The "Best" Time of Year

It’s that time of year again when it seems that anyone who is anyone in the whiskey universe comes out with their pick for the best whiskey of the year.  But what is the likelihood that these brands will actually align with your own flavour preferences?  Let’s just say that the odds are not in your favour.

The main challenge in evaluating whiskey is that flavour preferences are inherently subjective.  One person will love a whiskey because it’s peaty and smoky, while another person will dislike the same whiskey because of the very same characteristics.  Who’s right?  They both are, which is precisely the problem. However judging whiskey is hardly alone with this issue with subjectivity.

Whether we’re discussing a movie, a song, artwork, top restaurants, wine or whiskey, aside from a small list of egregious “faults” (like a corked wine) there isn’t a universal, objective definition of what “quality” is for things so subjective.  If you’ve ever turned-off an awards ceremony and wondered if the judges and you were really assessing the same thing, you know exactly what I’m talking about. 

The value of a review as it applies to a specific reader is really dependent on how similar the reader is to the reviewer, or how well they’re likes and dislikes are known and considered before the review is made.  For example, if your best friend told you that a new movie is a “must-see”, that’s a pretty solid recommendation.  But if a person reviews a whiskey who grew-up in a different generation, in a different culture half a world away, has different food preferences and gets exposed to more whiskey in a year then you will in a lifetime (in other words, not at all like you) then the chances of your tastes aligning are not so great at all.

Annual magazine rankings are slightly better, but not significantly so.  Reviews are typically done by panels of between 5-10 judges and their individual scores are tallied to determine a whiskey’s overall ranking position.  While these reviews are done in blind tastings sessions by judges who are very knowledgeable about whiskey and it is the opinion of more then one person, there’s still just too small of an opinion sample to project their views meaningfully onto the whiskey drinking population. Put another way, the margin of error on a 10-person poll seeking the attitudes of a whiskey drinking population of 50,000,000 would have a 38% margin of error. That’s much better than the 98% margin of error found when sampling the opinion of just one person for that sized population, but not of much in actual personal value for you.

My suggestion is to approach these rankings as a fun way to discover new whiskeys to sample at a bar and not to read anything more useful into them then that.