Stately, plump, Barry the Bouncer came from the stairhead, and walked into the bearpit of the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Halted, he peered down into the dark and called up coarsely, ‘Jeez, I’d kill for a pint of porter’. Beneath, the vulgar and venereal looking lady spoke through her Guinness moustache, ‘For goodness feckin’ sake, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a visit to the Doctor’s …’
Actually you don’t get a stream of consciousness from this self declared ‘Joyce County Ceili Band’ – in truth its best to leave your brainbox at the door – rather it’s a flood of unremitting (and to be honest almost oppressive) good humour, mawkish sentimentality and Irish Showband fuelled folksy rock and roll. It’s loud, loquacious, and totally infectious.
If you’re not familiar with the Saw Doctors then you should have a look at some of their earlier albums – If this is rock and roll then I want my old job back, All the way from Tuam, Same oul’ town and Songs from Sun Street – which provide the majority of material for the evening. To be fair they haven’t recorded much of real note since, but they have maintained their reputation as a live act without compare.

TASTING - ANOTHER BIG BOWMORE SESSION:
8 SPECIAL EXPRESSIONS

Bowmore 15 yo 1989/2004 (58%, SSMC, Cask #6185, 240 bottles)
Colour: white wine. Nose: very spirity and grassy at first nosing, but it then gets much more complex. Freshly mown lawn, fresh pepper, green barley. Some peat, but some ‘farmy one’. Hints of eau de Cologne and violets perfume. Hints of dill. Gets a little buttery after a few minutes. Fresh rhubarb, ‘boerekool’. Some peppermint too – and some Chinese anise. Nice! Mouth: some big, bold and typical ‘perfumey’ notes. Lavender sweets, violet sweets, Turkish delight. Some fructose, acidic fruits (kiwi), litchi. Too perfumey and spirity for my taste, I must say. Really pungent, and some water doesn’t help too much. Long, burning finish. 82 points.

TASTING - GOING WELSH!

Prince of Wales 10 yo (40%, OB, Welsh whisky, ‘Single Vatted Malt’) Ha! A single vatted malt, so funny! Fellow Malt Maniac Lex wrote the whole story of Welsh whiskies in Celtic Malts, and it’s very interesting. Anyway, let’s taste this one now.

TASTING - TWO BRAND NEW INDIE 25 yo HIGHLAND PARKS

Highland Park 25 yo 1979/2004 (50%, Cadenhead, 214 bottles) Colour: pale straw. Nose: lots of garden lovage, Maggi, soy sauce. Very interesting! Gets a little waxy, with some light honey and flowers (heather). Very, very nice. Mouth: satisfying and coating. Lots of fruits, pineapple, mandarin. Highly drinkable! Too bad it gets a little too tannic (Van Houten cocoa powder). 88 points, still.

CONCERT REVIEW - JAH WOBBLE AND THE ENGLISH ROOTS BAND - 100 Club, London - December 7th, 2004 - by yotta-deluxe guest writer Nick Morgan

Few performers can have taken as culturally diverse and eclectic a musical journey as Jah Wobble (actually it's John Wardle – but apparently this was too much for the linguistic skills of the late Sid Vicious, so he became at some point in the late 1970s Jah Wobble).

And maybe this is what you have to do when you realise your own musical limitations, and those of Dub style bass lines – move rapidly through genres (and like marketeers, never hang around long enough in any one in case you get found out) and surround yourself with a succession of highly talented and obviously committed musicians.
So tonight we have Jah Wobble (“I am 45 years of age and still extremely good looking”), with all the easy humour and latent menace of an East End market trader who looks as though he’s lived life on the outside and the inside, as do much of the audience, some of whom appear to be having a Wormwood Scrubs reunion in the corner.

TASTING - BLAST FROM THE PAST: TWO VERY OLD MACALLANS

Macallan 1947 (80 proof, OB, Rinaldi Bologna, bottled circa 1962) Nose: amazing, like an old leather suitcase you open for the first time since fifty years: old leather, wax, old books… Develops on beehive, cod oil, burnt cake and lots of peat and smoke. Mouth: so peaty, so complex! Bunches of tropical fruits, dried orange, pine resin. It’s almost as bold and smoky as a current 10 yo Talisker. The kind of bottle the distillery bought back, vatted and re-bottled recently to build its ‘vintage’ range. Simply stunning. 96 points. (December 12 - correction: in fact the vintage range was made only with some G&M bottlings like the one below, which means it never matured at the distillery, but in G&M's warehouses. In other words, just some G&M re-bottlings, no OB.)

TASTING - FIVE 'ITALIAN' ARDBEGS

Ardbeg 21 yo 1974/1996 (40%, Sestante) Colour: straw. Nose: a nice mixture of peat, smoke and fresh fruits at first nosing, but it gets curiously grainy, flat and weak. Very delicate, but really too restrained. Perhaps the bottle has been opened for too long. Mouth: again, slightly watery, lacking vivacity. Notes of old cardboard and smoke. The whole seems to be really tired. My rating is 78 points but please don’t take it too seriously.

CONCERT REVIEW - JOHN OTWAY AND THE BIG BAND - The Half Moon, Putney, London - December 4th, 2004 - by zetta-deluxe guest writer Nick Morgan

The church bells were ringing when I arrived in Putney – a Triple Bob Major I think – a charming, eccentric, and very British remnant of a bygone golden age. Appropriate then that I was heading – with my mate Bob – to see John Otway; charming, eccentric, British, remnant, bygone, golden and most definitely aged.

If the 51 year old Otway didn’t exist it would be hard to imagine him, let alone invent him. And certainly far beyond the powers of the witless corporate-faced marketing and A&R guys who dominate decision making in most record companies – even the so called independents. [Editor’s note – steady on Nick - just remember what pays your pension !] Otway is one of those very British gems who gently slid through the door that Punk had kicked in so violently in the mid-seventies – think Ian Dury and the Blockheads, Siouxsie Sioux, Elvis Costello – but whose musical directions and ambitions lay elsewhere. Otway’s songs (and there are some good ones – try ‘Josephine’ off the first album) are mostly rooted in the English folk-tradition, and his performance is pure Music Hall – somewhere between the insouciant naiveté and manic surrealism of comedians such as Charlie Drake, Tommy Cooper and Eric Morecambe.
He starts the evening by somersaulting (literally) through what was – until a couple of year’s ago – his sole claim to fame – the 1977 top thirty (no. 27) hit ‘Really free’, followed by the B-side ‘Beware of the flowers’ – which for those of you who don’t know, was voted number seven in a BBC poll in 1999 for the Nations’ favourite song lyrics.

TASTING - THREE SWINGING BOWMORES FROM THE SIXTIES (and one from the fifties)

Bowmore 32 yo 1968 ‘Anniversary Edition’ (45.5%, OB, 1860 bottles) Colour: dark straw. Nose: starts on heavy tangerine, grapefruits, ripe melon. Then you have a desert with some vanilla ice cream and all sorts of fruits, mainly freshly cut pears and apples. Great notes of old rum and banana flambéed. Fantastic! Goes on with lots of passion fruit. Whiffs of smoke… It then goes back to vanilla and fruits and doesn’t change anymore, but the fruity burst right at first nosing is stupendous. Mouth: big bold citrus (grapefruit, lemon) and passion fruit. Goes on with a ‘nice’ bitterness: grape seeds, pineapple, white pepper. Not overly complex but very big. The finish is long, but slightly bitter. In short, a fabulous nose and a good palate. 91 points.

Mouth: incredible, it is drinkable at more than 67%. Very sweet, and much less rubbery than on the nose. Hints of fruit spirit coming from the young age, I guess. Lots of apple juice, pear juice, gentian. Quite grassy too, with some perfume… Okay, after three small sips, this is finally getting too strong, and my mouth gets anaesthetised. Let’s add some water now… Great, the malt reacts beautifully after the usual one or two minutes of saponification. Lots of fruity notes developing, mostly peach. There’s just kind of a strange metallic taste coming through after a few minutes, something like copper, which makes me think of some foreshots. The finish is long and very bold, again slightly metallic – but hey, it’s only three years old (and three months). This is extremely encouraging, to say the least – and I swear I’m not partial.
90 points, mainly for the great nose.

By the way, Bruichladdich will start distilling its Islay grown barley on Monday, and will compare the result with some barley coming from three other places. They hope to stress the fact that 'Terroir' counts in whisky as it counts in wine. Hmm... Imagine it's true... What's sure, is that the barley itself counts, as we could find out when comparing some 'organic' newmake with some regular one... It was so good!

Glengoyne 17 yo (43%, OB, 2004) Here’s the latest batch. Colour: straw. Nose: rather light, somewhat restrained. Grainy and slightly oaky. Hints of vanilla and butter, not much else. Mouth: ah, nice attack, although quite oaky and sugarish, but some sour notes develop after thirty seconds. Stale wine, cider, apple juice. Gets a little bitter… Medium finish on stale beer. Well, I recall having had some much better 17 yo Glengoyne. Certainly just a batch that’s below the par, or is it me? 78 points. (PS: it may well have been me, as almost all my fellow Malt Maniacs rated this Glengoyne much higher)

TASTING - FIVE CAOL ILAS (or only four?)

W&M Born on Islay 1995/2004 (43%, Wilson & Morgan, cask 655-672) Said to be Caol Ila, while some earlier versions were said to be Lagavulin. Colour: gold. Nose: gentle smoke and peat, with quite a lot of vanilla, caramel, and some fine winey notes. Some bitter orange, burning ashes, spices (clove) and some hints of freshly cut grass, tea… Very nice! Strangely Lagavulinish… Mouth: nice attack, sweet and smoky. Peat smoke, orange marmalade, pepper, apricot syrup. Fruit salad, marzipan… Yes, very nice. The finish is rather long, on bitter orange and pepper. Well done, Italy! 84 points.

Caol Ila 12 yo (43%, OB, 2004) Colour: white wine. Nose: much cleaner and fresher, but also a little simpler than the W&M. Smoke, cooked apple, matchstick, bonfire, oatcake… A nice everyday smoky Islayer.

Caol Ila 1994/2003 (40%, G&M for Meregali, Italy) Nose: watery but clean, pure and fresh. Quite nice! Huge whiffs of smoke but not much else, I’m afraid. Mouth: really a straight shooter. Peat, smoke, fresh water, that’s all. The finish is quite long but a little spirity and bitter. 78 points.

Caol Ila 25 yo 1979 (41.7%, Jack Wiebers Auld Distillers Collection) This one is quite rounded but smoky – ‘molto torbato’, with lots of fruits. Nice depth. The mouth is smoky and very satisfying, but gets perhaps a little too sweetish. Still a very nice old Caol Ila. 85 points.

TASTING - TWO VERY GOOD NEW SINGLE GRAINS

Alloa Grain 40 yo 1964/2004 (42.3%, JWWW, Old Train Line, 114 bottles) Colour: gold. Nose: lots of praline, roasted peanuts, candy sugar, cappuccino. Gets quite tannic (oaky), vanilla. It’s really the cask doing the job here, but it’s a great. Lots of cold coffee then, and some furniture polish. Hints of aniseed too, concentrated milk, cream. Very nice! Mouth: some nice oak, very subtle. Lots of pear drops, vanilla, light rum, dried coconut… Not overly complex but very, very enjoyable. Rather short, but slightly salty finish. Another great single grain. 87 points.
Girvan 15 yo 1989/2004 (60.4%, James McArthur, cask #110636) A brand new one! Colour: white wine. Nose: a little medicinal at first nosing, with some engine grease. Goes on with rum and vanilla (as in many single grains). Nice woody notes – a very classical single grain whisky. Mouth: ouch, quite pungent and burning, with some fructose and white rum. Lots of vanilla, peardrops… Interesting, it’s really close to a bourbon this time. That’s what I’d have said, had I tasted it blind. 84 points.

TASTING - TWO LONGROWS (including a legend)

Longrow 14 yo (46%, OB, bottled 2004) This one has been released in October, and was sherry matured, although not first-fill, I think, as the colour is white wine. Nose: farmy, on green barley, wet hay and milk. Very little smoke and peat. Nice, but not too expressive, I’d say. Mouth: very sweet and malty, and again not too smoky. Quite some pepper… Somehow like a weaker Talisker. 82 points.