Glasgow’s Whisky Festival – The Arches, Glasgow on 13th November 2010

This is the the inaugural Glasgow Whisky Festival and Jim and Nicola where very happy to attend this sold out event.

We arrived early in Glasgow and had a good lunch in the Piccolo Mondo a fine dinning Italian restaurant not far from The Arches, after which we headed for the festival.

The first pour of the day was at 1pm and the final pour was at 4.30pm which gave everyone plenty of time to enjoy a dram or three of their favourites.

The Arches were holding in excess of 40 stands which makes it one of the biggest in Scotland and really outshines Glasgow’s Whisky Live.

The Whisky Boys took there time and had a wander around before heading to one of our favourites, Glengoyne, and that stand was manned by Joe and Arthur, who we had enjoyed Glengoyne whisky tastings with at Leslie’s Bar in Edinburgh.

Many of Jim and Nicola’s favourites were on show, Isle of Arran, Burn Stewart, Douglas Laing, Balblair, Old Pulteney, Ardbeg, Bruichladdich, and Master of Malt to mention but a few.

We did meet some friends old and new, we enjoyed chats with Jonny McCormick a freelance Whisky writer, Euan Mitchell the Managing Director of Isle of Arran Distillers and he was happy to hear that we had picked one of his products for the Scotch Malt Whisky Society’s free joining bottle. Other friends were Bill Mackintosh a Director of Glasgow’s Whisky Festival and Darren Rook from the Master of Malt.

There was stands that did not have Whisky, these included book signings, 2011 calendars and sustainable wood products all of them fabulous.

So we found this to be a very well organised and run Festival and is now a “must go to” event on the Whisky Boys calendar.

Due the number of exhibitors we both had to select our drams carefully, as it would be impossible to take a dram from every exhibitor. Think about it 40 exhibitors and each one have anything up to 10 expressions to sample, our kidneys and livers would be unable to cope.

So to end this article both Jim and Nicola agreed that this was the best event of the year, and we look forward to next years event.