I am about to post the article on Johnnie Walker and rival whisky blends which appeared in the FT on January 19th. (It was, I was surprised to discover, the fifth 'most read' article on FT.com from that Weekend edition.) You will shortly find the full, original, uncut version in the ‘Articles’ section of this site – but, to get straight to the point, here was my rating of the different Johnnie Walker blends:

• Red Label 14/20
• Black Label 19/20
• Green Label 16/20
• Gold Label 18.5/20
• Blue Label 16.5/20

Here’s how the scores work:

• 11-12 signifies a simple but enjoyable dram
• 13-14 a good dram
• 15-16 is an enthusiastic score, denoting a very good dram
• 17-20 are reserved for outstanding or great drams.

The learning experience

This tasting taught me a lot about whisky blends. As I already indicated in my blogpost of January 13th, the difference between one serious (i.e. full-priced) blend and another is a matter of great subtlety and subjectivity. With Black Label, Diageo has very nearly done the job as well as it can be done. Black Label is grand whisky by anyone’s standards, and it offers fine value for money. (Yes, I would rather drink it than Blue Label.)

Battle of the dramsAll the blenders can do after Black Label is try to create something as good, but in a different style. This is what they have managed with Gold Label. Black is dark, challenging, authoritative, grown-up; the experience of drinking it is almost malt-like. Gold is luxurious, creamy, sumptuous, seductive. There are certainly times when I’d prefer Gold to Black (and on those occasions, I might score Gold more highly).

Green Label indicates the difficulty of blending pure malts, and underlines the value of grain whisky in blends. The malts in Green are not very old (that would pump up both cost and characterfulness – not always a virtue in blended whisky). Yet without a bit of softening grain, the blend of young malts in Green has a slightly hard, ungrateful, angular quality.

Blue Label indicates a wider problem with the deluxe blend. You can, of course, make it certifiably venerable (like the Chivas 25, the Grouse 21 and 30, and the Cutty Sark 25 which I tasted against Blue) – yet old whisky is not to everyone’s taste. It isn’t to mine. Blue can’t really be more challenging than Black already is (since drinkers wouldn’t like that either), nor could it be creamier and lusher than Gold (it would turn into a caricature). That leaves it with its ‘finest and rarest ingredient’ USP … but picking out finest and rarest casks in the inventory isn’t necessarily the way to make a great blend. I’m sure it sells well and satisfies as a status-led product in a status-sensitive market, but for pure quality in the glass, Black or Gold seem to me irrefutably better.

The rivals

What about the competition? I was, I must admit, surprised by the style of those older Cutty Sarks (12 Year Old 17.5/20; 25 Year Old 16.5/20). I had always been used to thinking about Cutty Sark as a light, soprano-style blend, so the unapologetic darkness of the 12-year-old in particular came as a great shock.

Keep the yellow flag flyingIt made me go back to taste the basic Cutty Sark blend, which I did last night, blind, against Johnnie Walker Red. Cutty is in fact a shade or two darker in colour, but in aroma much sweeter and more Speyside in style (cream, bread dough, window putty, raisins) than Red.

In my FT article, I queried the avowed ‘West Coast’ style of Red. Ah, everything in context! Against Cutty, Red does come across as very West Coast, with palpably peaty touches and an oily richness. On the palate, it is deeper, fruitier and fuller, even with a hint of meaty and sulphury notes. Cutty is very sweet and vanillic alongside it. There’s no big difference in what wine tasters would call ‘concentration’ (pretty much irrelevant for whisky, since it is the core of alcohol which drives the perception of concentration in whisky) – though Cutty finishes a little hotter, suggesting to me a high percentage of either high-quality grain or young malt. Scoring those two against each other in isolation, I think I’d give Cutty 13.5/20 and Red 15/20.

The lesson here is that the Cutty Sark family is diverse. (No, I didn’t say dysfunctional!) Even if you find the basic blend too light, don’t ignore the older alternatives. They’re very different, and much more exciting.

Chivas Regal showed well throughout:

• 12 Year Old 16/20
• 18 Year Old 18.5/20
• 25 Year Old 17.5/20

Pernod Ricard are doing a good job with Chivas Regal. As blends, they don’t quite have the personality of the Johnnie Walker family, but they are blended with great skill, subtlety and harmony. They are, indeed, almost an object lesson is how to blend a beautifully seamless whisky from disparate raw materials. Their overriding style print is a Speyside one: see Speyside top 10 article for more details on exactly what that means.

I enjoyed the two older versions of Famous Grouse (21 Year Old 15/20 and 30 Year Old 16.5/20). As my scores suggest, they don’t quite achieve the sublime nuance, harmony and polish of the very greatest blends – and personally I don’t greatly relish whisky over 20 Years Old, when the notes of age are beginning to lord it over the intricacy and allusiveness of lightly aged, mature whisky itself. For me, the magic decade is 10-20 years (or, for some malts, 15-25).

I’m sorry there wasn’t space for more rivals but I will be returning to this subject in the future.

Last but not least

Finally, I can’t leave the subject without applauding the beauty and elegance achieved in the packaging of Johnnie Walker Black, Green, Gold and Blue. These have been tweaked down the years, and always with consummate taste and skill; once again, I find it hard to imagine how blended whisky packaging could be bettered. None of the rivals matches up; most, indeed, flounder. A bottle of Gold is not a Vermeer, a Canova or a Northern Qi buddha from the Qingzhou hoard, but it’s a dandy object all the same.