Analysis of Michael Jackson's tasting notes

Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson (27.3.1942-30.8.2007) was the most influential beer and whisky writer of his time. He pioneered the writing of whisky tasting notes and also wrote many ground-breaking books on whisky manufacture and drinking culture. In the first edition of his most famous book, The Malt Whisky Companion (1989), he assessed 250 whiskies from 120 distilleries, a huge effort at the time. Based on his work Lapointe and Legendre (1994) studied the similarity of different whiskies. A total of 68 descriptors used five or more times in the book for describing basic malt whiskies aged circa 10 years were included in a matrix analysis to produce the dendrogram below to examine the similarities of different distilleries. Colour, nose, body, palate and finish descriptors were included. Some of the connections are quite expected, but for an average Scotch enthusiasist some are at the first glance somewhat compelling. That is probably because the descriptors are not scaled in any way and therefore the smoky notes in for example Aberfeldy and Glenugie are statistically just as strong as the smoky notes in Laphroaig. Also the amount of colouring, the cask-types and the maturation time of whiskies compared vary considerably. Anyway, despite these shortcomings, there is a highly significant correlation between the tasting notes and the geographic locations of the distilleries, especially in the 12 subgroups named from A to L. IMHO the dendrogram works pretty well in terms of grouping different styles of Scotch whiskies as well and at least is an eye-opener for some unpredicted similarities.

Lapointe 1994

The most common descriptors for each group are listed in the table below:

	color	nose	body	palate	finish
A	full gold	fruity, salty	medium	oily, salty, sherry	dry
B	amber	sweet, sherry	medium, smooth	dry, sweet	long
C	pale gold	sweet, salty	medium to full, oily	sweet, spicy	big, long, spicy
D	pale gold	fruity, grassy	oily	sweet, fruity	sweet, quick
E	pale wyne, gold	fruity, peaty	light	sweet, spicy	fruity
F	gold	aromatic	medium, smooth, light	sweet	sweet
G	gold, full gold	grassy	smooth, light	grassy	dry
H	white wyne, pale	sweet	smooth, light	sweet, dry, fruity, smoky	dry, light
I	gold, full gold	dry, peaty	medium, light, firm	dry, smoky, sweet	salty
J	full gold	dry, peaty, sherry	light to medium, round	sweet	dry
K	gold, full gold	sweet, dry, peaty	medium to full	sweet, dry	dry, long
L	full gold	aromatic, peaty	medium	sweet, smoky	smoky

...and the best whiskies of each subgroup are listed here:

	average	best in basic malts	pts	best in book (1st ed)	pts
A	75,3	Laphroaig 10	86	Laphroaig 15	89
B	80,0	Highland Park 12	90	Macallan 25	95
C	78,5	Talisker 10	90	Talisker 10	90
D	69,5	Auchentoshan 10	85	Auchentoshan 18	86
E	74,8	Bladnoch 8	85	Bladnoch GM1975	86
F	76,5	Springbank Cad15	88	Springbank Cad21	92
G	79,1	Cragganmore 12	90	Cragganmore 12	90
H	69,2	Bruichladdich 10	76	Glenfiddich 30	86
I	79,9	Longrow 14	90	Lagavulin 16	95
J	72,8	Linkwood 12	83	Linkwood GM25	87
K	74,0	Dallas Dhu GM1971	85	Dallas Dhu GM1971	85
L	73,3	Lochnagar 12	80	Lochnagar NAS	83

An interesting fact in MJ's tasting notes is that there is a significant correlation between colour, body, palate and nose, but the finish notes do not correlate with the classification derived from the other descriptions. As expected the correlation between the nose and the palate is extremely strong, but there is also a very strong correlation between the colour and the body (texture) of whisky, which might support the hypothesis that added caramel colouring affects the body (or mouthfeel) of whiskies.

Legendre 2004

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING:

Jackson M: The whole bibliography.

Lapointe FJ, Legendre P. A classification of pure malt Scotch whiskies. Appl Statist 1994;43;1;237-257

Legendre P, Lapointe FJ. Assessing congruence among distance matrices: single-malt Scotch whiskies revisited. Aust N Z J Stat 2004;46;615-629

Mantel N. The detection of disease clustering and a generalized regression approach. Cancer Res 1967;27;209-220

Sokal RR, Rohlf FJ. The comparison of dendrograms by objective methods. Taxon, 1962;11;33-40

Ward JH. Hierarchical grouping to optimize an objective function. J Am Statist Ass 1963;58;236-244