Whisky Online Blog

All nostrils have been pronounced clear so I have decided today to celebrate with a couple of drams that I’ve been holding on to for sometime. Namely these…

A dodgy photo but you get the idea

I remembered I had these samples after I mentioned Bunnahabhain briefly in yesterday’s post, seeing as I’ve been whisky starved for the last two weeks I decided I should probably break my fast with appropriate sensory overload. I have a big soft spot for Bunnahabhain, I always felt it was one of those rare distilleries that produced a very distinctive make without relying on big peating levels. Although Bunnahabhain as we know it today has only really existed since 1963 when the distillery stopped producing peated spirit. Incidentally, if anyone has a sample/bottle of Bunnahabhain distilled before this era then… well we should talk. Anyway, I love these old Bunnas, I think its a spirit that can age really beautifully so I’m pretty excited by these two.

Bunnahabhain 1975 35yo. Adelphi. 157 bottles. Cask no 456. 51.8%. 70cl.

Colour: Honey

Nose: Starts on big whiffs of wax polish, menthol sweets, dry spicy oak, fresh sawdust and raisins. There are also some glorious fruit characters that you just don’t get in younger whiskies, lots of ripe bananas, tinned pineapple and dried apricots. There are also some quite specific notes of licorice, cloves and anise. Its obviously old but its kept a wonderful freshness about it, I’d be really interested to know where this cask matured. There are those big sinewy, nutty, honey and salty aromas after a while, typical Bunnahabhain character, all of a sudden fresh strawberries, it just seems to keep on getting fresher and livelier. What a harmonious and well balanced nose, will the palate hold up… ? With water: some fresh vanilla, banoffee pie and something slightly earthy and medicinal, akin to Antica Formula or another really high class red vermouth.

Palate: More fresh strawberry fruit and lots of smooth, clean, spicy oak character. It has that wonderful savory, mouthwatering saline edge to it that is common in these old Bunnahabhains and in other coastal whiskies. Its beautifully dry with loads of crystalized fruit and nutty, dundee cake flavours. Citrus, honey, maybe a tiny hint of wood smoke and more zingy saltiness. The oak is definitely big but its so well integrated and kept in check by the distillery character and the fruitiness that it never becomes too much or too dominating, its really well composed. With water: Water turns it into a huge, ballsy, coastal salt bomb. Its really incredibly lively now, masses of sea air, atlantic freshness and some really clean citrus notes, lemon and honey, like a great hot toddy.

Finish: Long, drying with yet more of these lemon, honey and salt notes, just beautiful…

Comments: Just absolutely top notch old Bunnahabhain, really classy whisky. Its beautiful with and without water, you could really have a lot of fun with a water glass and pipette here if you had a whole bottle of the stuff. However, it would be perilously easy to quaff vast flagons of it.

Score: 91/100

I did not realise when I took this picture how utterly awful and out of focus it was. For this I am very sorry, just drink a few drams to correct your vision and bring it into focus.

Bunnahabhain 1968 41yo. Adelphi. 719 Bottles. Cask Numbers: 12461/3. 41.2%. 70cl.

This is from the same vintage that produced the legendary ‘Auld Acquaintance’ bottling so I am doing my best to settle my high expectations.

Colour: Polished copper

Nose: Lovely rounded, rich, unctuous sherry but there is still a glimmer of saltiness at the back keeping the sherry in balance. It gives the immediate impression of a malt that has been captured just at the moment before it disappeared into the grasp of the wood never to return. Lots of cocoa, dry, nutty oak notes and again those notes of ripe banana. Very clean, flawless sherry, its not as complex or astonishing as some of the official Bunnahabhains from the same vintages but its wonderfully balanced and attractive whisky. The sherry is rich but not dominating an the distillery character has retained its voice very nicely. Stewed fruits and toffee apples now with baked pears and something like custard.

Palate: Very gentle delivery, lovely soft, velvety sherry flavour, walnut oil and a combination of rancio, pipe tobacco and some earthy, raisin qualities. Drying but not at all cloying, quite a beautiful oily mouthfeel as well, with flavours of olive oil towards the back of the palate. I suspect the naturally low strength has a lot to answer for here, the fragility of this whisky is beautiful and quite charming. Its so soft, there are no edges anywhere, no bitterness or chalkiness, no brutal tannins, just lovely soft, chocolatey, fruit flavours. The distillery character is a little more hidden on the palate but there is still a definite freshness about it and that nutty, honey thing is still there only now its much more delicate. This is really growing on me.

Finish: Very long indeed, it fades in a grand and stately fashion, dignified to the last. Leaves a warming, menthol feel in the mouth.

Comments: Like the 1975, this is a whisky that you could very easily drink far to much of. Every part of it is easy but it still remains fascinating, balanced and compelling to drink. These old Bunnahabhains are fantastic value drams if you ask me, they could easily knock lumps out of other big named, premium priced distillery bottlings. Well done to Adelphi for bottling these great casks at such fair prices and well done to the lads at the distillery in the 60s and 70s who made the stuff. No need to score this one any different, they’re both in the same league.

Score: 91/100

and now…

The amateur blending olympics strikes again! A vatting of both bottlings…

This may be silly and borderline sacrilege but it is always fun. On the nose its just brilliant, its a pure concentration of the best aspects of both malts, all the richness from the sherry in the 1968 and all the fresh saltiness of the 1975. Bags of character, oily, fruity, nutty, even slightly meaty as well now. The palate has the same knock out combination effect, just delicious. If I had to score it I might be tempted to go as high as 92 for this vatting, interesting. Anyway, these Bunnahabhains were fantastic, go forth a try them yourself.

Well I’m back from my holidays and I was going to start up again with a tasting but sadly I am still shaking off the after effects of the man-lurgie. Hopefully tomorrow will bring clear noses and fresh palates but in the meantime we can while away the time with some meandering cinematic musings, namely around the film Lawn Dogs.

Lawn Dogs is one of those rare things, a great wee film. Its the sort of film you sit down to watch and as it unfolds you quickly start to wonder why you haven’t seen or heard of it before. It wasn’t particularly obscure when it was released but for some reason or another it has slipped out of people’s collective mind with the passing of time. Maybe its the fact that it touches on some quite thorny issues and does so in a wholly uncompromising way. It is also an unashamedly intellectual, imaginative and emotional film, a funny, complex and ultimately tragic modern fable. One of those films that restores any cinematic faith that might have been recently shaken free by a trip to see 2012 or Transformers 2. You watch with that glowing sense of joy that you have stumbled across a hidden gem, something you can then take further joy in sharing with someone else, watching them glow with the same rush of discovery.

It is ultimately quite a sad film in many ways, even the most private and joyous moments between the two central characters are set against a dark, invisible social backdrop that bears down increasingly upon them. The film laments the failing of human relationships and the ruinous victory of ignorance and narrowness of mind over love and understanding. It also turns in a heart rending expose of the pain of growing up and coming to terms with the fantasy crushing reality of adult life. It is poignant but funny and beautiful in its execution.

Queen Of The Moorlands 1997 heavily peated Bunnahabhain, hits you in the face like a shovel of peat that's been marinading in oloroso sherry overnight.

Those films like Lawn Dogs that have that ‘hidden gem’ quality to them have a natural affinity with the whisky lover’s mentality, we’re always on the lookout for new, obscure, undiscovered glories. That sense of excitement when a whisky takes us completely by surprise, it can’t really happen with many obvious drams, if we’re presented with an old single cask Ardbeg or an early Macallan 18yo for example, we’re obviously expecting great things. Its when we get the rug pulled from under our feet by a random Braeval or Edradour (ok maybe not an Edradour), whiskies that are not always the most earth shattering posses the greatest potential to wow us when they really shine. Bunnahabhain, in all honesty, perhaps belongs more to the former category than the latter but it can be variable. Anyway one of the last drams I had that really surprised me was a Bunnhabhain. I tried it at a tasting during the Islay festival in May, it was the Queen Of The Moorlands festival bottling, a heavily peated 1997 Bunna from a sherry hogshead. It had that wonderful flavour that you can only get in whisky when you combine massive peat with thick, heavy sherry character. It was sweet, oily, briny and full of that wonderful medicinal sarsaparilla character. Sometimes the best things in life are those that take us by surprise and whisky is no exception.

Glasgow, a city with a big soundtrack.

When I was at university in Glasgow I listened to lots of music and drank lots of whisky. So far so normal. I tended not to listen to a lot of the modern bands my friends listened to, party because I liked to think of myself as ‘different’ but mostly because my music tastes stopped, for the most part, somewhere around 1978. However as time passed I started to notice that Glasgow did seem to have a tendency to churn out a lot of bands and a lot of music. After a while I realised that this was not the case with every city or every scene, and Glasgow really does have a ‘scene’. The music from these ‘indie’ bands, for want of a better descriptor, was like a background noise in my life after a while, it hung around, it moved and permeated all aspects of a day. Uni life is admittedly a very social life, at least it is if you study a silly arts degree in Film and TV like I did. So you’d expect us to be listening to music in our flats, our unions, clubs, parties and we did but in Glasgow music is such a big thing, people seem proud to have so many local bands, to go and see them, to root out new and cool artists, to know them, know the scene, be part of the fabric of it all that it felt much bigger. I say all this but I’m sure there are a thousand students in a hundred different cities having the same feeling these days, maybe it just felt big to me as it was part of a big musical awakening, I still loved all the old music I’d always listened to but now I found new music that suddenly wasn’t all by boy bands, it wasn’t all commercial shit in other words.

Belle And Sebastian are probably one of the best known bands to come out of Scotland in the past decade. I’m A Cuckoo is also one their most famous songs, I chose it over their many other wonderful songs because for me it is one of these songs that perfectly illustrates what I’m trying to say. When those first opening bars play it is immediately familiar, I have no idea when I first heard it or when it entered my life but it is impossible to hear it without thinking of sitting in one of the student unions, of dancing lightheadedly with friends, a pint of ‘magic drink’ (don’t ask) in hand. It typifies the style of melodic, vibrant pop that so many bands have spewed forth in recent years but unlike so many cheap imitations Belle And Sebastian seem to be able to make the sound all their own. Music like whisky is a powerful trigger of memory and this song sits in the ears like a roll call of places, parties and people that make up much of the four years I spent at uni. There really is something about the texture of the sound, the noise it makes that conjures up these feelings.

If Belle And Sebastian were something of an aural backwash to uni life then Camera Obscura were an altogether more focused borderline obsession. I remember when I first heard them, sitting in a friends room being played their music and it really put the hook in me. One of the first songs I heard was the one I selected here, Lloyd I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken. Its a soaring, lush, almost anthemic piece of pop, lyrically obscure and joyfully melodic. They are worth investigating further if you haven’t heard them because they deserve so much more recognition then they get and all of their four albums are wonderful. To me they speak of specific times and places, they are the band I played while working long afternoons in the Oddbins on Byres Road, they are the soundtrack to sitting up late with a big dram ploughing though my dissertation, they are the gig I went to at the ABC one summer’s night several years ago. They are what I like to think of when someone says the words ‘indie music’, a small but harmonically tight band that sings topically diverse and musically seductive tunes, they have a sound, an identity. They were a big part of my last two years at uni.

Sunny afternoons in Glasgow, music percolated every part of life there.

If I were to choose whiskies to match these songs it would not be in terms of flavours, moods and textural patterns, it would have to be simply in terms of memory, nostalgia and association. Just as these songs speak of a particular time in my life so too do certain whiskies. I remember what I was drinking in those days, I already had a keen knowledge and passion for whisky but it was not so honed or specific as it is now, I had yet to discover many things and I was also, truth be told, a little less bitter about the whisky industry and about modern whisky styles. I was working at Ardbeg during my summers so obviously Ardbeg plays a big role in this, I would talk about it to friends, extolling its virtues and usually ordering them in bars to illustrate my points.

Uigeadail, an old favourite.

I remember having bottles of Uigeadail, 17yo and latterly the great, great 1990 at my flat and the joy of seeing people discover them for the first time. As much as music was an essential part of these social experiences, whisky went hand in hand with them also. I was renowned for my habits of bringing good bottles of malt to parties and a tasting glass to boot, sitting enjoying some daft single cask while chatting away to a friend with a can of strongbow, it was great. There was a time when I had a bottle of Bunnahabhain Moine at one of our flat parties, I had tried it in the Pot Still bar the previous month and been so knocked out by its flavour that I had sought out a bottle. It was an important dram for me as I remember being amazed by it, I didn’t know whisky could taste like that, like a heavily peated carpet put through a washing machine with a bottle of TCP and a bag of seaweed. It blew my mind and turned me on to a world of young, heavily peated cask strength whiskies, it paved the way for my love of Ardbeg Very Young later that year and, ultimately, for me seeking out work on Islay.

Moine, an early peaty milestone for me.

So its difficult for me to find drams that match these songs as they are already so closely bonded to certain styles of whisky in mind. It is also sad in some ways that while I still love these songs and much of the music I was listening to while at uni, the whiskies I drank are, for me, perhaps more of that time than now. It is safe to say that I am over young peat monsters these days, I tend to taste such whiskies a little more objectively, its rare for me to be so inspired by one. I haven’t re-visited the Moine in a long time, not that I wouldn’t like to given half the chance. I suppose on one hand that snobbery has a role in this, I am lucky enough to have tasted some incredible spirits, when I think of great whiskies these days I think of old bottlings, I think of pre-67 Clynelish, Glenugies, Springbank local barlies, old St Magdalenes and very old Glen Grants and Longmorns to name a few. I always try and find something to enjoy in all whiskies but inevitably the more you taste and learn the more you understand about what you perceive as quality and what you enjoy. These drams I enjoyed several years ago would probably not thrill me so much nowadays, but then isn’t that the nature of nostalgia? Some things are better looking back than in the cold light of day. In the end its too personal to make any grand factual conclusion, I have found that whisky and music have one big thing in common, they are both about 90% opinion and 10% fact and what sounds and tastes good right now may well change so maybe its better to just enjoy the ride.