On the subject of whisky I admit that I’m biased. I have tasted some lovely drams from Japan and Ireland, but for better or worse, I’ll stick with Scotch. No such bias troubles the English whisky writer Jim Murray. “I treat Bourbon, Scotch, Irish and everything else as equals,” he told me, having anointed Canada’s Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye as the world’s best whisky this year.

The judgement came down from on high in Murray’s annual Whisky Bible. “I was shocked, I really didn’t see it coming,” he said, about his decision to give his top mark of 97.5% to the Canadians. I haven’t tried it so I cannot comment on his choice, but it beats me how anyone can judge something as subjective as booze as though it were a maths test.

Not many people score films, books or plays out of 100, so why whisky?

Or indeed wine like the American uber-critic Robert Parker, who is said to use a stopwatch to measure a wine’s length – how long its taste hangs around, as part of his 100 point scoring system.

Murray certainly doesn’t. “I don’t allow anything to disrupt my concentration,” he said. “I go to extraordinary lengths when I taste and make sure I’ve had absolutely no spices.” He claims to live on nothing but fish fingers and the like for the four months of whisky tasting his book entails.

Charlie MacLean, another leading whisky writer, agrees with me that percentage scores are absurd, and questions how you can declare an overall winner among different categories of whisky. “You should compare like with like,” he says. Murray disagrees, saying: “you’re judging a whisky on whether it’s a great example of what it’s meant to be.”

No Scotch whisky made it into his top five this year, or last year when he crowned a Japanese single malt as his top dram. This certainly provoked plenty of publicity, but woe betides anyone who suggests any cynical motives.

“There are one or two comments that are now in the hands of my solicitor,” Murray informed me. He swears he loves Scotch, but feels the industry has become complacent with all the praise heaped upon it, and therefore needs some friendly advice. “It takes your best friend to tell you if you’ve got BO or not,” he says.

I guess Scottish distillers will be discreetly sniffing their armpits.

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