"I like the taste of cheap Japanese blended "scotch" more than any $500 bottle of 23 year old from the highlands."
Really? I've found whisky unique in regards that its price correlate with quality quite uniformly as opposed to majority of other products (wine and cheese comes to mind first). At least to the medium price range (~500$), can't comment about high end whisky as I haven't tried a bottle of 10000$ or similar[0].