Tastes

If you want to taste Ardbeg's notes of smoke, salt and sweetness in isolation, this whisky will walk you through them one by one. It's a fascinating reference for the Ardbeg vocabulary, but ultimately the sweetness dominates, underscoring how well integrated the current Ardbeg range is. Still, well worth the $14 I paid for 2cl at Chami Bar in Davos.

Tasted at the incredible Chami Bar in Davos, a modest pub that just happens to sell drams of unicorn single malts for the price of a regular Scotch in New York. The amazing thing about this whisky is that the flavors keep changing in the mouth, from one thing to another and another and then back again, falling and rising like the eponymous phoenix. I wasn' t able to take notes at the time but it was perfectly rounded and smooth.

Peter Kaalund's review nails it. These Laphroaigs that start out smoky and end up sweet are among my favorites from the distillery. I didn't think much of this based on the taste I had at Duty Free a while back but will definitely pick up a bottle after savouring a sample at home.

It's the nose I like best on this: full-on toffee. It's creamy and caramely in the mouth, especially with a drop of water, and finishes long and smooth. The Roca brothers were going for desert flavors when they picked these casks and they hit the mark. Note: ignore the Rare classification. There are 20,000 cases, so finding a bottle will be easy.

I could inhale its sweetly perfumed aromas for long enough to lose myself in a fantasy landscape of violets and heather. There's a lemon note too that foreshadows flavors of pink grapefruit underpinned by a blast of smoke and oak. Its goodbye kiss brings to mind the buttery Meyer lemon sauce that graced my cod last night. No wonder the bottle's gone down quicker than many a pricier dram in my collection.

Campbeltown Chronicles #4: My sample was the 13-year bottling. It's a softer version of the Burgundy cask, less herbaceous and peaty but with the same sweet/smoky/earthy profile and balance. Call it 3.5 stars.

Campbeltown Chronicles #3: After wetting my appetite with Longrow CV (disappointing) and Kilkerran 12 (outstanding), I continued my exploration of Campbletown with this limited edition 12-year-old from Springbank. Unsurpringly, the burgundy cask has tinted the liquid a lovely rosewood hue that positively exudes warmth. The nose and flavor is a beguiling combination of peat and a vegetal note that reminds me (oddly) of the funky flavors I love in Lock Stock & Barrel's 16-year rye. The peat swells to Islay levels (more than the label "medium" would imply) before ceding ground to the earthy notes, which settle into your mouth for the evening. Altogether fascinating and worthy of more exploration that my small sample allowed.

Stewed fruit, orange rind, vanilla, leather, molasses. Finish is faint but long.