Best Scotch Whisky
The advent of National Scotch Day on Saturday 27 July is a reminder that there’s a day for just about everything in 2024. Today – as I write these words on 17 July – is National Hot Dog Day. It’s also, apparently, National Lottery Day, National Tattoo Day and World Emoji Day. Combine all four and you’d have quite the celebration.
Whisky isn’t exactly short of its own moments in the limelight. There’s International Scotch Day on 8 February. This was invented by leading Scotch producer Diageo in 2017 and marks the birthday of Alexander Walker of Johnnie Walker fame.
If you miss it, don’t worry. International Whisky Day falls on 27 March, and is followed, on the third Sunday in May, by World Whisky Day. Not to mention Hogmanay, Burns Night, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, birthdays, anniversaries…
Plenty of opportunities, then, to crack open a decent bottle of whisky, whatever its provenance. But National Scotch Day turns the spotlight squarely on Scotland – the country that many people still consider the spiritual home of whisky (look away now, Ireland).
Historic moment
Why 27 July? It’s said to mark what is purportedly the first written reference to making whisky in Scotland. The moment when, according to the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland of 1494, one Friar John Cor was given eight bolls of malt ‘wherewith to make aqua vitae’. A boll was an old Scots measure of volume; aqua vitae was the Latin term for ‘water of life’ –
