Tastes

First stop on a World Whisky Day tour of 10 countries was Finland, home to this well-regarded rye. The nose is malty, like warm crusty bread. The dominant flavor is gingerbread, with a dry finish. It’s very different from U.S. ryes, and while it’s tasty I’m not sure I’d pick it over a good MGP or Wild Turkey. Still, it’s a small, young distillery that’s worth watching and supporting.

My sample came from an ex-bourbon cask that yielded 900 bottles at 55% in 2019. Ten years in the Indian heat has resulted in concentrated baking flavors like maple syrup, coffee grounds, pecans and dark chocolate. The ABV is painless and delivers a long-lasting burst of deliciousness with each small sip.

Mithuna is the usual Paul John tropical fruit salad turned up to 11. The nose is Seville oranges with a side helping of peaches in syrup and drizzled with honey. Freshly sanded oak adds a spicy top note. Neat, this is some of the most intense citrus fruit I’ve encountered in a whisky, exploding with mangoes and oranges on the first sip. It’s creamy and peppery too. Dilution to 50% retains the fruit but accentuates the spice, which dominates the finish. Another great release from the distillery, albeit an expensive one.

Fusion was the gateway dram for many Indian single malt fans, so this 10th anniversary celebration of the brand has a lot to live up to. Matured for four additional years in PX-Sherry butts, it doesn’t disappoint. Aromas of gingerbread and clove set the stage for an oily mouthful of ginger spice, orange oil and preserved Seville orange rind. The finish is tangy and herbal, with dashes of chocolate nibs and coffee. It’s a shame it’s so pricey, but if you split one of the 1,010 bottles with a couple of friends you won’t regret the expense, especially if you get to keep the fancy porcelain container.

I’m really annoyed by this whisky. For the price of $75, including two glasses for crying out loud, there must be something seriously wrong with it given the ever increasing price tags on Indian whisky. But I’m struggling to find fault. It’s not particularly complex. And if you have zero tolerance for sulphur, you might find the hint of firework on the nose off-putting. But it’s well balanced for a sherry cask finish, more dark chocolate and dried fruits than white sugar, with just the right amount of dryness to the satisfying finish. And the dash of sulphur on the nose is exactly how I like it. Part of me wishes this was $50 more expensive so I could more easily resist buying a bottle. But at this price, I’ll probably find it hard to pass up if I come across one in the wild. So do me a favor and buy them all before I can - I have no room nor appetite for more bottles.

This was the highlight of a recent tasting of the Redbreast range, the name Midleton uses for a certain combination of barrels of its distillate. I slipped that extended description in there because I was fascinated to learn that Redbreast, the Spot range, Powers and the malt component of Jameson all come off the same stills distilling the same mash. What differentiates them and the other brands in the portfolio is the three different cuts that Midleton uses to produce what it calls light, medium or heavy spirit. Multiply those three spirits by all the different types of barrels in its warehouse and you have an extensive palate to carve out unique flavor profiles for each brand. Redbreast is a combination of light and heavy barrels, which in the case of this release were aged in bourbon, sherry and port casks. Those casks were aged for at least 28 years and then married in a Sandeman port pipe. The result is a whisky that lives up to its dream billing. There’s custard and redcurrant on the nose. A sip immediately delivers an abundance of peaches and plums , followed by a lovely dose of oak spice that fades slowly through an extended finish. The stone fruit flavors are superb, similar to those I found in the similarly aged Teeling Revival series, suggesting this is a characteristic of well-aged Irish whiskey. It’s a very different dram to the core Rebreast range, which I find a tad simplistic despite their unquestionable tastiness. Of course, it’s a lot more expensive and harder to track down, but it’s well worth a try if you get the chance and I’ll be keeping an eye on future releases in this series.

This second release from one of the hot new Scotch distilleries has really grown on me after a couple of glasses. To oversimplify, it’s like a classic Highlander with a warm honeyed center, but with a lively undercurrent of ginger spice. Ardnamurchan produces both peated and unpeated spirit and I’d guess there’s a mix of both types in this bottling. The way the sherry casks present mid-palate reminds me of how the honey oozes out of a lemon cough lozenge I used to get in my childhood. I’d gladly drink this over Glenmorangie 10 any day and tasted blind I might even mistake it for a Balvenie were it not for the spice. Between this and Torabhaig, we are going to be spoilt for great affordable Scotch before too long.

This starts out on a very similar path to the Imperial 20-year-old I sampled as an appetizer: austere and minerally. But things liven up considerably mid-palate with a burst of pineapple cubes at the back of the mouth and a bouquet of crisp, bright fruits. And while the single malt Imperial finished short, this blend has a long coda of apples and canned clementines. Like a wet brush on a magic painting book, the Aberlour brings out the colors in this blend to great effect.

I dug out this long-neglected sample from @PBMichiganWolverine as I have never had an Imperial before and wanted a level set before trying the distillate in the recent Compass Box Magic Cask blend. It was probably worth the wait as this is a style of whisky I appreciate more than I did a few years ago. There’s a flinty pineapple quality to the nose that I rather like. It’s crisp and minerally in the mouth, with more of the pineapple to texture an otherwise austere profile. The finish is short and dry. It’s a combination of flavors that I find interesting and increasingly to my taste, though this isn’t a particularly outstanding example of them and the finish doesn’t add anything. Still, levels set, let’s see if Compass Box can bring the magic.

I stopped chasing the Ardbeg committee releases after the disappointing Drum but on the strength of samples of last year’s release and this latest edition I may have to rejoin the hunt. This delivers pretty much what you would want from a rye-cask edition, adding a sprinkling of extra spice to the Ardbeg goodness. That means a dash of white pepper on top of the gasoline aromas and caraway seed spice in the mouth that lingers through the smoke into the finish. Otherwise it’s a silky, creamy Ardbeg that’s a simple pleasure to drink. By the way, if last year’s edition had a string of a’s in the name and this year’s holds down the r key, does that mean next year’s name will have a string of d’s?