Whisky and Cheese

Our chosen event at the Spirit of Speyside festival, prior to heading home, was a whisky-cheese tasting. Basically we were matching 5 malts with 5 cheeses from the same area, quite an educational experience. Cheeses can match well with whiskies, some basic rules of thumb we found were:

Good matches: smoked cheeses with all but the lightest malts, and blue cheeses with the big Islays and Talisker.
Bad matches: soft cheeses with almost anything, except perhaps wood-finished malts like Port Wood Glenmorangie.
Worth investigating further: Cheddars and their ilk and Speysides.

The 5 malts tasted were:
1. Glenmorangie Port Wood finish
2. Dallas Dhu Signatory 23yo
3. Scapa 11yo limited bottling (non chill-filtered - nowhere near as nice as the standard Scapa expressions IMO)
4. Springbank NCsquared bottling - superb!
5. Isle of Arran 10yo

Springbank with smoked Mull of Kintyre mature cheese was excellent.