Olaf Meier has one of the coolest jobs in the whisky world: deciding, glass by glass, what an entire global membership gets to drink next. As Chairman of the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s Tasting Panel, the German-born storyteller has tasted many thousands of casks and written thousands of tasting notes over more than two decades — all while keeping a healthy distance from the industry’s marketing machine.
His whisky journey began by accident. A German with no interest in whisky, he was talked into a trip to Scotland by a friend of a friend in 1983 and had his first dram, a 21-year-old Springbank, in front of a peat fire on a wild summer’s night. What he’s held onto since is curiosity: for the liquid, for the people who make it, and for the stories that turn a good whisky into an unforgettable one.
This conversation was recorded the weekend before Olaf flew out to South Africa for the Johannesburg and Cape Town The Only Whisky Show festivals — his first time on the continent — before heading almost immediately to Taiwan and South Korea for the Society. Over a dram, he talked about learning to trust his own palate before he had any language for it, what it’s like chairing a panel of people trained to disagree with each other, and why he still doesn’t believe he’s ever truly objective, twenty-five years in.
The Person
Let’s start at the beginning. What’s the first whisky you can genuinely remember — not necessarily the best one, but the one that made you stop and think, “there’s something interesting here”?
That, to me, is very, very simple. Because the first whisky I ever drank was in Scotland. I’ve never had a whisky before — I’m a German national, so I lived my youth in Germany, and I drank certainly the beer and wine, plenty of it, in my youth, probably too much in my youth. But I’d never drunk whisky. And I think that’s a good thing, because a lot of people who say they don’t like whisky, it usually goes back to teenage years, student years, cracking open that bottle of whisky at 3 o’clock in the morning at a party or something, and never touching it again afterwards.
I came to Scotland because of a friend of a friend who I’d visited in London. His Scottish friend visited his friend in London as well, and he said, “Olaf, we’ve been all over England, but you can forget England — you have to come to Scotland, because Scotland is the best part of Great Britain.” So a year later, in 1983, I knocked on his door. And there I was in Scotland. In the evening, the first night, we had a dram, as he called it — didn’t know what a dram was, of course, no idea. And that was the first whisky I ever drank.
It was a typical Scottish summer’s day. Chucked it with rain horizontally. Bitterly cold, the wind blowing, and the peat fire was literally on in the lounge because it was too cold. We sat there on the sofa, and I drank my first whisky.
“It was people and whisky, which was it, which made it for me.”
I didn’t know at the time what it was — in 1983 you couldn’t just go online and Google it. I actually went to Edinburgh two days later and went into a bookshop on George Street, which unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore, and I wanted to buy a book on whisky. People looked at me as if I’d come from Mars — why would you like to buy a book on whisky? There wasn’t a single book to buy on whisky. Times have changed, eh.
I didn’t find out until much later, he had poured me a 21-year-old Springbank from Campbeltown. (Mark: What an incredible dram to start on!).
The beauty of it was that this gentleman, John, then told me where to go in Scotland for the next four weeks, because he was such a proud Scottish person — he knew Scotland like the back of his hand. He said to me, “Olaf, every day, every night, you go to a pub, of course. You’re German, so of course you drink beer. But you have to drink whisky, because that is the lifeblood of Scotland — that’s what Scotland is all about. But never ask for scotch.” Because when you ask for scotch, you’re going to get the whisky tumbler, if you’re unlucky lots of ice in it, and you get all the stuff hanging there in the gantry. And he said, “That’s all blended whiskies, Olaf, and you do not touch them. You have to drink single malts. They’re behind the bar. You have to ask for them by name.”
Now I knew nothing about a blended malt, a single malt — unpronounceable names, you know. Highlands, Islands, Speyside, absolutely no idea. But every night I went to the pub and I looked at all these bottles at the back, and I sort of said, “I’ll take the second from the left” or “the fifth from the right.” Before it was in my glass and came to me on the counter, someone next to me said, “Oh, I see you know your whiskies there.” Because there was no mass tourism in 1983, when we walked into a pub in the Highlands everyone sort of looked — who’s this stranger, what’s he doing here? Where do you come from? Germany. Oh, all right. What are you doing here? I’m on holiday. Why on earth are you coming on holiday to the North of Scotland?
So every day, the whisky was the door opener to people. I tried all these whiskies every night, and they all tasted different. I didn’t know why, I didn’t know how, I didn’t know what. But it was just people and whisky, which was it, which made it for me. I always say the most important letter of the four in SMWS is the last S, society.
When you walk up the stairs at The Vaults in Edinburgh and go inside, everyone talks to each other. Which whisky did you just try? What have you got in your glass? You’re never alone for a minute. You never sit down at a desk on your own just to ponder — it’s always people surrounding you.
The first time I stepped into The Vaults was in December 1992. And it’s been my second home ever since.
Has your own palate changed over the years? Is there a style of whisky you dismissed early on that you’ve since fallen in love with—or one you’ve drifted away from?
No, I really enjoyed the variety of it. I’m not Scottish, so I can say that quite happily — there’s wonderful whisky all around the world. I’m happy to try anything, and then I can say I like it or I don’t like it. That doesn’t mean it’s not good — I just don’t like it, it’s a personal preference. But the one thing — if you told me today I can only drink one type of whisky, from one country, it has to be Scotch, because the variety is just so wide.
I’ve travelled around the world and tasted wonderful whiskies, Taiwanese, Danish, Swiss, German, Dutch and more. In a way it’s distilled beer, so if you make a good beer, you can actually make a good whisky at the end of the day. I have always loved the variety of it.
There are phases — like when I prefer the non-smoky ones to the smoky ones, and then the sherry ones, then the non-sherry ones. When it’s above 20 degrees in the UK, everyone’s in shorts and T-shirts, and I’d rather drink more bourbon-cask whiskies, first fill, second fill, a bit sweeter, a bit lighter. Come autumn, come winter, it’s the lovely sherry whiskies, dark in colour but also dark in flavour. And the smoky whiskies have always been special to me, in part because of the hint of smoke I had in that first Springbank I tasted.
When I came back to Germany, there was hardly any Scottish whisky — it was all the blends, Johnnie Walker, Bell’s, Teacher’s, and so on. If I wanted a single malt, there was a tobacco shop in my hometown, Stuttgart, that also sold about three or four single malts. The first one I bought was a 15-year-old Laphroaig, which had just been released. And now I see they’ve re-released the Laphroaig 15 — this week, actually — a retro 15-year-old Laphroaig, and if it’s still in stock when I get back from South Africa, I’m probably going to buy myself a bottle. It’s quite funny when you already live long enough to buy retro things of your own past — you realise you’re getting old.
If we opened your home whisky cabinet tonight, what would surprise us?
Well, first of all, there’s a lot of Society whisky, which probably shouldn’t surprise you. But probably what will surprise you is there’s a lot of non-Society whisky as well — very international. Not just Scotch — there’s Finnish whisky, Dutch whisky, Swiss whisky, a lot of American whisky, a lot of rye whiskies too, which I loved for a long, long time before anyone was really talking about rye. Old Potrero — I don’t know if that’s a name you’re familiar with, back in California — a guy did 100% rye whisky thirty years ago and everyone thought he was completely mad. Nowadays, brilliant ryes are almost the norm.
What would surprise you is the variety — original bottlings straight from distilleries, but also single casks not just from the Society but from other independent bottlers — Gordon & MacPhail, Cadenhead’s, Adelphi.
Whisky drinkers should not limit themselves. We’re the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, so we bottle single malts from Scotland, but we’ve also released so many different spirits as well — plenty of rums from the Caribbean, cognacs, Armagnacs. I’ve just finished a bottle of Calvados from Normandy. Life’s too short to just be drinking Islay whiskies, or just drinking Speyside sherry whiskies — if that’s what you want, that’s fine.
The Society gives you the opportunity to be curious and try different things — every one of the expressions we release represents one single cask from one distillery. It’s not about the name, it’s about the spirit in your glass.
What’s one whisky opinion you hold that most enthusiasts would disagree with?
The one thing where maybe I’m already too Scottish is: most of the time I really enjoy my whisky with water, and with quite a bit of water. I’d never add water before I drank it neat — I’ll try it neat — but with cask strength at 60, maybe 65% alcohol, I just get that burning sensation which I don’t want. So I’m someone who has a glass water jug by my side. I’m not a fan of pipettes, it’s not a chemical experiment we’re doing, it’s actually about enjoying whisky.
“You hated the whisky. So what can you lose by adding water to it?”
A lot of people still say to me, “Olaf, you’ve ruined that whisky, you’ve added too much water,” and I say, “That’s the way I’ll enjoy it, thank you very much, and you leave it up to me.” But there are so many people, even members of the Society, who say, “I never, ever add water to my whisky,” and then they’re drinking a 62%, 63% whisky from us and going, “Oh, this is so harsh.” And I say, “Add some water.” “I’ll never do that,” i” comes the response. And I say, “But you hated the whisky. So what can you lose by adding water to it?”
Occasionally, when I’m leading a tasting with five whiskies, and one person says for example, the second one was undrinkable, too hot and too spicy, but won’t add any water, I’ll say: “Well, as you didn’t drink the second one because you hated it so much, I’ve poured you another one.” I give him the same whisky, with water added an hour ago, put on the side to let the flavours evolve. And nine times out of ten, he drinks it and says, “That’s very enjoyable.” Then he asks, “What did you pour me?” And I say, “Well, if you really want to know…”
Outside of whisky, what hobby, interest or obsession has unexpectedly influenced the way you think about whisky, or the way you approach your work?
I’m very much, as my daughter calls me, an alcohol snob. The first thing that actually fascinated me, without really knowing the background, was sherry from Spain. It’s a wine that’s not like anything else across the board, and most people, particularly in the UK, just know it as a sweet wine. If you go to Jerez de la Frontera, you’re not getting that — you’re getting a fino, a manzanilla, an amontillado, a palo cortado — very, very bone dry wines. And I love them.
I try get to Spain once a year, in fact, I was in Jerez two months ago. They love the old-fashioned way of going out for dinner, which in Spain means 10 o’clock at night, and you finish the last glass of sherry at three in the morning. It’s just wonderful.
The other passion for me is rum from the Caribbean. Because as much as I had my first whisky in Scotland, I had my first rum in Barbados. And I’m also a big fan of cricket…
Have you ever heard of a weirder person? A German loving cricket and talking about Scotch whisky?
What’s something you believed about whisky when you were starting out that you no longer believe?
I never really believed anything, you see — because when I started in 1983, there was no knowledge, no belief. You couldn’t read a book, you couldn’t go online, no one was telling you this is 90 out of 100 so it has to be good. I had no knowledge.
That’s why I always tell people nowadays: don’t come from the knowledge side all the time. It’s not about knowledge, it’s about enjoyment. It’s about passion. And when you have that passion, then knowledge comes automatically afterwards. If you try a whisky and really enjoy it, I’ll ask you why? “Well, it’s quite fruity.” Ah, that fruitiness is as a result of longer fermentation times. You see? Start with the enjoyment, rather than starting from the knowledge.
The original idea of the Society was: it doesn’t matter which distillery, what cask, what age. Just pour it in your glass and drink it and share your view. In those days it was a secret what it was. Now you just get your mobile phone out and in two seconds you have it.
We live in this day and age where everything needs to be scored, and if some expert calls it the best whisky in the world and I don’t like it, does that mean that there’s something’s wrong with me? No, not at all.
I do love it when a critic hates one of our whiskies, because then I know I can still buy it at a reasonable price.
You’ve tasted thousands of casks and written thousands of tasting notes. What have you learned about the difference between a whisky that’s technically excellent and one that’s genuinely unforgettable?
I think, if I’m doing it in a professional way, i.e. on a panel, there will always be excellent whiskies and fabulous whiskies, but I don’t think “unforgettable,” because unforgettable whiskies are unforgettable not because of the whisky, but because of the event, the moment, the people, sharing it with people, their impressions of it, their reactions to it — that’s what makes it unforgettable.
“My favourite dram is always the next one coming.”
That’s when people ask me, which I get asked many millions of times, which is my favourite dram — my answer is always “the next one coming.” Or, probably because I’ve lived too long in Scotland, “it’s the one you buy me,” because I don’t have to pay for it. A free dram is always a better dram than the one you have to pay for. Someone got so fed up with those two answers — an Aberdonian, and I know Aberdonians very well, they play hard and work hard and call a spade a spade — he said, “Olaf, just imagine tonight is your last night and tomorrow you’re going to be shot — so what will be your last dram tonight?” I said, that’s easy. He said, why is that easy? I said, well, that’s simple — it’s a 21-year-old Springbank. If I’m lucky or unlucky enough to know when I’m going to pass away, and I still have a chance to drink a whisky, of course it’ll be the one I started my journey with. Not because a 21-year-old Springbank is the best whisky in the world — no, it would just bring me full circle.
So professionally, it’s about evaluation, looking at it in every respect. You get whisky appreciation and whisky enjoyment, and there’s a difference between the two.
The Tasting Panel — Scotch Malt Whisky Society
Most people assume the Tasting Panel’s role is simply deciding whether a cask is good enough to bottle. What do you think the panel is really trying to achieve?
It’s changed quite a lot in the last 25 years, since I’ve been on the panel. When I came to Edinburgh in 2001, they already knew me well, because I was very outspoken about whisky, and they said, “Olaf, we’d like to have you on the panel.” I didn’t know what the panel was. I said, “What does the panel do?” “Well, the panel decides which whiskies we’re bottling — you sit together with us, try it, give your opinion.” It took me one nanosecond to decide. So there I was, sitting in the panel as a newbie 25 years ago, thinking all these guys around me had a screw loose — “this tastes like a grass meadow in May, covered in dew, and it rained ten minutes ago, and now the rainbow’s coming out.” What the heck are these guys talking about?
In those days, it felt like being Nero or Caesar in the Colosseum in Rome — it was just thumbs up or thumbs down, because we didn’t actually own the casks. We were a true society, we didn’t have the cash to buy thousands of casks. We’d try a cask, and then decide, do we want to buy it and bottle it, or not — and the problem was, we could say, “this is really good, but we’d love to have it for another two years in the cask,” but we couldn’t, because it wasn’t our cask. Two years later, if we came back and asked to try that cask again, of course it was long gone. We look at every cask as a child of ours, and the industry is just, you know, making one of one billion bottles of blended whisky at the end of the day.
That was frustrating for a long time, because then ownership changed — we’d been part of Glenmorangie for a while, then Glenmorangie sold us and we became independently owned, and they put money in, so now we own about 18,000 casks in the Society. Now we’re doing re-racking, looking at different casks, going to bodegas in Spain, going to cooperages in America, doing it our way. We’re not becoming whisky makers, because we don’t make whisky — we’re becoming flavour makers.
“We’re not becoming whisky makers, because we don’t make whisky, we’re becoming flavour makers.”
You can see that in particular in our Heresy range where we’re playing around a bit, blending, doing blended malt and blended whiskies and grain whiskies, making 100% malted barley whisky, we also made a rye whisky. We’re just having a bit of fun as well, and then it all comes to the panel — we might have five different whiskies with five different blending parts and different amounts, and we’re analysing and saying — I don’t need to know that this is a blend, or this cask or that, all I’m saying is which one was your favourite of those five, and then we all agree, and the guy with the big spreadsheet knows exactly what number three is, and that’s what we make as a Heresy bottle.
It’s a completely different way of looking at it, a constant learning curve, because we make mistakes too — we put it in a different cask, a year or two later we look at it and say, this is a disaster, and we ask why. The more you know about maturation, the more you know you don’t know — because the whole area before maturation is chemically analysed, the Scotch Whisky Research Institute pretty much knows everything, if fermentation time is two hours longer, which chemical compounds you get, if the cut is a bit different. But as soon as you stick this stuff in a cask, you have some idea, but you don’t know precisely. It’s like a child — you can have two children go through the same schooling, kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, and everything the same, but they turn out differently.
As Chair, your role isn’t simply to have an opinion — it’s also to guide the discussion. What have years of leading tasting panels taught you about listening, consensus and knowing when to challenge the room?
That was a big change for me, from being a panel member to becoming a panel chair. I was, simplifying it, ten years a panel member, then I became panel chair (the only non-British chairperson in the Society’s history). I actually refused it twice when they offered it to me, because I said it’s a far too important role to run, and even more important for me was the writing of the tasting notes, because English is not my first language, and I find the tasting notes are a vital part of the Society. So I thought I wasn’t equipped, and refused twice, and the third time they didn’t ask me anymore, they just told me. I said I’m happy to do it, it’s a great honour, but if you feel I’m not doing it justice, tell me, I’m quite happy to step back down. That’s now 15, 16 years later, so I must be doing something right.
I really felt that, because when new people come to the panel — great, new youngsters coming in — I always look them in the eyes and say, first of all, congratulations, glad you’re here, this is your first panel. Let me tell you one thing: you are not important. And you can see their face dropping. And then I tell them that I am also not important — the only thing which is important is what we have in the glass in front of us, because that’s what we decide whether we’re going to bottle or not, and that’s what our members will get, and that’s what the Society is about. We’re talking about quality — if someone says to me, “I hate this whisky,” fine, no problem, but if someone says “this is bad quality,” they’ll have an argument on their hands with me for hours. Taste, flavour, liking it, is something else than quality. First of all, we have to assess the quality — that’s the most important thing.
“I love whiskies which split people.”
There’s a lovely story that says there’s no bad Scotch whisky, just good Scotch whisky and very good Scotch whisky — I can tell you in my 25 years on the panel there’s some blooming awful Scotch whisky. So it’s about quality, and then about taste and flavour, and the one word I really don’t like is “nice”. Nice is not nice, it is neither hot or cold, it is lukewarm and we don’t want to bottle lukewarm whiskies.
I love whiskies which split people — because we only have two or three hundred bottles, we’ve got 40,000 members worldwide, we only need to find the right two or three hundred people to enjoy that whisky. A master blender friend of mine, one of the good ones, once said the secret of a good blended whisky is to please most of the people most of the time, because that’s what they have to do. We don’t have to please most of the people most of the time — we just have to find the right ones. That’s where the tasting note comes in, as a warning too — if you don’t like this, this might not be for you. The tasting note is written for the people who cannot try the whisky before they buy it, because when you can try it, you don’t need the tasting note.
When I’m doing a tasting with the tasting note in front of me, people read the note first and then try the whisky. I say, don’t do that — just try it, drink it, think about it, or write a few things down yourself, and then get the tasting note and see if you agree or disagree. But this is not correct, this is not gospel — this is just what three, four, five people thought of that whisky one day, five, six months ago, sitting together, and I’m writing that tasting note as a tasting note of us as a group. It’s not my tasting note either.
Once I became chairman, I also had to change how I behaved in the room. When I was a panel member, I was part of the team — say I was a forward player, my aim was to shoot goals. If I’m a defender, I defend; if a goalkeeper, I stop the ball. But when I became chairman, I saw myself as the manager — I wanted the best out of my team, because I can’t shoot the goals or stop them, it’s the people on the field. At the beginning I was very outspoken, saying “I don’t think this whisky is that bad, we should try it.” But if I really love a whisky, I stay quiet, because I don’t want to influence the rest of the team — I just ask, “so what do you think?” It’s a completely different perspective, and that was quite hard to get to.
There’s a lovely story I had to learn the hard way, too — the British have many quirks — when asked “what do you think of this whisky?” and the answer is “oh, it’s interesting,” I’d say, “yes, tell me about it,” expecting more. But when a British person says “it’s interesting,” it actually means “I don’t like it” — they’re just being polite. Now I always ask, “is that a British interesting or a European interesting?” Because when a German, French, Italian or Spanish person says “it’s interesting,” they mean it’s interesting.
The panel deliberately brings together people with different backgrounds, professions and palates. What have you learned about how differently people experience flavour?
What I really see is that nowadays it’s a lot more scientific — is it red apples or green apples, a yellow grapefruit or a red grapefruit. In the older days it was much more about experience, childhood memories — what was the smell of your grandad? Well, he smoked a pipe, and had this old sideboard with dusty books in it. It was much more holistic. Nowadays it’s much more, “I smell apples” — “no, you’re wrong” — but how can you say someone’s wrong? You can say “I don’t smell apples,” but your apples might be a very different type of apple.
“We’re also much more international on the panel now. Twenty-five years ago, dare I say, it was all white men from Scotland, and this odd German fellow.”
The composition of the panel has changed in the last 25 years — people from France, America, Australia, young people, women too. You get people who’ve gone through distilling and brewing degrees as well, students, fascinating — it’s become a lot more lively and open, not only that Scottish club.
I try to make sure all those different voices are heard.
When experienced tasters disagree, what have those disagreements taught you about the nature of taste itself?
It’s very personal. That’s what we want, of course — a master blender has to look at a whisky completely differently to how we do, because he’s looking at whether this whisky is going to affect his blend. I had the wonderful pleasure, way back 25 years ago, of working with long-passed-away, then-retired master blenders on the panel. One gentleman, a true Scottish gentleman, when asked “So what’s your opinion?” would reply with “Well, there are no off-notes” — and that’s the highest praise, because that’s what he’d been trained for, 40 years of his life, always coming from the negative side of things, while we come from the more idealistic, positive side.
It’s fascinating how we could both sit next to each other, nosing the same whisky, completely differently, and his opinion is as important as mine.
When you nose a whisky for the very first time, what are you looking for? Are you searching for distillery character, cask influence, balance — or something much harder to define?
Much harder to define, I think. I’m certainly not looking for distillery character, because I don’t care about distillery character. Balance is probably the first word that comes to mind. And I’m a weirdo in a way, because when I nose a whisky and immediately fall in love with it, I’m dubious. I do a lot of travel, and lots of times you sit in a bar next to someone and think, “oh, that’s quite nice,” start a conversation, and in five minutes you’re absolutely bored to tears because it’s just small talk. And then you sit next to a character, and three hours later you’re still in deep conversation with that person, because it’s interesting in a proper way. That’s what I like about a whisky — I don’t really like whiskies that immediately go “ah, beautiful and wonderful.” I prefer “hmm, it’s a little bit — something’s there, keeping me occupied, keeping me thinking about it” — you take the first sip and think “not so sure, let’s add a drop of water — ah, here we go” — because I love getting to know the whisky.
“I don’t really like whiskies which immediately say, ‘ah, beautiful and wonderful.’ I love getting to know the whisky.”
Some casks aren’t bottled immediately and are revisited later. Have there been whiskies that completely transformed after spending a few more years in wood?
Yes — way back there was one whisky I said should be sold off — we shouldn’t waste another cask on it, it would just be a shame for the cask. In those days it was easy to sell a cask, there was a cask shortage, twenty people queuing up to buy it — different world, different life. So I said, sell it, thanks for the information. Five years later, I got a sample again — because I never know when a sample I get is the same cask, I only find out afterwards, because they know I’ve said I don’t want to know. And I got that sample and was literally waxing lyrical about how wonderful it was. Then Euan came back to me and said, “Olaf, that was the one five years ago you said we should be selling.” I’m a nerd, so I still had my notes from five years ago in a folder to compare it to what I’d just written, and I couldn’t believe the difference.
“We never talk of finishing a whisky, because we don’t finish it.”
That’s why we never talk of finishing a whisky — because we don’t finish it. Most of our extra maturation is at least two years, maybe three, four, five, six — sometimes longer in the second cask than it was in the first. The decision to bottle hangs on the panel, nothing to do with “it’s been three years in that cask, so we have to bottle it.” No — after three years, if we still say it isn’t right, it isn’t right. There’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes I can’t see, and I’m just the guinea pig at the front of it, so to speak — because that’s exactly what we want. I’m not really engaged with the commercial side of things at all — I don’t worry about the bottle cost, nothing. All I’m worrying about is the liquid, and I think that’s the right way to do it.
After tasting so many thousands of casks, are there distilleries whose spirit you can recognise almost immediately — or do the best single casks still manage to surprise you?
For me, they still surprise me. I’m not expert enough to really smell the new spirit, the new make — that’s what a master blender can do. There are characteristics that are recognisable for whiskies we’ve bottled a lot. For Caol Ila, we’re up around the 500 mark. So there’s some reminiscence. On the other hand, if you give me a first-fill sherry cask, fully matured for seven years, from that same distillery, you’d probably find it difficult to spot — because that’s exactly what we’re not looking for. We’re not looking for the trademark whisky, and that’s why we have the numbering system.
That’s why I always say — if you can’t try the whisky before you buy a bottle, read the tasting notes, because there will be hints in there. Hopefully you don’t spend your hard-earned money on a bottle you don’t like, because it means there’s someone out there who would have loved that whisky, but they can’t buy it now because you did.
With only a handful of bottles per release, I often hear: “Oh, last time we were here, three months ago, that second whisky we tried was phenomenal, I should have bought a bottle, can I buy one now?” The answer is no, it’s gone. And nowadays you just need one influencer saying “this is the best whisky I’ve had all year” and everyone buys it — that scenario didn’t exist fifteen years ago.
After more than two decades on the panel, what still surprises you?
What still surprises me is what shouldn’t surprise me — there are distilleries I like more, and distilleries I like less. When I get something from a distillery I say, “I’ve never really had anything good from them,” and it’s fabulous whisky, and I have to say to myself, “Yes, Olaf, all you know is about the brand, and you don’t like the brand — but the brand has nothing to do with that one glass of whisky, that single cask, in front of you.” And that still surprises me. Or the opposite — “I love that distillery, I love that whisky,” and then you have one and it’s underwhelming, because it’s a single cask.
“You think you are objective. No, you’re not.”
You think you are objective. No, you’re not. We all have our own history and biases. So the whisky in your glass still has the ability to surprise you.