Promise made, 56-year-old Murray, who always wears a cream fedora with a black band (including the four hours I spent with him) zips me to what he describes as one of the quietest bits of rural England. Until a few years ago, Murray, who tastes more than 1,000 whiskies during a four-month period when he is writing the nearly 400-page Bible, “cooped up in a room every day for 16 days at least”, lived in the city of Northampton. The address was widely available. “I would have people popping in to see me whenever they liked. I love a chat and a drink. But it really disturbed my schedule,” Murray tells me.

Nothing about his writing retreat—Murray lives in another cottage a few miles away when not working on the Bible—suggests that this is where many a reputation in the $68 billion (Rs 4.3 lakh crore) global whisky market is made or marred.

(Whisky led the $262 billion spirits market according to 2010 numbers published by researcher Global Industry Analysts.) Rather, it is the sort of cottage you might image characters in the books of Agatha Christie or Enid Blyton living in, complete with a parrot called Percy in a large cage in the sitting room.

The day I meet him, Murray is excited about a new word he had heard on BBC—“intertwangle”—which he is using in this year’s guide. “Isn’t it perfect to describe the magical alchemy in whisky?” he asks rhetorically. He has no television, but beside his dining table a fat green radio, the same shade as the upholstery in the British Parliament, is perpetually tuned to classical Western music.

When I ask him to describe the perfect whisky, he plays the German composer George Frideric Handel’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day on his Mac. “Can you see how the cello brings balance and rhythm? Can you hear violin come in just at the right moment? And the fading, the ending, so elegant, Handel didn’t just fade out, he brought character even in the fade. That’s how the greatest whiskies are.”

Jim Murray

Whisky’s most powerful man

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