The SMWS was present at Whisky Live Athens in Greece in March, in collaboration with the Hellenic Malt Whisky Society
For the first SMWS tasting of the weekend, Ioannis Mallios, founding member of the Hellenic Malt Whisky Society and SMWS event ambassador, presented SMWS – Peat around the clock! and discussed the Society’s unique approach to whisky through flavour profiling.
Ioannis and guests explored four different SMWS Peated flavour profiles from Society distilleries 4, 16, 66 and 108, with age and distillery also part of the discussion.
The second tasting was titled SMWS – This is a Flavoured World! with Ioannis presenting a variety of diverse Society flavour profiles from non-Scotch distilleries: 128 from Wales, 138 from Taiwan, 140 from the United States and 150 from Ireland.
“I wanted to use SMWS codes in order to challenge stereotypes and to pass on the message that it is all about flavor profile, and good whisky is not related only to distillery, regions, age, country,” said Ioannis. “Our guests were all surprised that there was such a wide and great offering of Peated flavour profile whiskies, but none of them was from Islay! Most participants hadn’t experienced whisky from SMWS distillery 108 and couldn’t believe such a good Peated profile was from such a lesser-known distillery.
“For our ‘Flavoured World’ tasting, we conducted the tasting blind and everyone was surprised by the ages of the whiskies, especially the 140.1: Walk-in cigar humidor from the United States – no one could believe that this was a 3-year-old whisky from Texas!The responses we had were really great and the SMWS seminars highly appreciated and accepted.”
Find out more about the Hellenic Malt Whisky Society at http://hmws.gr/