Happy New Year! Best wishes for 2017.

We won’t start our 2017 tasting track until we’ve looked back at some of the highlights of the past year.

Whisky highlights of 2016

My two favourite new releases (94 points) were the undisclosed Speyside 1975 bottled by Sansibar and the Brora 38 Year Old from this year’s Special Releases.

We’ve had more undisclosed Speyside whiskies – all pretty excellent. We seem to be particularly fond of the 1975 expressions (Whisky Agency, Maltbarn, Whisky-Fässle) but there was a whole list of 1973 and 1977 siblings, e.g. the great Speyside 1973...