Categorie: Tasting Ledger
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Back in time: Port Ellen 22 years old RMS Islay malt In our periodical series in which we highlight expressions in the Rare Malts Selection, we aimed at getting a Port Ellen story in place for the Port Ellen Day of Feis Ile. Call me an old man, but I still have to get used…
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A sunny day with Caol Ila 1972 and Bruichladdich 2004 We continue our (digital) celebration of the Feis Ile festival on Islay, that is going into its third day today. Bruichladdich Day has traditionally been one of the more popular festival days, while I have the best memories of celebrating at Caol Ila Distillery. In…
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While we wait for resurrection: a Waterford trio The news hit many of us hard at the end of 2024, when it was announced that Waterford Distillery in Ireland had gone belly-up. Perhaps the most Scottish of all Irish distilleries, I know Waterford had a lot of fans who normally not venture into what the…
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A successful Kilkerran 8 years old bourbon matured The Campbeltown Malts Festival is well underway, but this is also our monthly regular Campbeltown Wednesday and we taste a new expression. The Kilkerran 8 years old bottlings are making quite some waves among enthusiasts. I have started buying the yearly expressions myself too, as they are…
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Make Longrow Great Again! Some musings and tastings The Campbeltown Malts Festival has begun and I know this will delight many of my whisky drinking friends. In fact, I know quite a few who slept with the complete itinerary of the festival under their pillow ever since it came out late January. More power to…
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Raise your hand for Wagging Finger whisky! Wagging Finger is a small operation in the east of The Netherlands, in the beautiful old city of Deventer. The (micro) distillery started some ten years ago, and at that point I was still active as writer for the Dutch club whisky magazine De Kiln. Together with the…
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Dalmunach from octave casks: do we need that? Today is not so much about Dalmunach, which is for little under a decade now the workhorse distillery of Chivas/Pernod Ricard. The stamp on the tasting note of today is created by independent bottler Duncan Taylor. They have released no less than 64 expressions of Dalmunach that…
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A crazy Ledaig (and/or Tobermory?) bonanza There are enough distilleries in Scotland that produce unpeated and peated batches of whisky. At some places, this feels totally natural. On the Isle of Mull, such a practise is in use at the Tobermory Distillery. Their unpeated production is presented under the name of the distillery, and the…
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Embracing the soapy whisky in Blended Scotch Living Souls is a new bottler from Glasgow that has launched some interesting new products on the market. In a heavily saturated whisky spectrum, the odd ones stand out, and the 40 year old Blended Scotch by Living Souls that landed on my desk last month, could well…
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Highland Park 12 years old: return to normalcy? When famous whisky writer Michael Jackson used the words “the greatest all-rounder in the world of whisky”, or words to that effect, I believe he describe specifically the Highland Park 18 years old. And no one would dare correct him, because it was very true in those…