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I should say at the outset that I did not drink all of this in six weeks. That would be a medical situation rather than an editorial one. What I did was move through six categories with more deliberate attention than I usually apply to what's in my glass — and at the end of it, I found that my opinions had shifted in ways I wasn't entirely expecting.
The shift wasn't about quality. The quality, across the SlowSip catalogue, is consistent enough that it stopped being the question after the first two weeks. The shift was about something else: about what category I reached for when, and why, and what that said about the relationship between what's in a bottle and what's happening in the room when you open it.
Here is what six weeks of deliberate drinking taught me.
I came into the whisky weeks confident that I knew where I stood on the category — broadly in favour, partial to Speyside, slightly suspicious of anything marketed heavily around peat. Talisker 10 adjusted my priors. There is a particular quality to whisky made on an island — something that reads as genuine rather than constructed, a salinity and weight that you can't engineer in a landlocked distillery — and Talisker has it without apology. I drank it on three separate evenings and found it different each time. The first time it was aggressive. The second it was complex. The third it was the right thing for the moment. I'm not sure a spirit can offer more than that.
I have, historically, been slightly dismissive of gin as a serious drinking proposition. This was wrong. Not wrong in a grand revelatory sense — gin is still predominantly a mixer, and I haven't been converted into someone who drinks it neat with the lights off — but wrong about what the best examples are capable of doing when the whole picture is assembled correctly. Gin Mare with a Mediterranean tonic and a sprig of rosemary on a warm June evening is not a complicated argument. It's just a very good drink. And the difference between that and a rail gin with whatever tonic the bar stocks is, in its way, as significant as the difference between entry-level and aged whisky. I hadn't given it sufficient credit.
Tequila was the category I expected least from and received most. That's partly the fault of the category's reputation — which is, at the lower end, justifiably poor — and partly the fault of Código 1530 Rosa, which is an unreasonably good bottle for what it is. Reposado tequila rested in French rosé wine barrels, which sounds like a brand meeting that went slightly off the rails and turns out to be a genuinely thoughtful decision: the soft fruit notes from the barrel do something quietly interesting to the agave character without overwriting it. I gave it to four people who described themselves as non-tequila drinkers. Three of them asked what it was before they'd finished the glass.
I want to be honest about rum, because the honest version is more useful than the enthusiastic one. Premium rum is genuinely good. Diplomatico Reserva Exclusiva is a serious bottle — complex, long, well-made — and I drank it with the attention it deserved and arrived at appropriate conclusions about it. But rum as a category has a perception problem that even the best individual bottles haven't yet solved, and I found myself working slightly harder to approach it without the preconceptions than I did with whisky or even tequila. This is not the fault of the liquid. It is the fault of decades of marketing that associated the category with beach resorts and hangover-intensity mixers. That legacy is being dismantled, slowly, by producers like Diplomatico and Foursquare. But it hasn't been dismantled yet.
We ran a piece a couple of weeks ago about drinking Champagne without an occasion, and I stand by everything in it. But the piece didn't say what I actually think about Bollinger, which is that it represents the Champagne argument at its most coherent — a house that prioritises Pinot Noir and makes no apology for the richness and structure that brings, in a category that has moved steadily toward lighter, more Chardonnay-dominant styles over the last two decades. Bollinger Special Cuvée is what Champagne looks like when you decide that fullness is a virtue rather than a problem to engineer around. I will have this argument at dinner tables for the rest of my adult life, and I am at peace with that.
I expected to find Cognac interesting in an academic sense — the history, the four houses, the regulated geography — and boring in the glass. I found the opposite. Hennessy VSOP is a bottle I have walked past in duty-free for fifteen years without stopping, and sitting down with it in an actual glass rather than a branded snifter at an airport was genuinely revelatory. The toasted oak and dried apricot notes that read as generic on a tasting sheet reveal themselves, given time and attention, as the product of a specific decision made by a specific blender. You can taste the intention behind it. That's not something you can say about everything on this list.
Six weeks. Six categories. Sixty-something glasses of one thing or another, consumed with varying degrees of ceremony and at various points in the evening. What I expected to take away was a more refined set of opinions about which categories I prefer.
What I actually took away was something less comfortable: the realisation that the category doesn't matter nearly as much as the attention you bring to it. The Talisker I dismissed on the first evening and found revelatory on the third was the same bottle throughout. What changed was how I was drinking it. The Cognac I walked past for fifteen years tastes different when you sit down with it in a glass you chose yourself.
SlowSip exists, in part, to make that kind of attention easier to arrive at — editorial that earns the product, product that earns the editorial, and a platform built on the conviction that the drinks industry is worth taking seriously as a subject. We're six weeks into that argument. We're just getting started.
