If you had the formula to perfectly transform salt, citrus, the most delicate smoke imaginable, sharpbarley, more gristy barley, light vanilla, toasty vanilla, roasted hazelnut, thinned manuka honey, lavender honey, arbutus blossom and cherry blossom, light hickory, liquorice, and the softest demerera sugar into the aroma of a whisky, you still wouldn’t quite be able to recreate this perfection...;

t24 the sugars arrive: first gristy and malt-laden, then Demerara. This is followed by a salty, nerve-tingling journey of barley at varying intensity and then a slow but magnificently complete delivery of spice...; f24 those spices continue to buzz, the vanillas dovetail with the malt and the fruit displaying a puckering, lively intensity.

Ridiculously long fade for a malt so seemingly light, the salts and spices kiss the taste buds goodnight...; b24.5 by far and away one of the great whiskies of 2012, absolutely exploding from the glass with vitality, charisma and class. One of Scotland’s great undiscovered distilleries about to become discovered, I think... and rightly so! Tasting Notes

Second and third Whiskies of the World went to went to US bourbons George T. Stagg and Parker’s Heritage collection Wheated Mash Bill Bourbon Aged 10 years, respectively.

The most northerly distillery on mainland Britain and one of the more remote in Scotland has wins the coveted title of World Whisky of the Year in the 2012 edition of Jim Murray’s Whisky Bible.

This year Jim Murray (right) tasted over 1,200 new whiskies plus (understandably, Gaberlunzie feels) many more re-tastes for the latest edition of his best-selling annual whisky guide.

Pulteney distillery, which dates back to 1826, is located in the heart of Wick and much prized as a blending whisky but still relatively unknown as a single malt. Murray, who has long admired the Highland malt, hopes that will now change - though he is the first to admit that even he was surprised when he encountered the 21-year-old.

He said: “I was on the home straight after four months of continuous tasting. By that time I was pretty sure I knew what the winner was going to be. With what I still had to taste it needed something exceptional to knock the leader off its perch. That’s exactly what happened. To be honest, I was amazed. I knew the Old Pulteney 17-year-old was likely to be exceptional, and it was. However, I had never come across a Pulteney 21-year-old like it. Talk about coming out of left field….

“I first went to Pulteney nearly 25 years ago and I have never known them to produce anything other than top rate malt. Owned by a relatively small company, without the financial muscle of the major whisky barons to market their malts on the global stage, I hope that this award helps Pulteney to become better known around the world; that is the whole point of my Whisky Bible, after all.”