Nose: Apple, pear and malt on the initial nosing, maybe an orange peel aroma as well. The leathery Darjeeling tea and floral sherried oak that is common to all Johnnie Walker blends is present. Ginger, treacle and yeasty wash, and there is an ashy note – not quite peat smoke, more like soot. Complex and interesting for a blended scotch nose. Palate: On the entry there is sweet gristy cereal, malt extract, orchard fruits, thinned honey and red berries. This sweet arrival flows into the development, gradually accumulating more spicy and bitter notes. Cinnamon (both sweet and hot), pepper, a drying flavour like unsweetened cocoa and tannic oak all appear and the ashen note from the nose is present here as well. The texture is excellent, with silky and creamy highlights from the grain whisky component. Finish: Medium. The fruity and malt notes fade quickly (very quickly in fact), but there is a bright, crisp grainy flavour that lingers. The bitter tannic tinge remains until the end and there is a little white pepper and brine in the aftertaste. There is a particular quality to all Johnnie Walker blends that is instantly recognizable, and this certainly has it. It’s very much like a mixture of Red Label, Black Label and Gold Label turned up to 11. I can immediately recognise Cardhu in the blend and I bet there is some Teaninich as well, but that's all I can spot for sure. The hot and bitter notes combined with 51% abv would make it a challenging whisky for a novice, but to anyone with some experience I would think it should be most interesting. It does not taste "hot" as such, but the ethanol concentration amplifies the spice notes and tannins. Certainly anyone who likes Johnnie Walker should try a pour. So, the elephant in the room – is this REALLY what 1860s blended whisky would have tasted like? It is impossible to say for sure as there are no surviving samples of such whisky to analyse. There are recipes and blending records in the Diageo archives but the fundamental problem is that the style of malt and grain whisky that is produced today is very different to that of 150 years ago. The best that a blender can hope to do is make something that is an honest hommage, and approaches what we think it may have been like. On that score it's interesting how much this reminds me of Old Parr blended scotch, another Diageo brand that has a very old-school recipe, and I think that answers the question. Whether or not this is genuinely like something that would have been made in the 1860s it is most definitely a very “old-school” style of blended whisky, and that’s good enough for me. In reality, I'd bet good money that this is more like JW from the 1960s than the 1860s. Where does it sit in the JW lineup? Somewhere between Double Black and the 18 year old. It's more interesting then the lower echelon Red, Black and special finish blends that I've previously rated at less than 3 stars, but not quite up there with Blue Label or the old Platinum 18 that rate 4 or more. I agree with the official Distiller rating of 89, but the official comments leave me scratching my head in confusion. I’m not convinced that he and I have tasted the same whisky. At the usual price of $100 in Australia it is questionable whether this is value for money, however when I bought it on special for $75 I bought 2 bottles, and I’m glad I have one to keep in the short-term stash. “Good, not far short of Very Good” : 84/100 (3.75 stars)