Is drinking whisky a creative process?

Yes, like you I certainly see the formulation and the expressions of the perceptions obtained during whisky nosing and drinking to be a mentally creative activity. For me it is certain that we create (with reference to the collective linguistic conventions in which we participate) the ideational constructs by which we describe our sensory experiences. For expressive mental constructs some people like visual images, some auditory analogies, some kinesthetic descriptions ("it tasted like a bracing sea breeze" or "it felt like a warm hug"), some a combination of these and other sensory analogues, and some might use totally abstract comparisons ("This whisky exhibited the perfect balance of an elegant mathematical proof"). Yep, it's an infinite creative universe, and we are all located at gound zero.

Like you I often tend to like to use musical analogies.

To call it art? Well, I guess that is in the eye of the beholder as to how artistic the resulting description is.

I agree with you that drinking whisky is a creative process when approached with a mindfulness, a curiosity, an enthusiasm and a willingness to be open to whatever emerges. One is tapping into the creativity of many others who have brought the whisky to the table. One enters into the continuing, emerging creative process by choosing to take a dram…and the dram one chooses. For me, the “art” in the tasting process comes in the verbal or written descriptions of one’s experience. There is also an art to introducing others to whisky and its seemingly infinite expressions.

Connsro.com is a delight because of the many artful expressions of its members (“I laughed. I cried. It was better than “Cats”…but, anything is better than “Cats”.) There is passion at work in people’s posts and isn’t that at the root of any true art?

I think the answer largely depends on one's philosophy (whether they've thought about it or not). The phenomenologist would argue that since life itself is an "unfolding" the process of drinking is absolutely a creative process. He would further argue that whisky in the bottle is effectively meaningless. It only gains meaning through the drinking process.

The realist on the other hand that the bottle and its contents are effectively immune to any interpretation. The whisky tastes like what it tastes like, and the experiential differences are merely a shortcoming of the faculties of the taster.

I admit that I am generally speaking a realist (even though it's not been in vogue for at least 400 years). The fact that someone experiences, say, marzipan and I don't is merely a shortcoming of my taste or a lie perpetrated by the taster who found it there. Don't let this lead you to believe that I consider tasting a boring repetitive process. Mood, state of mind, environment may all affect any single tasting, and that is the beauty of being a consumer of the finer things in life. It's always different even though it's always the same.