Monday 24 September 2012

Mortlach 18 yr old. The Wine Society, 2008 bottling. 55%

Another favourite distillery, this.

Nose: warm sherry and raisins.
Mouth: lots of sherry and dried fruit still, but nicely balanced with cleaner wood and barley.
Finish: long and warm.

A very good, well-balanced malt.

Sunday 23 September 2012

Glendronach single cask 1989 20 yrs old, cask no 3315, 53.2%

I believe they call this type of malt whisky a 'sherry monster'. And yes— it is. It's a very good one, too.

Besides sherry, there's black treacle, dried fruits, and sweet maltiness by the bucketload.

Right now, though, it's just a bit much— too rich, too intense, too filling. It doesn't help that I'm recently back from a holiday that involved way too much apple strudel, spent most of today indoors, and and had a big Sunday roast a few short hours ago. I think this would go down better in front of a log fire after a hearty-but-not-excessive supper, rounding off a long day of hiking across some bleak moorland somewhere in the frozen north.

Addendum:
In the mid-90s, the then-entry level Glendronach was one of the very first single malt whiskies I ever tried— perhaps the one that got me into malt whisky in the first place— and I've got a hankering to sample the current 12 year old to see if it brings those memories back (the label design, at least, looks very similar). I remember preferring it to the 15 year old that came out a little later, after the distillery was mothballed. Watch this space.