BenRiach Curiositas 10 Year

Color: Butter Yellow Nose: Honey, vanilla, peaty, spice, hints of oak and apples Palate: Vanilla, honey, leather, nice punch of peat, pepper Finish: Rounded finish with lingering peat and hints of pepper This dram definitely diverges from your typical Speyside. It is very well balanced with vanilla and peat as the main attraction. In the backseat you can pick up wonderful hints of leather and pepper. If you’re a newbie to the peat world BenRiach 10 Curiositas is one dram that will definitely challenge your taste buds.

Complex, light, smoke, full

Awesome juice. Went into a dirty liquor store on the poor side of town and saw this thing all extra dusty with a price on it that was from before the single malt hike. Ka-ching, 20 bucks saved, an old 'to-drink' crossed off. Some mentions: Bourbon, toasted virgin oak, and rum make the caskings up. You would swear there was sherry, but it says there isnt and you'll read why. Its NCF and without added coloring. My bottle literally had a few wisps of barrel wood in it before I opened it that I noticed when holding it to the light to reveal in its amazingly golden-yet-clear color. NOSE Inviting hit of smoke. Sweet smoke. Cherry trees that havent hit yet. TOBACCO. Concord grapes that are old and nearly turned. Peat is there, but not as much as Stephanie's expert review on distiller claims. PALATE Ever take the long long way somewhere? Iodine, but not the coastal/seaweed kind its earthy and dense and different (this is a speyside and those are rarely peated). Greasy, rich meat is immediately cut by fruit spice, clove (really, CLOVE, not baking spice), the bourbon cask's vanilla finishes you away from the licorice/floral complexity. Delicate floral keeps finding it's way through but NEVER gets in the way of what is going on--yum! MOUTH Long. Makes you swear there was a sherry cask. Layered. The heathery honey lingers in a way I did not expect but was delighted by. I wouldnt outright call it 'dry' like Steph but it is indeed deceptively easy--you would never know its 92 proof. 'Smooth' doesnt do it justice. It's a rollercoaster compared to other things I've had with similar trappings but it saunters through them so slowly your tasting "brain" kinda stumbles as you get stuck finding your way through them. The bottle says add water and I tried ice--recommend you skip. It makes the sweet things come out bright, shiny and delicious but it muted all the amazing composition th is one has and vanished the unique peat it has. Paid $45+tax but would've been happy with a lot more spent. It's good liquor.

The peat/smoke flavour is just a bit intense for me. It's not a relaxing drink at all. Initially the flavour is as described bring Smokey, the middle is a little bit salty and the rear brings up a little sweetness and some caramel. It's a little complex and I didn't even notice that until I read some other reviews. I had just added a Smokey label to the entire experience which isn't fair as there is a lot more going on. I'll try another BenRiach but with less peat to see how these whiskies behave themselves usually.

This is the final dram of this now empty bottle. It is my favorite whisky so far. I wanted to give it a whole bottle that I opened in early November to come back to every so often to see how it’s ranking compares to other whiskies of all varieties. And I can say my first impression still stands and it was, is and remains my favorite so far. For me it is near perfect. It is young, unique, wild, vibrant, complex, flavorful, has a lot of variety and every stage is so enjoyable from A to Z. This 10 years old whisky is triple cask matured in virgin oak, bourbon and rum casks. This sounds as wild as this whisky is. Nose: the peat, despite what others say, for me not intense or harsh - it is fresh and floaty and just builds nice brackets around this otherwise speysidy aspects. What’s makes this interesting is that the peat they used is from the highlands region which creates a in my eyes beautiful fusion. It is not the kind of peat that you associate with bacon or smoked foods. It is just a base solid peat not to overwhelming or aggressive. On the nose you also get vanilla, lemon peel, malt sugars, walnut, orchard fruits and cocoa. And while this somehow sounds the same as a lot of other whiskies (especially Speyside) the triple casks are blended so well together with that very well leveled peat, that it makes this different and unique to everything else I have tasted so far. It has Highland Park 18 qualities (meaning the peat part to it) but the BenRiach Speyside base gives it the fruity smoothness. It works just so perfectly together. Palate: very sweet and malty at first and completed by a slight burn that doesn’t really feel like 46% ABV. It is definitely not oily and more in the rocky and fresh side. You also get fresh warm toasted wheat bread (French baguette) and a very friendly peat that lays some enjoyable wood and smoke on the tongue - wild and fresh and not meaty or aged at all. There also is lots of fruits now with mango and pineapple and milky caramel / toffee. Finish: long and surprisingly not to dry. Leaves a wooden and sweet malty summer hay taste in you mouth for quiet some time. The finish is the only reason I don’t give it a full 5 rating. If the palate would offer some oilyness to transition into the finish with some of that smooth fruitiness it would be a 100/100 for me. I guess that would be achieved with a couple more years in the barrels, but that might make it miss the vibrance and freshness that it has now. But for this reason it is a 98/100 for me. It may sound weird but the whisky in combination of nose and palate is like a Bob Ross painting for me. It has a lot of details that are just a combination of several simple aspects - but in the end when it is all combined it falls in place so well, that it looks like it has been created with much more time and effort. It hasn’t but the product in the end looks so perfect and well rounded that it doesn’t matter how long it took to create and with what simple techniques - in a finished combination it just feels perfect and right. So right that you want to look at it again and again wondering how it was done. This will be a stable in my whisky collection.

10 years is a peak age for many peated whiskies. It's no coincidence that Laphroaig and Ardbeg age their introductory expressions for a decade, and that Bruichladdich's Port Charlotte line features a 10-year-old version. Peat in the single digits often manifests as overly harsh and ash-y, or medicinal and weird as hell (sometimes even producing hot garbage notes, which I truly but bizarrely enjoy). Highland peat and Islay peat are a little different, as expressions like the Balvenie Peat Week prove, but this bottle demonstrates that the decade mark is still a near-perfect time to bottle a peated whisky. Its signature is balance: smoky, earthy tones countered by beer-like malt and apple sweetness. It is not incredibly complex, but it is a simple, lovely pleasure of a whisky. It's an easy drinker and a great candidate for a daily nightcap whisky (alongside drams like Talisker 10, or Gledronach 12 for sweet-tooths). It's also reasonably priced in the $50-60 range, which makes it a realistic contender for that session dram role.