Love Orchard House. I just keep coming back to it.

I think you're on the money. This year's winners felt a bit anticlimactic. I guess that's the problem with 90% of the contents being voted on not having changed since previous years. Some of the year-on-year change breakdowns were interesting at least.

Springbank... it knows its hot. No disagreement here.

I get the distaste for Springbank winning again but they remain the only distillery doing it the way they do. Since the chairman died maybe Edrington or somebody will swoop in with a blank chequebook and stick it in a Viking head shaped bottle at 40% then someone else might get a look in. I think there’s a lot of Johnny come latelys on the whisky scene that are seeing stuff like OSWAs and Ralfy etc say Springbank is the best and are snapping it up until they pop the cork and try it. I love it but there’s some flavours in there that probably don’t jive very well with modern palates. I voted for Bunnahabhain 12 cask strength.

Yeah, I think springbank splits the crowd because it’s so hard to get hold of a bottle. A victim of their own success. I’ll say hello if I see you at the GWF.

I'm new to the scene but I get the impression that Springbank was a long-time darling among those in the know, who knew it to be a distillery with integrity and whose bottles could be picked up from the specialist, covered in dust because they had been overlooked by snooty clientele. That is, until two years ago when it drew the fervour of investment and even criminal prospectors, and you read disgusting stories about people parking up a camper van outside the distillery, settling down for a week in order to go into the shop every day and strip the shelves. Now I can buy Springbank 10 and Kilkerran in local shops for £50-60, so I feel like the fervour is settling down. I'm more jaded by the fuss over Ardnamurchan, who did literally just pop up overnight and became neck-and-neck with everyone else overnight. In my cynical view, they are being fanboyed by would-be Springbank fanboys for nothing short of copying the style. That said, I've tried neither Springbank nor Ardnamurchan, so I'm only going by what people have said, and from what people say, they appeal to the sort of whisky geek to whom anything which doesn't fall into the style of "rugged coastal peated-but-not-too-peated" is not whisky at all. True, they are doing everything right and should be commended for it, but then so is Wolfburn, and no one talks about Wolfburn.