Glenallachie distillery visit (May 2023)
Having walked the woodland path to Glenallachie from Aberlour last year and hand-filled a bottle (an excellent 2012 finished in a Languedoc red wine cask), it was time for a more extensive experience of the distillery. Glenallachie offers a variety of tours – the Glenallachie Experience for £25, the Premium Experience for £35, and the…
The Glenlivet distillery visit (May 2023)
A year after our first visit to Speyside, we did the same road trip again, with a focus on different distilleries this time. The pre-booked events were a warehouse tasting at Deanston on the way up, a tour and tasting at Glenallachie, and a single cask tasting at the Glenlivet. I confess I ignored the…
Deanston 2002 Pinot Noir Finish (50%, OB 2019)
I always find Deanston to be a distillery with a distinctive character (current Master Blender Brendan McCarron identifies it as waxiness, I normally find a lot of ginger biscuits and honey in most Deanstons) that nevertheless remains a ‘chameleon malt’ of sorts, able to take all sorts of different maturations and finishes. This one has…
Deanston 13 (Distilled 2007, 65%, Signatory Cask Strength Collection 2020)
For a self-proclaimed Deanston fan, I haven’t reviewed any spectacular examples on this blog so far. Time to change that. This Deanston was matured for 13 years in a first-fill sherry butt, and bottled at an eye-watering 65% ABV. I first tried it in December 2020 in a tasting by the Blind Tasting Consortium. It…
Deanston Kentucky Cask Matured (40%, OB 2021)
The Deanston Kentucky Cask was a recent addition to the Deanston range – I believe it came out in 2020, or mabe late 2019. Deanston already have a budget-friendly no age statement bottle in the much-loved Virgin Oak, but the Kentucky Cask is aimed at a different share of the market: issued at 40% ABV…
Glen Grant 12 (48%, OB 2019)
It’s fashionable these days to dunk on Glen Grant, especially since a certain disgraced whisky reviewer declared the 18 year-old the best Scotch whisky a few years ago. Ralfy, for example, only gave 72 points to the 15 year-old Batch Strength, which can only mean he really hated it as he rarely scores anything less…
Speyside Road Trip Postlude: Aberfeldy
After the brief stop at the Arctic climes of Dalwhinnie, it was time for the planned activity of the day: a tour and tasting at Aberfeldy. I had booked the Connoisseurs’ Tour, which seemed good value at £26.50 (I see it’s now up to £30 – not sure if that’s permanent or whether it’s due…
Speyside Road Trip Bits and Pieces (Glenfiddich, Glenfarclas, Tormore, Dalwhinnie)
The bulk of the whisky-related activities of our final day in Speyside was all done by lunchtime (Glen Grant, Benriach and Glen Moray). Since most distilleries close to visitors between 4 and 5, we felt compelled to try and squeeze in as many as possible, so we drove from Elgin to Dufftown, where Glenfiddich, Balvenie,…
Speyside Road Trip Day 3, Part 3: Glen Moray
We arrived at Glen Moray already in a good mood after the great visits to Glen Grant and Benriach on the way. It’s a relatively big distillery that’s packed in a compact space in the town of Elgin, so we didn’t take any photos of the distillery buildings other than these picturesque casks because the…
Speyside Road Trip Day 3, Part 2: Benriach
The walk in the Glen Grant gardens was an ideal start to the day, so it was time for more distillery visits. For the sake of completion, we first dropped by the other distillery in town, Glenrothes. We knew that there’s no visitor centre or shop, so we just stopped to take this photo and…
Speyside Road Trip Day 3, Part 1: Glen Grant
Our last full day in Speyside was set aside for random distillery-hopping, and we decided to start it with an activity unrelated to whisky: walking in the expansive gardens of Glen Grant. The distillery is in Rothes, about 10 minutes’ drive from Aberlour. We made a brief stop at Macallan first since it was on…
Speyside Road Trip Day 2, Part 2: Knockdhu
My love affair with anCnoc has been an accelerated one: for one reason or another, I’d never tried one until I took part in an online tasting with distillery manager Gordon Bruce last month, even though I sort of knew they made my kind of whisky. There are no official tours at Knockdhu and no…
Speyside Road Trip Day 2, Part 1: Glenallachie & Strathisla
We walked from Aberlour to Glenallachie. Then we arrived at Glenallachie, look. I got a bottle there. And how about Strathisla. How about it. OK, so the above was just the template text I used while we were arranging the photos, but my wife remarked that it was an accurate and succinct description, so I…
Speyside Road Trip Day 1: Aberlour
The drive from Dundee to Aberlour was very pleasant overall. We decided to stick to the motorways on the East of Scotland, before turning West at Aberdeen. It took about two and a half hours including a stop, and we arrived with about half an hour to spare before my tasting at 2pm. The location…
Speyside Road Trip: The Preamble (Glengoyne, Deanston, Tullibardine)
After two previous visits to Scotland that were part of tagging along to various friends’ plans, my wife and I finally planned a Speyside trip that was exclusively whisky-related. It involved driving up from deepest mid-Hertfordshire to the town of Aberlour, with overnight stops in Moffat and Dundee along the way (the former to split…
Lagavulin 9 Game of Thrones (46%, OB 2019)
We all know about Diageo’s Game of Thrones range by now. Mostly repackaged NAS fare, it does however contain some interesting variants on distilleries’ standard expressions, of which the Lagavulin 9 year-old is an example. (the Clynelish is another, with a welcome high strength edition) After the success of the 8 year-old, a young Lagavulin…
Lagavulin 8 (48%, OB 2016)
The Lagavulin 8 year-old was initially a limited release to celebrate the distillery’s 200th anniversary in 2016. Predictably, it was hugely successful and soon became part of the core range. The bottle I’m reviewing here is from the original batches. One thing to notice straight away is the extremely light colour – a very welcome…
Lagavulin 16 (43%, OB 2018)
Let’s taste a few peat monsters before the warm weather returns, starting with a classic. Like most whisky aficionados (I assume!), I always have a bottle of Lagavulin 16 in the cabinet. There often is chat about the quality fluctuating with different batches, but I’ve never noticed much variability from bottle to bottle. The prices…
Glenfarclas 105 (60%, OB 2018)
After the Aberlour A’bunadh more than doubled in price, the Glenfarclas 105 has become the undisputed leader in terms of bang-for-your-buck cask strength sherry bombs. Unlike the A’bunadh this one used to carry an age statement too, with earlier batches stating (quite discreetly at the back of the label for some reason) that they were…
Glenfarclas 25 (43%, OB 2016)
Ah, Glenfarclas… The last bastion of sanity when it comes to whisky prices. If you happen to read this in the future when the Glenfarclas 25 costs more than your mortgage, it’s worth noting that, at the time of writing, this is still (sometimes) available for just under £100, when its similarly aged competitors are…
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The Daily Dram 