Ardbeg Uigeadail has been my wife’s gold standard for judging a whisky since I met her. Everything she pours she compares, whether conscious or not, to how she remembers Uigaedail, or at least the feeling that the whisky gives her.

We all have formative, seminal pours, the whiskies against which we measure everything else afterward. Some may become things we enjoy regularly, like my wife and her Uigaedail, others are once in a lifetime drams that just stick with us. We’re constantly comparing and measuring new experiences against old ones. Instinctually we create idealized versions of whiskies and experiences based on the aspects that pleased us, while forgetting, or editing away, the parts that did not.

Such is love.

Ardbeg was there very early on when my wife and I began dating. Our first date was stouts and burgers, then hiking, wine and pasta, more hiking… eventually we progressed to the stage when it was time to start meeting each other’s friends. It’s a big step that, it’s really the beginning of trodding into a new world and discovering more about the world in which this other delightful person lives. It was also a chance for my future wife to share what she considered to be proper whisky.

I wish I could tell you that my first experience with Uigeadail was love at first sight. It was not. There was no spark when I first sipped Uigeadail. The only fire was the one that burned across my taste buds and left an acrid wasteland that was radically different from all of the other whiskies I had been drinking (shout out to Jameson Black Barrel, my idea of a smokey whisky at the time).

My future wife had invited me to join her, a co-w0rker, and one of her best friends at an Irish Bar for after work drink. I duly agreed knowing this was also an interview I needed to pass.

At the bar, I took in the extensive whisky list while we chatted and had no idea what to order. In hindsight the list was not that extensive at all, but my scotch experience at that point was Johnnie Walker Red Label (I honestly couldn’t imagine that red was the worst… I should have paid more attention to the prices). I had a bottle of that sitting on top of my fridge few years while the bottles of Irish whisky and vodka changed regularly (and I still have that bottle of Red).

My wife already knew her order: Ardbeg Uigeadail.

She once explained that a proper whisky, like a proper black coffee, should rough you up a bit. She held that the bitter or acrid flavors were part of the experience: the bitterness of the black coffee woke you up right away, the acrid smoke of the whisky reminded you that you were alive. The way she put it was simple: a good whisky you punch you in the face the first time.

I said I would have what she was having when they took our order. I figured if she spoke so highly of the whisky, then surely it would be great. I should have thought more about what it meant that a double black belt in two different martial arts was comparing the quality of the whisky to a punch in the face.

I nearly lost the whisky on the first sip.

I choked down muffled coughs as my throat burned, not wanting to let on just how much of a punch in the face the whisky had in fact delivered. I had no experience with peat, and no experience with high proof whiskies. I managed the rest of the glass, but wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into. This was not whisky love at first sip. Why was it so burnt? Why was my tongue and throat now burnt? Why in the world would anyone drink this?

The one thing I did not question was how much I adored my future wife. Though I did wonder about her taste in whiskies if that was the sort of thing she enjoyed.

That was all many years ago. My preferences have changed a lot, and so has the depth of my experience with whisky. I did discover a love of peat eventually, though it was not Ardbeg that brought that about, it was the Laphroaig Quarter Cask and a sharing a dram with my wife’s family over a beef stew.

I am still not the biggest Ardbeg fan, so take all my reviews of Ardbeg with a grain of salt, a bit of the brine you might find on the classic Ardbeg 10 Year. My wife counts herself as a massive fan of Ledaig these days, but she remains fond of Ardbeg, especially the Uigeadail, She still keeps an emergency bottle stashed on her desk at home- the final comfort blanket when you need a wee dram to decompress at the end of a long and stressful workday.

Artwork this week is my own: I was aiming for something like a movie poster, but I think trying to do it on a landscape ratio was probably not the right call. The green character is a peat monster, engaged in combat with the Platypus, my wife’s spirit animal. The Turnip and his cat consult with a hairy coo, perhaps trying to find the way to Arbeg.