Any body who pretends to know SCOTCH is a liar. OK sure there’s somebody somewhere, mostly in Scotland. But you’re not going to meet him. There is just too much to know. And pretending to know gets real expensive, real fast. There are 5 major regions; there are blends and single malts; there is history, meaning at one point they were all independent, but now for the most part they have all been bought up by large consortiums who have seen fit to use some as blending stock and others as stars. Plus scotch in Scotland is only marginally like scotch in America. You have much available through retailers in the Scottish cities who are licensed to blend their own barrels they get from major distillers. If you ever have a chance to try this do it. Not because you’ll get better stuff, but because you will find out what it takes to make a decent, let along stunning, bottle of scotch. A place just south of High Street in Edinburgh, on Guthrie I think, comes to mind.
What makes scotch scotch is the peat fire used to dry the malted barley. That and the local water. Scotch is aged in used Amercian bourbon barrels or port/sherry/???? barrels so the grains and peat come through more clearly. [Note: Irish and Canadian also use old American barrels for their aging. And so they all are missing that harsh new oak barrel edge that American whiskies have. ]
Again, surf the websites and thumb through books - find a guide. Then go to your local bar and start tasting shots. Research is important here in that scotch will run $25 a bottle more than a comparable American whiskey. [Though the outburst of small American whiskey micro-distillers has narrowed that gap significantly in just the past few years.]
I recommend you start with a blend - Buchanan's 12 year, or Teacher's, or Johnnie Walker Gold, or Black Bottle. Live with it for a while. If you can get 2 of these even better. Begin to notice the differences. Once you begin to notice what aspects you enjoy most, and there are dozens in scotch, you can go to a soid retailer or bar and begin pin pointing single malts that emphasize those aspects. But for all the hype about single malts, the blends are what made Scotch scotch. Their taste is more subdued; they work better in mixed drinks; and they appeal to a broader range of palates. You can live your live without single malts and still have a shot at heaven. Unless of course you come to love scotch, in which case you are condemned to one of the growing circles of hell. [For more on this ring of hell, locate the Michel Couvreur. A Frenchmen who buys barrels of scotch, in turn blends and barrel ages them himself. A most unusual practice and a most unusual product. He has a couple out at any one time].
The Irish story is as sad to tell as tales of the troubles. A once proud distilling tradition is a shadow of its former self. All Irish is produced by 4 major distillers: Midleton, Old Bushmills, Cooleys, and the recently opened Kilbeggan. A handful of independents sprinkle the landscape. Irish is Scotch with out the peat, though Connemarra makes a peated Irish. This is not to belittle the Irish - do that at your own risk. In fact, it is a logical step to move from Blended Scotch, to Irish, to Single Malt Scotch. Without the peat the Irish is a smoother drinking whiskey than scotch. And Irish again seems to be on the rise.
The region of Scotland is in brackets. As you can see I lean toward Islay and Speyside. Not to say that Lowland [typically the home of blending scotch] and Campbelltown [the old capital of scotch] don't have offerings worthy of inquiry. In fact, there is no reason Rosebank [Lowland] and Springbank [Campbelltown] couldn't be on this list as 1's.