Maybe that is why he sees the whiskies not as investments or products of industry, but as having personalities: Ardbeg is ‘a powerful engine, quietly purring’, Bowmore a ‘chameleon’, Bruichladdich ‘sensual and immediate’, Bunnahabhain ‘taut, meditative, masculine, elegant’. He notes Caol Ila’s ‘sinewy, catwalk elegance’, how Lagavulin is ‘a big beast, yet well fed . . . inclined to play’, and then throws himself into young Laphroaig’s wild mix of ‘fierce frankness’, which somehow remains ‘grand and stoic’.
