Clynelish 14 - Honey, Heather and a hint of Sea Air

An author friend was kind enough to bring a bottle of the Clynelish 14-year-old single malt to the annual Solstice party my wife and I host. He was even kinder to leave it behind for people to continue sampling when he and his wife had to head for home.

The bottle did survive the night, but with rave reviews. I couldn't resist stealing an extra dram from it to write this review before returning the bottle,

The Clynelish Distillery (now owned by Diageo) has an interesting history: while there has been a Clynelish Distillery for hundreds of years (since 1819 in fact), this Clynelish Distillery was built in 1968 across the street from the original. The original simply didn't have the capacity to keep up with demand, so they copied the stills and built a new facility with more of them. You can find a full rundown of the history at the Malt Madness entry on Clynelish.

Clynelish hails from the northern highland coast of Scotland, in the same general region as Old Pulteney.

Compared to the Old Pulteney 12, the Clynelish is a lighter, more nuanced dram.

Clynelish 14 has a lovely golden color. The nose is honey and heather and salty sea air and a whiff of smoke. For me water, doesn't change the nose much.

This a wonderful whisky, with just enough complexity to keep it interesting. Just a little bit of water, and it's easy to over do it, and you're sipping spicy honey, The taste starts off sweet, jumps to a mildly spice pepper pop and then fades to a lovely, happy glow of pepper and honey and just a tiny bit of peat smoke on your tongue. And I do mean a tiny bit of peat - I have to concentrate to pick it out. The mouthfeel is medium-heavy - more weighty than you'd expect.

Clynlish 14 is a excellent sipping whisky: a perfect companion for good conversation, a game of cards, or a night reading by the fire. At $50 a bottle in the US, it's not even too dear a dram. Highly recommended.

Hirsch Small Batch Reserve Bourbon - Tasty, and Gone

Hirsch Small Batch Reserve Bourbon 

(image courtesy of Anchor Distilling)[

The long and short of it is this: I bought my bottle of Hirsch Small Batch Reserve Bourbon about two weeks ago. I'll be replacing it next week.

Please note that I did have some help from my friends.

This is an amazingly balanced bourbon. The nose is soft and sweet. It has a medium heavy creamy mouthfeel. The flavor starts with vanilla and honey and touch of caramel, then some rye spice shows up to give it little pop, and it finishes with some pleasant oaky notes. It's bottled at 92 proof (46% abv), and while it's fine with a few drops of water, I actually prefer it neat. It sips easily...oh, so easily.

According to the label, it's blended in small batches from selected barrels of 4- to 6-year-old bourbon. Given that the flavor is less predominately sweet than Weller Antique Reserve, but not as rye spicy as Blanton's, I'm guessing that it is a low rye grain bill.

Whatever the actual grain percentage in the mash bill, the master distiller (whomever they are) blending this whiskey is doing a fantastic job. The result is well worth price - about $35 a bottle in the US as I write this.

And that's what you should focus on. Because everything about this bourbon is concealed by more than the normal amount of marketing twaddle and historical appropriation that is depressingly common in the US bourbon market.

For certain, this is distributed by Anchor Distilling, which is a subsidiary of Anchor Brewing out of San Francisco. But Anchor doesn't distill, age or blend this.

It's bottled by "Hirsch Distillers" in Bardstown, Kentucky. Who are they? Well, no relation to the A. H. Hirsch, the semi famous distillery owner and liquor executive, whom I assume is now dead (if alive, he'd be 106). And this whiskey has no relation to the famous, and now grossly expensive, A. H. Hirsch bourbon whiskey derived from 400 forgotten barrels starting in the 1980s. In fact, if you read the label carefully, it says in small print: "Inspired by the quality of A. H. Hirsch."

The best guess on the internet seems to be that Hirsch Distilling is another camouflage group for Kentucky Bourbon Distillers, aka KBD, aka Willette. And even then, there's no hint to who actually distilled it, although the Heaven Hill Distillery which has provided a lot of KBD distilling over the years, is as good a guess as any.

Which, of course, means that the master distiller, whose taste buds are the key to this blend, also remains anonymous.

But, does it matter? If the drink in your glass is excellent, do you care that you don't know exactly what company distilled, aged and blended it?

I'm torn. On the one hand, part of the fun of single malt scotch is tale of the distillery and the amount of peat used to dry the malted barley, and the aging and so on. On the other hand, the liquid in the glass has to stand on its own: no amount of history and whisky wonky details can make a bad dram good.

This is a good dram, and well worth the price, in my opinion. I'll buy it again, despite its lack of real history.

Glen Ord 12 - Damned by Diageo

Look carefully upon that bottle, and that precious bit of whisky it still holds, as you may never see it's like again.

At least not in the US, Europe, Africa, South America, Antarctica and most of Asia.

I rarely swear at the computer screen while writing these reviews. After all, I'm drinking good whisky - that generally translates into a good mood.

But, as I was reacquainting myself with this old bottle of Glen Ord I unearthed from the back of liquor closet, sighing happily with each sip, I found myself damning those black hearted bastards at Diageo with vehemence I would normally reserve for some worthless, slack-jawed, jackass who just cut me off in traffic.

Those f$%#!!'s took my whisky away.

Yes, those blackguards at Diageo, the monstrous conglomerate that owns Glen Ord and several other distilleries, including Lagavulin and so help me God they'd better not pull this crap with that single malt, have ended the distillery editions of  Glen Ord. The whisky barely continues as a single malt as "The Singleton of Glen Ord" in 12- and 15-year-old expressions, but only at the distillery itself, and in Japan.

The other approximately 6.96 billion of us are S-O-L (shit outta luck).

If you look really hard (say, at the Whisky Exchange site in the UK) you might find a retailer with a small hoard some old stock of the Glen Ord 12-year-old.  That bottle will cost about $100 before shipping, which is a damn sight more than my old bottle cost me back in the day.

The rest of the distillery's production presumably goes into blended Scotches, for example, the various Johnny Walker blends (also owned by Diageo). I hope not too much of it ends up in Johnny Walker Red, as that would be a mighty sin.

And what makes this so sad is that this is a really excellent whisky. Glen Ord is a sherry cask aged Highland whisky. While it is similar to the Macallan and Glen Farclas whiskies I have previously reviewed, it does have a different character.

The Glen Ord 12 (RIP) was bottled at 80 proof (40% abv), which is pretty much at sipping strength. I prefer it with a small (very small) splash of water, as that opens up the aromas and flavor for me.

The aroma is sweet sherry with heather notes with a slight subtle hint of smoke. The spirit has a lovely amber color with a tinge of red.

"I shine, not burn" is the motto on the bottle, and that's exactly how it drinks. It start out with smooth sweetness of sherry, heather and honey. About midway through, some fire, a little spice and a suggestion of smoke that rapidly disappears enter the flavor mix. It all fades pleasantly away, leaving your fast buds demanding more.

Is it worth $100 and international shipping costs? That's a tough call. I easily like it as much as the Macallan 12, probably a little bit more. But $40 plus more? Damn Diageo for making me have to think about that.

If you are traveling, and do get a chance to taste the Glen Ord 12, then I recommend you leap at it. Because if you're one of the S-O-L 6.96 billion, it might be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

(PS - let me know if you're going to be visiting the Glen Ord distillery. I might need a care package.)

Angel's Envy Bourbon - The Curse of the Ever Empty Bottle

As far as I can tell, the natural state of a bottle of Angel's Envy Bourbon is as pictured above: drained empty by your friends.

And if you have no interest in reading the next 600+words, here's the review in a nutshell: it's wonderful stuff, you owe it to yourself to give it a try, and it's earned a permanent place on my bar, if I can figure out a way to keep a bottle around for more than a week after opening it. It'll set you back about $50, and it's worth every penny.

I recommended this as part of my last minute 2013 gift guide, but didn't do a full review. Several weeks later I discovered that the local ABC stores had started carrying it, and picked up another bottle to share with friends at the monthly First Friday art walk at City Market Studios and Gallery.

That bottle did not survive the night.

After almost two years of whisky on First Friday, it stands out as the only bottle I did not get to finish at home.

But that left me with 1 bottle, so all was good. And then I took that bottle, still unopened, to share at a whisky tasting at Mysticon in Virginia.

It survived the tasting, but with barely enough nectar left to provide for this review. And now that bottle is now empty as well, and I am sad.

Angel's Envy is truly special. It shows what a master craftsman can do when they set out to create something special. In this case, it was master distiller Lincoln Henderson (recently deceased), who helped birth Woodford Reserve, creating a special whiskey to help his son break into the whiskey business.

Everything about the base bourbon, from the grain bill (72% corn, 18% rye, 10% malt), to the yeast, to the distillation process to the use of charcoal filtering instead of chill filtering, to where in the warehouse (top rack) the whiskey is aged, and for how long, is designed to create a spirit that will blend well with the flavors that come from being partially aged in a used ruby red port barrel.

And that's how most of what's in an Angel's Envy bottle gets there: distillation, aging in a charred oak barrel for 4-6 years, and then a further 6 months or more in a port barrel shipped over from Portugal. However, reading the marketing materials on the Angel's Envy website, I discovered another interesting tidbit: some of the whiskey apparently goes straight into port barrels after distilling, and then is blended back in with the oak aged bourbon at some point in the process.

Of interest to whiskey geeks - these materials also claim that bourbon ages quicker than scotch due to warmer climate of the US and the use new charred barrels (the scots tend to age in used barrels, commonly, bourbon).

And now onto the whiskey itself.

Angel's Envy is a lovely golden liquid. Bottled at 86.6 proof (43.3% abv), it's is medium heavy when sipped neat, which is generally how I drink it.

The aroma is an enticing blend of honey, oak and sweet port. And then there's the flavor.

Smooth and sweet and subtle straight from the bottle, with a surprisingly mild alcohol bite. The flavor starts with the honey sweetness and touch of rye spice familiar to all bourbon drinkers, but then you realize the ruby port flavors slipped in at some point, and you're not sure when, and your tongue doesn't care, it just wants more.

This a far different experience than the distinct oak pop! at the end of the Woodford Reserve Double Oaked. These flavors blend seamlessly, much more in the style of a good single malt scotch, with everything singing in harmony across your taste receptors.

And this, of course, is why you never have any around. It tastes so damn good and sips so damn easy that your friends just can't help themselves.

This is an easy recommendation. If you find it, buy it. Give it as a gift. Get your friends hooked on it. That way you can help empty their bottles when you visit them.

Because your bottle will never last long.

(PS - This is another bottle that your artsy friends will hound you for, even after it's empty.)

 

Aberlour a'bunadh - Richly Flavored Throwback

 

Aberlour a'bunadh is a cask strength  - my bottle weighs in at 119.8 proof (59.9% abv) - single malt scotch from the Speyside region of Scotland. It's aged in used Spanish Oloroso sherry casks, which adds distinctive flavor and color to the whisky. Aberlour boasts that a'bunadh is produced and bottled without modern falderal such a chill-filtering for clarity or watering down to lower, sipping proof (usually between 80-86 proof).

It's released in small batches, in a bottle style that was distinctive when it was introduced, but that has been successful enough that Aberlour has switched its two other standard distillery expressions, the 12- and the 16-year-old to the same style bottle.

The bottle carries no age statement.

It's irrelevant. The whisky is awesome.

It has a lovely burgundy color, and, when cut with some water, a wonderful aroma of sherry and malt with just a hnt of allspice. With the right amount of water, it has a medium heavy mouthfeel, and rich sherry flavors blending with malt sweetness, with some spicy hints along the way, especially in the medium long finish.

One of the fun parts of drinking cask strength whisky is figuring out just how much water to add bring out the maximum flavor and gentle the alcohol burn without diluting it too much. Some folks claim they can drink cask strength whisky neat and not miss anything ... to each their own. I'm part of the greater mass of folks who generally need some water to make the cask strength stuff sing.

For me, a'bunadh hits its sweet speed when I cut it with about 25% water...put another way, 4 parts a'bunadh, 1 part water in the glass, swirl it around, and then send your tongue to heaven.

a'bunadh will set you back about $75 - $90 a bottle in the US, so it's not a cheap dram. But if you like your whisky sweet and rich with lots of sherry flavor, you should avail yourself if you can manage to fit it into your budget at all.

This, naturally, brings up a comparison to the Macallan Cask Strength that I reviewed last year. It's a tough call, but I think I give the edge, by a small margin, to the a'bunadh. I feel confident in saying that if you like one, you'll probably like the other.

On a more practical note, a'bunadh has pretty wide distribution, at least in the US, and may be easier to find than the  Macallan Cask Strength.

Highly recommended, and, incidentally, a great gift for the single malt fanciers on your birthday and holiday lists.

Elijah Craig 18-Year-Old Single Barrel - Worth the Wait if You Can Find It

 

So what do you get when you leave good bourbon in charred oak barrel in the back of a Kentucky warehouse until it's old enough to vote?

You get a bourbon that is luscious, smooth, gorgeous and all around wonderful. And, if a warehouse fire interrupts the supply chain, you apparently get to wait until 2018 or so until they bottle it again (hat tip to Chuck Cowdery and commenters for that tidbit).

Which means, alas, the Elijah Craig 18-Year-Old Single Barrel (ECSB 18 for short) is in exceedingly short supply. I see it listed online for $60 a bottle, but no one has stock. Back in the day, it was a $40 a bottle..but if you're a bourbon fancier and you spot a bottle in liquor store somewhere, it'll be worth the $60.

(Side note - Heaven Hill, the folks who make the Elijah Craig bourbons, have been putting out extremely limited editions of 20- and 21-year-old Elijah Craig Single Barrel in similar looking bottles, for increasingly much  higher prices, to sort of fill the gap.)

So, what would you get for your $60, should you find one of these rare bottles on a store shelf?

The short answer is one of the top 3 bourbons I've ever had.

The long answer is a richly colored reddish brown bourbon, with a subtle aroma of oak and honey with a dash of maple syrup.

In the mouth it has a nice weight to it, heavy without being oily. The flavors come on smoothly, and blend together so seamlessly it can be hard to distinguish them. I taste some rich honey, followed by oak and rye spiciness that fades pleasantly to alternating sweet and spicy notes and then to a faint, lingering, happiness of the taste buds.

As a straight bourbon whiskey, ECSB 18's grain bill is at least 51% corn. The "flavoring" grain is definitely rye ( as opposed to wheat - see my review of Old Weller Antique Reserve) which provides a nice counterpoint to the corn's sweetness. It is, by all accounts I can find, a low rye recipe, which limits the amount of rye bite in the final flavor.

For the record, the third grain in bourbon is barley, which provides important enzymes and mouthfeel to the whiskey, but whose flavor contributions are apparently greatly outweighed by the corn and rye/wheat, even when the barley amount exceeds the rye/wheat amount.

As a single barrel whiskey, each bottle of ECSB 18 comes from one and only one barrel.  This is different from most whiskies, which are bottled from the contents of tens or hundreds of barrels being mixed together to create the distillery's signature flavor.

As a result, some bottle-to-bottle variation is to be expected if you manage to procure bottles from different barrels. That variation will be bounded by the tastes of the master distiller selecting the barrels, but there will likely be more variation than with whiskies bottle from mixed barrels.

ECSB 18 is bottled at 90 proof (45% abv) - which means it's been watered down some from cask strength (probably closer to 110 -120 proof). It drinks nicely neat, but I prefer it with just a little water added.

It's going to be hard making this bottle last until 2018...

Which brings me to a closing note: that bottle. That lovely unique, antique style bottle with the intricate designs, which is guaranteed to have all your crafty or artistic friends asking you just what you're planning to do with it when you finish the whiskey inside. It's gorgeous, and the whiskey inside is every bit as good.

The Whisky Advent Calendar - Plan to Give it

 

 

This was my most excellent early Christmas present from my wife. Why am I only reviewing it now?

I had to finish it first. With parties and travel, I didn't get through all 24 days until after Christmas.

I'll jump right to the heart of the matter: when you plunk down your $247 + shipping (and they do ship to the US) for the Whisky Advent Calendar, do you get gift value commensurate to your coin?

My answer, is yes. I got 24 days of whisky discovery, a chance to sample products from more than 20 distilleries in 5 countries. The selection was mostly single malt scotch (13 of the 24 days) with the balance filled in with, blended scotches (3), bourbons (3), American malt whisky (1, from Texas), Japanese malt whisky (1 single, 1 blend), a Swedish single malt, and an Irish single malt.

There were no bad drams. There were some that I didn't enjoy as much as the others, but that's going to be the case in any sampler package.

There were also some amazing whiskies in there. I'm now plotting to get ahold of a bottle of Glencadam - the 30ml sample of the 21-year-old in the calendar seduced my taste buds with amazingly complex flavors. And finishing the 2013 edition off with a dram of 40-year-old Glenfarclas was a master stroke - now I have another entry on my "List of things to buy when I win the lottery."

So, if you're looking for a gift for a whisky fancier that will put a smile on their face for most of the month of December, start saving your pennies now for the 2014 Edition of the Whisky Advent Calendar.

I'll also point out that Masters of Malt also offers several other boozy advent calendars: the Premium Whisky ( just north of $400) made of rarer drams, two variations of GInvent Calendars for the gin enthusiast, and a Rum Advent Calendar for the pirate in your life.

Zaya - Rum Good Enough to Drink Straight

 



 

Curveball - this week we're venturing into a place I rarely go: the world of rum.

As a younger man, I drank a fair amount of rum in a small variety of mixed drinks. As I aged and started drinking my spirits straight, or with a little water, rum became something I kept  on the bar for my friends who didn't like whiskey. It was a lonely bottle of either Ronrico or Bacardi, light, and lasted a long time, since it only got consumed by visitors.

Last year at our annual Solstice Party, though, a friend whose opinion on many things, including booze, I greatly respect, insisted I try a dram of this Zaya Grand Reserva dark rum he had brought.

With a little trepidation, I did. What a surprise.

It smelled of vanilla and caramel. It had a slightly heavy, but pleasant mouthfeel when taken neat.

And, oh my, the flavor. Sweet, so very sweet, with rich vanilla, caramel and chocolate notes. You can taste some alcohol, but there's almost no alcohol burn, which is simply stunning for an 80 proof (40% abv) spirit. It has a nice medium length finish, with maybe just a hint of oak towards the end.

Zaya Grand Reserva is a blended rum, made from a blend of different rums that have been aged in oak barrels for at least 12 years. It's also supposed to be quintuple distilled.

For those who have forgotten, rum is made from sugar cane. And while all drinking alcohol is produced by yeast eating sugar, the source of sugar the yeast consumes greatly affects the flavor of the alcohol created.

You could make mixed drinks with this, I guess, but stay away from mixing it with cola. Your tongue will go into a diabetic coma.

I recommend at least trying this as I take it: neat, at room temperature. It will have you seeing rum in a whole new light.

You can find this around the country, and even in North Carolina, for $30 - $35 a bottle, which is a decent price for an excellent 12-year-old spirit.

And, yes, my friend was kind enough to leave the bottle with me...

 

The Best Damn Rye - Willett Family Estate Single Barrel Rye, Rare Release

 

WIllet Family Estate Bottled Single Barrel Rye is simply the best rye whiskey I have tasted. All my whiskey-loving friends who like rye rave about it. Even those who don't like rye admit that it's the best rye they've ever had.

If you manage to find this, buy a bottle. It's not too pricey (around $35 a bottle in the US as I write this) and even if you don't like rye, it's a fantastic addition to your bar for your friends who do. It also makes an excellent gift to a rye whiskey drinker - I gave myself a bottle for my birthday, in fact. :-)

This is the whiskey that redeemed rye whiskey for me. My first taste of rye was horrid: astringent and unpleasant and completely off-putting. I was planning to give rye a complete miss, until a friend convinced me to try the Willet Family Estate Bottled Single Barrel Rye (hereafter referred to as Willett SBR).

That designation, detailed at length on the label, as a single barrel whiskey, makes this a rare bird in the marketplace. Most whiskies of all types (bourbon, scotch and so on) that are bottled are produced by mixing the contents of many, many barrels to produce the desired flavor and amount of product. This is necessary because different barrels of whiskey age differently, depending upon a host of factors, such as temperature, place in the warehouse, the wood of the barrel, variations in the quality of the grains in the mash and so on.

So, each individual barrel can have its own unique taste. However, successful branding requires a consistent product, and successful business minimizes waste.  So barrels are mixed to smooth out the variations and maximize utilization of the distilled spirit.

Willett SBR is one of a handful of whiskies on the market where the contents of the bottle came from a single barrel of whiskey: no mixing. Flavor consistency is maintained by the taste buds of the Master Distiller, which leads to an interesting phenomenon - WIllet SBR bottles don't carry a consistent age statement. I have bottles that were aged for 4 years, and bottles who had to spend another year in the cask to become "right".

This is also a cask-strength whiskey. The strength varies a little from cask-to-cask, but the bottles I've seen or drank have ranged from 109 proof to 116 proof ( 54.5% to 58% ABV).

In the glass, this has a rich reddish gold color. The aroma is of oak and alcohol and spice.

I occasionally sip this straight, which is frankly amazing for such a strong spirit, but I generally prefer it with a little water. That cuts the hefty alcohol content down and lets some of the other flavors come through.

WIllett SBR has a nice rich mouthfeel. I taste notes of mint and spice, maybe some oak, and a lovely sweetness that's not quite honey.

I think it's delightful. But rye, because of it's spicy notes, tends to divide folks more than a sweeter grain, such as barley, does when it is the primary ingredient in the mash. As an American Rye, WIllett SBR is legally required to have at least 51% of the mash grains be rye. I have found several places online claiming that the mash bill is actually 95% rye and 5% barley, but I haven't found what I consider to be an authoritative source for that information.

As I said at the beginning - if you can find it, buy it. If you don't like rye, buy it for your bar anyway. Trust me, you will find folks who do and will love you for introducing them to the Willet SBR.

Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select - Superb Bourbon

 

If you like bourbon, you owe it to yourself to give this one a try. It's both an excellent whiskey and and good value.

In fact, I'll cut to the chase. This is part of my top-flight bourbon quartet: 4 bourbons that stand above the rest . If you wish to give a bottle of bourbon as a gift to an aficionado, or want to stock your bar with a single top shelf bourbon, Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select is a can't miss choice.

Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select comes in old-fashion looking, flat-sided, almost rectangular bottles. The 375 ml bottle, as result, hits quite nicely in backpack pockets, jacket pockets, or even in the deep snap pockets of some cargo pants. The 750 ml bottle contrasts nicely with all the round bottles on my bar. The 1.75 L, on the other hand, looks a bit ridiculous.

The bottles carry no age statement, but do carry a bottle number and a batch number. Each batch consists of a number of different barrels blended together to achieve the Distiller's Select taste. If you're really, really, really, obsessively into taste consistency, you could try tracking down only bottles from the same batch. Given that the of the blending of the barrels will effectively smooth over the barrel-to-barrel differences, I doubt it's worth the effort.

The whiskey inside is a deep amber. It's 90.4 proof, which means it's been lowered from cask strength. The aroma is sweet and spicy, and the flavor, straight, is refreshing blend of the same. It sips smoothly straight, the alcohol fire tempered by the sweet and spicy down to a pleasant heat. It's got a nice medium body - not too thin on the tongue, not too heavy. The finish is pleasant, but not overly long.

Add a splash of water, (really, it only takes a little) and the aroma loses a little spice and gains more sweet and caramel notes. Likewise, more caramel and vanilla come out in the flavor, along with stronger hints of pepper. The oakiness recedes somewhat in the initial tasting, only to assert itself a little more strongly in the finish. The heat also turns down a notch to nicely warm.

This truly a smooth sipping whiskey. It's triple distilled, which is much more common for Irish whisky than bourbon, using scottish stills, another rarity in the bourbon industry. The extra bit of spice comes from the increased propoportion of rye in the grain bill (72% corn, 10% malt, and 18% rye, according to the Woodford Reserve website).

A 750 ml of this retails for about $30 - $35. Since the flavor matches well against other bourbons and scotches that sell for $40-$60 a bottle, I consider this to be a solid value.

It has a permanent home on my bar - as soon a bottle is finished, it's replaced.

For comparison, I like Woodford Reserve Distiller's Select more than the Old Weller Antique and Willett bourbon's I have already reviewed. It's just a bit smoother, a bit more complex flavor wise, a bit more polished, a bit more everything good to me.

Ardbeg Uigeadail - Pure Awesome

 

I'll cut to the chase. If you find a bottle of Ardbeg Uigeadail at a liquor store, buy it, and put it in your liquor cabinet. Or buy it, and send it to me. But buy it.

If you need to know more than that, read on ...

If I had to choose to only drink one whisky for the rest of my life, I'd go with Ardbeg Uigeadail (pronounced Oog-A-Dal). It's got an astonishingly rich, complex set of flavors that one can sip and savor for hours.

Despite being technically a single malt scotch- in other words, the product of a single scottish distillery where the grain bill consists of 100% barely malt, aged for at least 3 years in Scotland - Uigeadail is a testament to the art of vatting (marrying) different expressions to achieve something new and wonderful. It's also named after the lock (lake) that provides water to the Ardbeg distillery.

A brief aside, for context, is in order at this point. Ardbeg is an Islay scotch  - it hails from the Isle of Islay, off the southwestern coast of Scotland. Islay scotches are known for their peatiness, and Ardbeg is part of the monster peat triumvirate along the southeastern coast of Islay: Laphroig and Lagavulin are the other two. Other Islay scotches are peaty, but these three define the outer edge of peatiness.

Of further interest, is the modern history of Ardbeg. Once upon a time, the signature distillery bottling (at least in the US) was Ardbeg 17-year-old. However, the distillery was closed from 1981-1989, and open only 2 months a year for distilling from 1989-1996, and then closed again in 1996. It was bought by Glenmorangie in 1997 and slowly put back into full production.

The upshot of the production interruptions is that the standard Ardbeg expression available, at least in the US, became Ardbeg 10-year-old, and 17-year-old disappeared from the shelves. On a more speculative note, that production interruption and the resulting lack of stock may be part of the reason why the reborn Ardbeg has been so experimental, and why many of it's special expressions don't carry age statements.

Which wraps us back to Uigeadail. Ardbeg is traditionally aged in used bourbon barrels. Uigeadail is a mix of Ardbeg whisky aged in used sherry casks and Ardbeg whisky aged in used bourbon barrels. It's bottled pretty much at cask strength - 54.2% alcohol, 108.4 proof- and comes with no age statement.

And this is where the magic happens, The standard Ardbeg 10-year is a big, raw, brawling whisky that takes your tongue out to the woodshed and beats it into submission. And that's after being watered down to 92 proof for bottling, and likely more in you glass. It's a love it or hate it dram.

Uigeadail is a different beast. People who hate the standard Ardbeg find Uigeadail to be enchanting (based on actual experience serving the same set of folks both Ardbegs on consecutive nights).

The peat, the iodine, and the sea are still there, but the addition of the sherry-cask-aged spirit rounds them off with sweet notes and rich counterpoints. This is still an imposing dram, but instead of delivering a back-yard beat down to your taste buds, it simply sweeps them away into a another world of savory flavors dancing with sweet, smoke intertwining with sherry, and leaves them satiated, a little breathless, and yet still wanting another sip and another dance.

In the glass, Uigeadail is a dark red, amber. It promises depth, which it will deliver in spades.

Straight up - well I don't drink this straight up. I always add water, and a bit more than a splash, but never more than 25% of the whisky in the initial pour. Because when you add water, Uigeadail truly reveals its wonders.

For me. the nose (bouquet, aroma) is wonderful mix of peat and ocean water, blended with sherry notes.

In my mouth, Uigeadail feels rich and full and a touch oily (but not unpleasantly so). It has weight and presence - a hefty spirit, as opposed to a light one. To me, the flavors are tantalizing and stunningly balanced mix of peat, iodine, seawater, smoke, sweet sherry, and a hint of thick honey.

Uigeadail has a long, smokey, finish that lingers and lingers and lingers. You can easily savor it 15 minutes or more after finishing your dram.

Uigeadail runs $70 - $80 in the US, and is worth every penny. This has a permanent place of honor in my liquor cabinet.