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This is where I store my drinks: whisky, cognac, rum and wine.

At first, I had all my collection stored there with the bottles standing horizontally, until I saw a bottle where the cork looked strange. So after checking in Internet I found that whisky has to be stored vertically. So I left there the bottles that has been opened and stored in another room the closed ones. Mainly I have there:

• Johnnie Walker Blue Label
• Highland Park 12 years old
• Ardbeg 10 years old
• Glenfiddich 18 years old
• Chivas Regal 12 years
• Macallan 9 years old Provenance
• Macallan 10 years old
• Macallan 18 years old Fine Oak
• Bell’s
• Courvoisier
• Luis Felipe
• Jaime I
• Jameson 12 years old Special Reserve

And about the wine, I have some great ones:

• Contino Viña del Olivo 2001 and 2003
• Contino Seleccion 2003
• Fincas de Ganuza
• Remirez de Ganuza Trasnocho 2005
• Taylor’s 20 year old Tawny Oporto

Spanish wines are really great and after having been drinking whisky and learning how to find the aromas and the flavour, I have learnt to appreciate even more the subtle aromas of wines. I do really enjoy Ribera del Duero wines but when you find a good Rioja there is nothing that can match it.

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This is the box where I stored my miniatures. I don’t collect miniatures because I use them for tasting purposes.

I used to open whisky bottles as soon as I bought them but I ran out of room for storing them so now I do just open miniatures. Once it is empty I throw it to the yellow bin :)

The box is a wine gift box that I fixed. Now I need more room because there are still some bottles that I need to store there, so either I get a bigger box or I start tasting more whisky :P

How do you do to taste many whiskies? Or are you a person of a single whisky?

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Why don’t you read the definitive whisky tasting guidelines

Gerry Tosh explains some tips about how to taste whisky. I find them quite interesting. One of the best parts is about nosing the whisky, and if you can follow him with a glass of whisky and it is incredible how good their tips about nosing three times are.

What do you think? How do you taste whisky?

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This year Whisky Bible by Jim Murray is out.

This year best whisky ( or that’s what Jim Murray says ) is Ballantine’s 17 Years Old.

I haven’t tried this one, so I will perhaps do a visit to my shop and get one bottle to give it a try. Anyway I think that Jim scores blends too high, even when he states that he is more strict with blends that with single malts because blenders can get the very best of each distillery and create a great whisky.

On second place we have Thomas H Handy Sazerac Rye and in third William Larue Welle. Both of them american whiskeys and both of them out of my reach :-P.  It is so hard and expensive to get good whiskey at Europe.

Well, no matter what, I stay stick to my glass of Nikka Yoichi 10 years old. A great dram of which I will post a review soon.

Any thoughts on Jim’s selection?

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I explain how I take the bottles’ photos to look good enough on an extra low budget.

First of all, the things that you are going to need:

• One big piece of white pasteboard
• A tripod
• A camera
• A camera remote control
• One big box

Then make sure your have enough room. Between camera and the bottle you will need around 1.5-2 meters.

How to use tripod and cardboard to take photos

So now that you have that setup, you have to make sure that the room is well lighted but that the pasteboard doesn’t get direct sun light.

Now get your camera and make sure that the ISO settings is set to the lowest possible, so the exposure time will be very high but as we are shooting from the tripod we don’t care about it.

Now move away from behind the camera and … SHOOT!.

You will get something like this:

A raw photo of a bottle

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