30 year old Caol Ila. The reason for my taking to so very, very long to tear these bottles open and put together reviews was that I thought it could be fun to get someone else’s opinion as well. The someone I had in mind was none other than my own old father, if anything any even bigger whisky fanatic than myself, and in the end my mother joined in as well – though mainly as a trained nose, as she admittedly doesn’t much care for the taste of whisky.

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Sound of the Islay; Caol Ila. With the phenomenal capacity to produce up to 3 million litres of fine whisky per year, Caol Ila is the largest distillery on the island that makes up the Islay distillery region. Not bad, aye? While they’ve got a lot of expressions on the market, the one I’m going to take a look at today is, in fact, the only one they had at my local pub upon my last visit(shameful!); the 1991, 16 year old.

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