The Online Scotch Whisky Awards | 2022

Are the OSWA’s succeeding?

Could the Online Scotch Whisky Awards be considered an echo chamber of enthusiasts?

Recognition for being better than the rest, of doing something more worthy, more capable or more successful than your competitors, isn’t why we grind ourselves to a pulp. Ask any winner of any award why they work so hard and put so much effort and enthusiasm into what they do, and not many would say, “So I can win an award”. The rationale for enduring through turbulent times, complex emotional rollercoasters and absolute exhaustion is usually because we love what we do - and the thrill of doing it is the juice. An award is nice, but not the motivation. Awards are useful though, or so I thought.

Growing up as an enthusiast of many things from tech to motorcycles, music and watches, I would often buy consumer magazines solely for top 10 lists or buy magazines to read reviews about what the best thing currently is. The online era shifted that approach to the web and I’d search out reviews and awards because I genuinely felt it informed me and offered reassurance what I was buying was actually worth it. Someone, an authority on the matter, had reviewed the plethora of things available in that category and decided this exact product had what it took to deserve my time and money over all else.

Starting my own business creating products that often appear in publications and interacting with the people that compile these magazines, websites and awards, I quickly discovered, much to my horror, that awards, features, spotlights and ratings were often the result of circumstance. A result of niche opportunity, desperation for trending content or, the open secret, favouring. Woah, Dougie - just hold on a minute there. You mean to say awards are not handed out to those who genuinely deserve it? No, they’re often not.

In my professional sector, accolades are often given to people who know someone responsible for curating content for magazines or who have recently placed a large, expensive advertisement in that publication, or who have a PR agency who are friends with the editors who took them to a fancy restaurant. As a payback, they’re rewarded with placements. Back scratching is not a new thing.

In my industry of product design, there’s awards such as the Red Dot Design Awards, something I was very much aware of since studying to be a product designer 20 years ago. I used to look at Red Dot Award winning products with a mixture of reverence and envy as products that had been chosen because they were so good, or solved a problem I never could have thought of. Looking more closely into the mechanics of this process to see how the awards were given, it turns out not to be a merit based awards platform either.

The Red Dot Design Awards (RDDA) is a competition based awards system, where a panel of “experts” select and reward products they deem exceptional, with a status that’s legitimately recognised in the industry as being of high praise. Products featuring the RDDA logo are celebrated and coveted. There’s a €600 entry fee per regular design submission, which is fair enough - the panel of successful industry-leading experts have to eat for goodness sake. But, in the event a product submitted for appraisal should win, it’s the creators of that product that have to pay the RDDA almost 7000 Euros to “accept” their award. Think about that - winners pay a huge amount of money to receive an award they’ve won. This winner’s fee does afford them the privilege of sticking said award status on their product, and a Red Dot Award winning product is certainly more enticing to consumers than simply, “My Mum Likes It”. How disappointing to discover that designers don’t get awards for working hard and creating exciting stuff. Designers get awards for being able to afford to submit their work in the first place.

It's because of the marketing-driven world that we live in that awards are seen as endorsements of the legitimacy of that product, even if in reality those awards mean nothing of the sort. I’m cynical of accolades as a result - what they were awarded for, who they were awarded by and what the mechanics of that awards system are; it becomes the focus point before I give any credibility to that product. The RDDA isn’t a panel of industry experts seeking out and rewarding influential design from a world of products. It’s a panel of experts appraising a small selection of products that the creators behind them were able to afford to submit. Pay to play, so to speak.

We, as consumers, see award winning products everywhere - your local supermarket will feature shelves full to bursting with award-winning wine and spirits, adorned with glittery bronze, silver and gold stickers drawing our eyes towards them, almost forcing us to pick those bottles over others devoid of metallic badges of honour. It’s not my place to say whether or not these bottles of wine and spirits are worthy of awards because, who am I? I don’t know what every stickered bottle tastes like, so I can only go on recommendations, and a gold sticker awarded by the IWSC looks like a pretty solid recommendation to me! 

But who are the IWSC, rewarding wines and spirits for being of exceptional quality and value? The IWSC - the International Wine and Spirits Competition Ltd - is a competition based system whereby brands submit their bottles, along with an entry fee, for judging by a panel of experts. The experts assess around 65 samples of whisky, wine or other spirit every day. Should a bottle of whisky be deemed the best of the best, the brand behind that bottle pays for the physical stickers and high-res digital artwork to broadcast their success - the very same system favoured by the RDDA. Looking at some of the IWSC 2022 awards, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the submission pool was a bit thin on the ground, given that the 40% ABV, chill-filtered and coloured Aberlour 14yo Double Cask won a gold award of 95/100 points. For Auld Doog, knowing the many Aberlour 40%ers that I’ve tried lately, that reward is a bit…keen. That Chivas Brothers Pernod Ricard, owners of The Glenlivet, Aberlour and many other brands that have won such high accolades are headline sponsors? Pay to play, so to speak.

So what do consumers, enthusiasts and exciters do then, if like me you don’t trust the legitimacy of some awards emblazoned on bottles. What other form of organised, authoritative, knowledgeable and, above all independent, awards system can we depend upon? 

The Online Scotch Whisky Awards

Launched in 2021, the Online Scotch Whisky Awards (OSWA) was a response to both the lack of genuinely independent awards systems, and the call of the enthusiast; to provide answers to what those buying whisky were asking: what is good, why should I buy it and who are the people doing great things deserving of our support?

The inaugural award ceremony was conducted under the withering blanket of Coronavirus, with organisers Roy Duff and Ralfy Mitchell presenting the awards separately via the online broadcasting platform YouTube. It was equal parts exciting and gratifying - finally there was a correlation of data and pooled knowledge that presented to us, the enthusiasts, the answers to our questions. But more importantly, the awards were unlike the RDDA or the IWSC; the OSWA’s were not pay to play, pay to win or pay to receive any awards. There were no bottle submissions or entry fees, for the bottles that were submitted into the mix were ones that the “experts”, made up of genuine whisky exciters, had bought with their own money. There was no price to pay to collect awards - certificates and high-res files would be delivered free gratis.

There’s a lot to be said about an awards system built upon a foundation of almost incorruptible independence. If a vast group of independently seasoned, bleeding edge whisky drinkers, who are spending their own money on whisky that they have deemed worthy, are the ones compiling the good, bad and ugly of whisky, then out of that process must surely come awards that have legitimacy; have proper value? Because honesty and independence equals integrity - something that takes a long time to establish, and mere minutes to destroy. The 2021 OSWA’s was a resounding success, and established an integrity based awards programme the likes of which we’d never before seen.

That hard won, but deserved integrity, was to be under the microscope once more in November 2022, when the OSWA’s returned for the second annual awards ceremony, this time with Roy and Ralfy in the same room. And to be totally honest, I was apprehensive. It’s all good and well celebrating the best whiskies that we are enjoying as whisky enthusiasts, but what if these whisky awards become a copy/paste exercise in echo-chambering? If it’s the same people compiling the same categories, and shortlisting the bottles upon which the same public are voting upon, it could end up being an annual patting of backs. Even worse, what if the category shortlists consist of the very bottles that are chased, collected and coveted so much that the average whisky-goer can’t get a sniff of them?

It’s a difficult task, given that whisky, as a hobby, is generally accepted to have reached a new age of acquisition. People are buying more whisky than ever before to sit inside cupboards - the glass loch as Roy calls it - as a byproduct of fear of missing out, money making speculation or “future inheritance”. It’s why the panel of judges making up the OSWA’s must, by definition, be composed of people who actively avoid such behaviour - whose open bottle count reaches into the 90% of their entire stash. The buying public are not interested in how many bottles of unopened Springbank 15 the panel have in their vast collection, and the phrase “I’m excited to try it” has absolutely zero currency in the OSWA world. People want to know how Springbank 15 rates compared to the thousands of other bottles of whisky available to us, and that can only be done if the panel is opening and drinking hundreds of bottles of different whisky each year.

Speaking of which, the panel of the OSWA’s is made up of people whose job it is to present the whisky that they buy, drink and rate, to the public; enthusiasts with YouTube channels the sole reason for existing being to talk about, and opine on whisky. It makes absolute sense to get all these diverse people together and ask what they think is worthy of an award. They are, after all, one of the many sources for the buying public to discover what’s happening on the bleeding edge of whiskyville. The more the buying public finds their statements of what is good and bad matching their own experiences, the more the trust in their opinion builds and very soon a rather large group has formed, whose tastes and preferences are respected.

But hang on. If the same people are saying the same things to the same audience, it’s as problematic as paying to win an award surely? How can any new whisky appear if the loop is closed? Diversity of opinion is the answer to this problem - and for the 2022 awards the panel has been expanded to include not just a larger group of YouTube reviewers, but other mediums as well but crucially, opinions from all over the world. It’s a growing global conglomerate of highly opinionated whisky excited people, compiling their thoughts via a community based, transparent system of merit. If a whisky doesn’t deserve to be there, or if a distillery isn’t producing quality products or if a brand is acting in an opaque way, then it will be reflected in the decisions that this group of people make by default - because they are operating from the perspective of the buying public.

And so we reach the big event, and a reveal of how the whisky enthusiasts are spending their money, but also how the whisky buying public is feeling about the way Scotch whisky is moving right now - will there be some usurpers or will it be business as usual? Well it was a bit of both, and despite some obvious winners (Springbank, deservedly so even if stoking the great fire of fervency for their products - catch 22), there were a few keen new entrants taking some of the kudos. The big award though - the Best Scotch Whisky 2022 - was awarded to Glen Scotia Victoriana, and I almost performed a standing ovation in my living room, because it’s so very well deserved. It reinforces the opinion I’ve always held since I was able to hold an opinion, that a great something is a great something, regardless of anything. I’ve never understood the stance that whisky can only be considered worthy of attention or respect if it has numerals on the bottle - it’s short sighted and stupid. If a whisky tastes and smells incredible, then that’s the truth. That the Victoriana doesn’t feature a statement of age is, for me, irrelevant. Whisky should excite the mind and soul, above all else, and Glen Scotia Victoriana brings the goods with aplomb.

An OSWA Success?

The legitimacy of an awards programme is entirely dependent upon the ability for that awards body to reflect the sentiment of the community around which that awards programme is formed, without any evidence of incongruity. It has to operate in complete disconnect with anyone inside that industry, without prejudice, with maximum inclusion and zero political intrusions. It has to reward the people, distilleries, brands and communities that are resonating in the here and now, whilst avoiding repetition, stagnation or, the hottest of potatoes, any indication of bias. It has to have integrity, not just in the awards themselves, but in the way that it’s presented; the interaction with both the viewing, onlooking public and the recipients of these awards too. Honesty and independence equals integrity, remember - something that takes a long time to establish, and mere minutes to destroy. The awards would be vaporised in an instant if, in the course of presenting these awards, the hosts said or intimated something that gave us the merest inkling that anything other than the aforementioned requirements were strictly adhered to. Luckily for the OSWA’s, it’s being chaired by two of the most principled whisky exciters known to humankind.

Case in point - when it was announced that Compass Box Orchard House won best Blended Malt 2022, and Roy poured himself and Ralfy a dram of said winning Orchard House in celebration, that after a few beats he must have realised the implication and subsequently clarified that it wasn’t product placement. Such is the fragility of what the OSWA’s are setting out to achieve that even the innocent, completely understandable act of reaching over to his hugely impressive library of whisky to grab an Orchard House - something that anyone who follows Aqvavitae would be familiar with (even expecting given his collection) - could be seen as bias. I doubt many would have noticed - but I did, and the lingering door of deceit creaked ajar; wide enough that, should someone have been opportunistic enough to dive through it, could have.

That Roy was so quick to clarify and snuff out any flame before it had chance to catch, showed how switched on he is to the fragility - every spinning plate, every connotation and nuance of what the OSWA’s are, as a platform, have been fully considered and understood. It cemented my trust and faith in him, alongside the jovial, chill-filtered commander-in-chief Ralfy, to lead this most perilous of endeavours onwards. Surgical precision of procedure. That the recipients of each award were so genuinely thrilled to be recognised through this awards system was indication enough that the OSWA’s are legitimately valuable to both the distilleries and the enthusiasts alike.

I say often that the whisky community is one of the most welcoming, warm, friendly places I’ve orbited. It’s no surprise given that the focus of this industry is a product that inherently makes people happy by force of chemistry and romanticism. Opportunists will always try to monetise or leverage the goodwill of supporters in an industry, and in doing so inadvertently turn those enthusiasts off from it. The more money that’s being punted about the place, the more opportunists flock to the scene with glowing hands and Cheshire cat grins, and whisky is certainly rife with fake-news casks buying schemes, NFT’s and auctioneers bullying their way around the place. Awards can easily fall to monetisation - it takes a lot of time, money and effort to create, run, manage and present such a viciously precarious event. It falls then, with an unexpected relief, to people like Roy and Ralfy to hold that burning chalice, alongside the stoicism of distilleries like Springbank, Ardnamurchan, Isle of Raasay, Daftmill and other flashpoints of fervent speculators, to push back against the cynicism, ill-will and misjudgement of the many, in order to redress the balance of fun, life-affirmation and community spirit for the few that make this industry so bloody wonderful.

I think the OSWA’s have been a roaring success, bringing the vast whisky community together and allowing us all to share in a genuine thrill of independent recognition, through deserved awards for the people we champion in the industry. It’s the format that all awards should follow, in all industries. That it’s very rarely witnessed, or that it’s even surprising to see an awards system based upon an independent process, is an indictment of our willingness to place so much trust and value in any old shiny-stickered award that has no foundation in actual merit. 

You’ve done good, Roy and Ralfy. Long may you lead the way, and quick should others follow, if they know what’s good for them. To next year then, and with it some more surprises.

Score: 10/10 DC

Other opinions on this:

Got a link to a reliable review? Tell us.