Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye is the 2016 World Whisky of the Year: How a demure Montreal lab worker created it

Jim Murray flew into Toronto the other day from Northamptonshire, England, to promote his new book, Jim Murray’s Whiskey Bible 2016. His reputation preceded him; a few days earlier he had anointed Crown Royal Northern Harvest Rye his 2016 World Whisky of the Year. The effect was immediate.

“We weren’t aware that this award was coming and it took us all by surprise,” says Alistair Kidd, marketing director for whisky at Diageo Canada. “We sold seven weeks of inventory in three days.”

In his “bible,” Murray, a purveyor of superlatives, links Northern Harvest Rye’s “natural beauty” to the tiny town on Lake Winnipeg where distillers brought the rye to life.

“Just a dozen miles from the remotest distillery of them all, Gimli, you can stand and listen to the ice crack with a clean, primeval crispness; a sound once heard by the very first hunters who ventured into these uncharted wastes,” he writes. “And hear a distant loon call its lonely, undulating, haunting song, its notes skudding for miles along the ice and vanishing into the snow which surrounds you.”

Murray likes to stoke controversy; last year he named Yamazaki Sherry Cask 2013, from Japan, his whisky of the year. Is he just trying to turn heads?

“Giving an award to a Canadian, people think there has to be some ulterior motive,” he says. “This is not random recognition. This had to kick a lot of fantastic whiskies out of the way to breast the tape. This is something where Canadians bow their heads and say, ‘We do that.’ ”

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