Seems the fedora’d one’s name is back in the news. Sigh. I guess when your brand has become tired and obsolete, there’s little left to do but fight for relevance and continue to holler old man things into the void. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, and all that, I suppose.

But let’s not give him any more print space than we already have. Instead, let’s tip the spotlight to both the only whisky book I need year upon year, and to the man who largely helps carry the frontline whisky presenters upon his shoulders, Ingvar Ronde.

The 2022 edition of the Malt Whisky Yearbook has just hit our shelves and is, as expected, flying off them just as quickly.

The MWYB is the bible so many of us in the industry use when cobbling together our metadata for presentations; for quick on-the-spot fact-checking; and for shoring up the foundations of knowledge we use daily in conversations with our whisky pals. But if you think this is an industry-only tome, you’re sadly mistaken. This is a guidebook, available to all, that helps level the playing field. In just a couple hundred brilliantly conceived pages, you should be able to find enough facts and wisdom to provide an unshakeable bedrock for…wait for it…all things whisky.

The book (which to me is an evolving entity) is chock-a-block with brilliant nuggets of distillery specs, timelines, bits of historicity, insider info, and essays dedicated to some of the industry’s most topical subjects from the past year or so. And let’s face it, this is a burgeoning whisky world and there are a lot of folks out there craving accurate and relevant information in easily digestible nuggets. With Scotchwhisky.com now sadly defunct (though still online, thank god!), the MWYB is truly the only one-stop-shop for the most up-to-date distillery news and updates.

I was fortunate enough to do a bit of a collaboration with Ian Buxton in the 2017 edition. Well…collaboration may be a bit of a stretch, I suppose. Ian reached out to me to provide some insight and context on something we’d been hammering away at here on ATW for some time. He then turned it into a great piece on the state of whisky prices and our own inherent biases. I am, of course, condensing the matter to but a line here, but the article was indeed a gooder. Well worth the read, if I do say so myself.

But even before that, Ingvar was great to me and to you, friends, in saying he liked this site and the dialogue that unfolds here, especially the comments. ATW has been in his Websites to Watch list for years now, even when it suffered silent seasons and periods of neglect. For that I’m grateful. And his kind words have been a testament that still leaves me chuffed, I must admit.

Forgot the other book. Make this your annual bible purchase. Trust me.

Thanks, Ingvar. On behalf of us malters, thank you.

And, pssst…I’m still hunting for ’07, ’09, and ’11, friends. If anyone has any leads, please pass them on.