Whisky is on a roll at the moment, and barely a week goes by without some new special whisky launch, quite often involving whiskies which command prices running in to thousands of pounds.

It’s a mad, crazy and mind-boggling world which has attracted the fashion set like moths around a flame, and if you go on to the internet you’ll find a world of bloggers desperately trying to outdo each other in pursuit of there latest releases.

Stand back a minute, though, take a reality check, and you’ll find that the world of single malt whisky is a lot more straightforward. It’s just a case of deciding what sort of flavour you’re after, setting a budget and then taking some advice from a member of the Whisky Shop team. And you really don’t need to spend a fortune to drink great malt. Indeed, that’s where this feature comes in.

Each week I’m going back to one the iconic whiskies, the classic malts which form the core of the Scotch malt whisky world, and reappraising them afresh. These are the malts which started it all off for so many whisky lovers and may have been forgotten by many as they seek out new and exciting tastes.

This week it’s the turn of Bunnahabhain 12 Year Old

If you go back to Bunnahahbhain today, you’re sure of a big surprise. And if you’re looking to re-ignite your passion for an old flame with this tasty little number, you’ll discover she’s put on make up, had her hair done and is wearing skimpy skirts -  making her a feistier, sexier and altogether much hotter challenge all round.

Bunnahabhain 12 year old isn’t what it once was. Brand owners Burn Stewart has made two important changes,  one the direct consequence of the other. Firstly it decided that it wanted to makes its whiskies non chill-filtered. Chill-filtering is the traditional process used to stop whisky clouding when it’s cold. At low temperatures fats and flavour compounds solidify, causing a clouding of the spirit. So companies chill the whisky and filter out the solids,  guaranteeing clear whisky whatever the temperature.

But in recent years there has been a growing view  that the process removes flavour and it has become something of a badge of honour to non chill-filter.

But Burn Stewart didn’t want clouding, either, so what to do? The answer was to raise the strength of the whisky because from 46% ABV clouding doesn’t happen. So now Bunnahabhain 12 year old has a a very grown up ABV of 46.3%.

the effects on the taste have been amazing. What was the gentle and barely peated taste of Islay has become a rugged, wind-swept and bolshy seaside whisky of distinction. The fruity flavours are there, the seaweed earthiness intact, but now you can almost taste the sea salt and hear the gulls sing. The flavours are enhanced, peat is clearly part of the mix and the taste crashes across the palate like west coast waves crashing on seaweed-covered rocks.

Your old flame is no longer the nice girl next door, she’a vamp, whisky’s equivalent to Grease’s Sandy dressed in leather.

It’s the one that you’ll want , honey, oo, oo, oo….

The Islay Festival is one of the most celebrated events in the whisky calendar. With people coming from all over the world to the tiny Island of Islay to visit the many distilleries which are housed there.

The festival lasts a week with hotels and Bed and breakfasts sold out months in advance. If you can’t make this years festival but would love to get your hands on the elusive and exclusive festival bottles (which each distillery releases each year for their their visitors only!) then fear not… The W Club are offering you a chance to win 7 Islay Festival Bottling’s worth over an estimated £1000.

This Prize is surely one of the best whisky prizes to be offered anywhere this year. To be in with a chance of winning simply answer the following question:

Which distillery is not on Islay?

A: Laphroaig

B: Bowmore

C: Dalmore

D: Caol Ila

Simply send your answer, your WClub user name, full name and address to thewclub@whiskyshop.com to be entered into the prize draw.

Good Luck!

London based Simon Swaby is back at work today – after  what he describes as unbelievable and amazing photographic and whisky trip to Islay.

Simon, aged 28 and a keen amateur photographer, was the winner of The W Club’s first ‘money can’t buy’ competion after joining the club on the first day.

His prize was an all expenses paid trip to join international landscape photographer Colin Prior on a three day trip to Islay. Colin has been commissioned to take some iconic Islay distillery shots for window displays for The Whisky Shop’s ‘Islay Festival’ promotion starting in May.

With dawn starts to capture the best coastal images and late nights drinking whisky with fellow whisky lovers at the Harbour Inn, Bowmore, Simon says that at the end of the trip he was very tired but very happy.

“It was everything I had hoped and more,” he said. “I don’t think we could have done any more and it’s going to take me a while to take it all in. Spending time with a photogrsapher as great as Colin was an amazing experience and I learned so much from him. Just simple things such as the way he had an eye for detail and deconstructing a scene an analyse how it would work as a picture. It was an excellent, one-off experience with a grat photographer who is also a lovely person.”

Simon buys his whisky from our Paternoster Square shop in London, where he says he has received outstanding advice from the staff. He is frelatively new to whisky, and had never been to Islay. Before the trip, he says he had a leaning towards Speyside whiskies. But the trip has opened his eyes, he says.

In all he visited seven distilleries on Islay and Jura, and spoke to several distillery managers.

“What I’ve learned most of all is that while the whisky and the distilleries are fantastic, it’s the people which make Islay what it is. It has been a truly fantastic experience.”

The W Club will be running more ‘money can’t buy’ competitions on a regular basis – watch this space!

Ardbeg is always a special treat for me and today the visit is made even more special and poignant than normal because I bring with me a message from the family of Alan Lodge, my deputy editor on The Spirits Business, who loved whisky in general, peated whisky in particular, and Ardbeg more than any other. He died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage at the age of 29 and at his celebration service last week a letter from Ardbeg distillery was read out. The family was deeply touched, so I am here to pass on the family’s thanks and to toast Alan for the very last time with a glass of Uigedail.

Despite the above, this visit, as always, turns out to be the funniest and most fun visit of them all.  The distillery has been expanded but it’s still only making 800,000 litres of spirit, and the heart and soul of the distillery remains undampened. Ardbeg is an oddball, slightly crazy whisky  which doesn’t take itself too seriously. It isn’t disrespectful of its past, embraces its army of fans in the present, and has one eye on the next slice of  innovation for the future.

Nothing encapsulates this more than Jackie Thomson, a force of nature who is at the epicentre of everything that is Ardbeg. You suspect that she has an efficient and potentially fierce business streak, but there’s a hippy girly-ness about her too, and she is utterly seductive, a one woman whisky roadshow of anecdotes, impressions and jokes. I hadn’t expected her to give us a personal tour but she does, and she is very generous with her time, regaling us with stories as she takes us through the distillery showing us the gaping hole where a wash back should be – the distillery isn’t in production just now – and telling us of how the distillery is now hitting its stride. And she shows us the latest addition to Ardbeg – a disgorging machine: “Whatever that is. But I’m sure it’s there for as purpose and we need disgorging.”

Our visit ends with a wee tasting – but what a tasting it is.

Firstly, Ardbeg Kildalton 1981, a 25 year old forerunner of Ardbeg Blasda, a lightly peated Ardbeg. If that sounds dull, it isn’t – it’s packed with melon and tropical fruit flavours, some menthol, and the most delightful sherbet hit. It’s very different but absolutely stunning.

Next up is Ardbeg Alligator – named after the heavily charred inside of the cask which looks like the back of  an alliator. This is burnt barbecued steak in a glass, and a real favourite of mine. Wonderful charcoally, peaty, whisky.

And finally the now unavailable Lord of The Isles – a rare Ardbeg packed with very old malts and as smooth and honeyed as a peaty whisky has any right to be. The few bottles of this that are left fetch hundreds of pounds and this is my first taste of it –  and it doesn’t disappoint.

It’s a great way to end our trip but before we leave Jackie has one more gift for me. She tells me this story:

“One day a big group of pretty scary Swedish men turned up,” she says. “They were all tall, and had long hair, tattoos, piercings, strange clothes, really intimidating. I think some of the people eating in the cafe thought that they were invading us, coming back after all the years to finish the job off. But if ever there was a case that you can’t judge a book by its cover, this was it. They were polite, erudite, very interested in the whisky and very knowledgeable. and it turns out they were all members of the Swedish Single Malt and Heavy Metal Society.”

Wow – that sounds perfect to me. Iron Maiden and Ardbeg? I’m there – and I’m going to find these guys and ask for honorary membership!

Ardbeg’s Jackie Thomson shows us a hole where a washback should be…

Coffee with distillery manager Georgie Crawford at Lagavulin turns out to be a trip highlight.

Georgie is a delightful and gushing bundle of  irreverent gossip and fun, and her office is one of those dusty and shambolic 60s affairs packed with bottles and memorabilia on the shelves and pictures and maps on the walls.

Colin’s eye is drawn to a model of an old puffer boat, the lifeline to the islands before big ferries serviced them, stubby boats drenched in history. The puffers were working boats and would bring the barley out to Islay and take the finished whisky to the mainland.

The sea is of course a key element in the Islay story and last year for the first time the island held a Festival of the Sea. This year it will happen again, bigger and better. It’s a recognoition of the sea’s role as a lifeline to the island, but also its role as a source of misery, hardship and death.

Georgie tells a story about her grand parents who set out by boat to make a fortune on faraway lands only to  sink their boat at Mull, where they were forced to ramian, penniless and propertyless.

“They bult their own house, which is still there, and every year we would go over and see the wreck which was visible and which we knew as mum’s wreck.”

Most fascinating of all are two crumbling cannon balls by the fireplace. Georgie pics up the story:

“They were fired by Oliver Cromwell when he decided to destroy the remaining castles along the coast here,” she says. “The Lords of the Isles had been very powerful but by theis time Scotland had been united and Cromwell was worried that it might take up arms against England so he destroyed the castles.”

There is a potential whisky link here, too – Georgie expounds the theory that Scotland’s whisky story starts outside the distillery at Finlaggan and in Lagavulin Bay.

“There is a view that distilling came to Ireland from Europe, and from Ireland to Scotland via Islay,” she says. “Boats would have arrived on Islay in the bay at Lagavulin so when James IV came to make peace with the Lords of the Isles this is where he would have come. We know that the first written reference to barley for the use of making Aqua Vitae was in a document in 1494.

“But King James IV came to Islay in 1493 to make peace with the Lords of the Isles and he no doubt celebrated with local hospitality. Less than a year later he was asking Friar John Corr to make Aqua Vitae. You can’t tell me that it’s just a coincidence that he came here and then that happened. There’s an argument that he said ‘go and make me some of that stuff I had on Islay.”

What I love about this shoreline is that its craggy outcrops and crashing waves have remained unchanged over the centuries, and as you stare out over them a force field of evocative history washes over you with a force that no museum or monument can match.

Georgie’s story reinforces that, and as we wander back through the distillery,  the ghosts of whisky’s past are all around us…

Click here to read Dominic’s final diary entry from the Islay whisky trip

We need a a stroke of luck on our final day on Islay and we get it – big time.

Our decision to delay going out until after breakfast is vindicated by grim conditions at 6am but a bright dawn and even sunshine by 8am. And day three turns out to be our best day yet, giving us a hattrick of dry days -the first time that’s happened on Islay in about eight months.

The plan today is to head down to the holy trinity of distilleries to the south of Islay – Laphroaig, Lagavulin and Ardbeg-  so we say goodbye to our new bartending friends – well those of them who managed to make an appearance at breakfast and can speak – as they depart for Auchentoshan and off we go.

Laphroaig is the game clincher as far as photography for the trip is concerned. We are given permission to wander at will so while I go down to the beach and stare out over the rocky outcrops, Colin and Simon set about filming first in the still room and then in the maltings. In the latter they hit paydirt – the kilns have been fired up and Colin gets dramatic shots of peat flame and smoke. These pictures are, he says, the best he’s taken so far, and they are definitively Islay.

He’s happier than he’s been on the whiole trip from a professional point of view. It’s only mid morning but we’re already in the home strait…

Click here to read the next diary entry from the Islay whisky trip

MONDAY MARCH 12

When I learned to scuba dive we used to head out on a boat each day and then when we reached a suitable diving spot. We’d go down to the seabed one by one and kneel with our arms folded waiting for the rest of the group. Then we’d follow our instructor on a journey of discovery.

I loved that time kneeling on the bottom. I have rarely felt a greater sense of excitement and anticipation, waiting to swim round coral reefs unsure what we might encounter. And just a slight frisson of trepidation.

To get to Islay I leave home at 7.30am, head two hours south to Stansted for a lunchtime flight, fly to Glasgow and wait more than four hours. And then I fly to Islay.

The Glasgow Airport wait is a metaphorical kneeling on the seabed: the wait, excitement and anticipation before flying to the whisky isle. The trepidation’s there, too, particularly between November and April, because there’s no guarantee the flight won’t be delayed, cancelled, or worst of all, will take off and be turned back. That’s the travel equivalent of God waving a bloody great glass of heavily peated malt under your nose and saying ‘you can’t have it mate.’

Today the anticipation is worse than ever. It’s no secret that I hate missing out on anything, and I’m the first to arrive and often the last to leave. So I didn’t deal well with the thought that  photographer Colin Prior and W Club competition winner Simon Swaby are already on Islay and visiting distilleries. It’s like when you’re 18 and you find that two of your best mates have gone away with a hot babe that we all fancy.Good things come to those who wait, they say. Not what I wanted to hear at 4.30pm this afternoon…

I arrive at Bowmore to find renowned photographer Colin Prior holding court and a group of whisky enthusiasts enjoying a dram to two – so I join in.

Our mission here is to  capture Islay without resorting to cliche or stereotype. So after a few whiskies we retire to discuss tactics. Seems tomorrow very early morning is the best opportunity for pics so we’re going to go for an early start 6am ready to leave.

Our competition winner is Simon Swaby, a chartered engineer with a love of whisky and photography and he is the first W Club winner. He’s relatively new to whisky, delighted to be here, and a really good bloke. I think Colin, Simon and I will have a lot of fun on this trip.

We’re staying at the Harbour Inn in Bowmore and out dinner, fresh sea bass. is superb. A late night Bowmore and to bed…