Jim Murray has long been a trailblazer. He has been a professional writer his entire career – he even earned money as a sports reporter while still at school – and in 1992 gave up his life as a Fleet Street national newspaper journalist to become the world’s first full time whisky writer. That was in the days before whisky shows, whisky tourism, whisky magazines and whiskymania. Having visited his first distillery in 1975 he had spent 17 years learning all he could about the subject before boldly going where no writer had gone before.