As regular readers of my wee blog may remember, I have family in Sweden and as such I tend to visit at least once a year. Heck, we’re such good friends by now, you and I, that I suppose I may as well reveal that it is my dear parents who have moved here – that with one of them being Swedish, thus making me a half breed, they’ve retired right by the Swedish coast. There, my dirty little secret is out in the open. So I’m here once again, and immediately upon my arrival my old man proudly thrust a bottle of his latest acquisition in my face – a bottle of ‘Mackmyra Reserve – Bengt J.’ (the latter being his name) from his very own (sherry/smoke) cask of Mackmyra.
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Nov15
And the prize for the least creative name of a “scotch” blend goes to… MacScot’s, which I heard of for the first time the other day. Apparently it is a blend produced in Sweden, yet I have been fortunate enough to try it. Scandinavia is pretty well known for having high taxes, especially on alcohol, which makes everything rather more expensive than one might like. MacScot’s saw a bit of a gap in the market for cheap whisky, and decided to roll out their own low-budget blend, priced at a reasonable £20(ish) for a 70cl bottle.
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”Det här, Skotten, det är whisky!” (This, Scotsman, this is Whisky!) she said, producing a stylish looking bottle. The label was covered in foreign scribbling, the content a very light golden. “That,” I replied, “remains to be seen”.
What my Swedish relative had brought over, a year or so ago, was a bottle of Mackmyra – The First Edition. For weeks before her visit she’d made various attempts to convince me that it was, hands down, the best Whisky ever made – needless to say, I was sceptical. Perhaps equally needless to say, I turned out to be right. Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying I’m always right or that the world’s finest Whisky couldn’t be Swedish, but Mackmyra is a very young distillery indeed.
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