Whisky and how you collect it has always been and will always be a topic of much debate. Since I’ve been shouting about Bottoms Up tastings and downsizing, I thought to give my two cents.

My collection started with a single bottle back in 2004 or so. A Glenfiddich 12 and after buying it I couldn’t wrap my mind around the fact that I’d just bought a single bottle of booze for over € 25. By the time I finished it, I bought another one, and after visiting a whisky tasting in Den Bosch at Barrique, I bought a cask sample there. That went bad within a week because of a non-air tight cork. After tasting several different whiskies at my father in law, I decided a visit to De Whiskykoning was neccessary.

There I bought a Caol Ila 18. From then on I would go there every two weeks and buy a bottle for quite a while and my collection started to take shape. Since then I went from a wooden crate, to a dressoir to a whisky cabinet to boxes behind the chairs to a whisky room. The whisky room was camouflaged as an office at first, but since I stopped working from home all non-booze stuff has been removed.

Now I find myself having about 240 bottles of which most (some 140) are open and I don’t like that. Not that I hate it, but I found myself buying random stuff because I felt like buying whisky. I’ve ended up with at least 20 bottles of which the cork hasn’t been off in at least a year, some boring whiskies and some bad whiskies, some will become sauce.

I’ve decided to start downsizing my collection and focus more on quality. Tasting samples first, saving money for a bottle and then buy that one special bottle. A good way to start was the Bottoms Up tasting, at which we emptied about 10 bottles. I’ll be finishing off some more bottles over the coming weeks and will probably take bottles with me when we go away for a weekend with friends and such.

The goal for 2012 is to reduce the amount of open bottles to a maximum of 100 and decrease the amount of cash spent on booze. So far (with about 2.5 months already gone) things are more or less according to plan. I’ve been able to buy some, sell some and trade some and my wishlist has only five bottles on it.

The wishlist:

• Springbank 21 (the old one)
• BenRiach 1975-2011 Asta Morris
• Inchgower 1982 Duncan Taylor (might turn in to a Malts of Scotland one, depending on the sample I got from Martin)
• Sazerac 18 2011 or 2012
• Caperdonich 1972-2011 Perfect Dram

Fun fact: I’ve never tasted Caol Ila 18 again after finishing my bottle in 2006. I’m too scared it will fall off its pedestal.