Blind tasting scotches any ideas of reputation

I love drinking wine.

And I love buying wine.

I don't love drinking scotch.

But I still love buying scotch for my scotchy wife.

And so it came to a blind tasting. Motivated by Costco's $10+ coupons back in the late 2008 for Johnny Walker (JW) Green and Gold we got some bottles as gifts. And it is perfectly fine to gift to yourself! [JW product roundup: they sell blended scotch whiskeys. Moving up the chain, they make Red ($10-15), Black 12 yr ($20-$30), Green 15 yr ($40-$50), Gold 18 yr ($50-70) and Blue ($$$). I think of Black as comparable to Chivas and Glenlivet 12 or Glenfiddich, as they are all fine $20 bottles in the late 90's]. And then a week ago at the San Luis Obispo store, they had the Green for $32. No way I'm passing that up.

And so it was JW Green versus JW Gold versus Grants, a bargain blended whiskey from Trader Joes for roughly $10.

The tasters: my wife, her brother Paul and his wife Lynn.

The pourer was me.

I gave them each scotch A and then scotch B in their own glasses. Then finally scotch C.

The consensus was scotch A was a bit harsh, B was the smoothest and C was somewhere in between.

The bottom line:

• Best scotch was (B). The Grants for $9... well actually $12 for a 1L bottle.
  
• The Gold (A) and the Green (A) were second and third.
• Price was not at all correlated with preference.
  

PS I said I love buying wine... as witnessed by the 2 more cases I just got today. (My wife will be "Fitou" to be tied... since I got 6 bottles of this briny $11 French beauty (see a previous post))