Nose: Sweet apple cider, pear juice, baked banana, fruit-flavoured bubblegum. Some light floral marshmallow-like notes but this is overwhelmingly a sweet fruity nose. Over time it tends to become more like cider vinegar. Palate: The arrival is light and slightly sweet with some fruity notes but a good deal of hard, gritty tannin. This gives way to more distinct apple flavours and pear in the development together with warmer spice notes. Apple and cinnamon muffins! It is crisp, but leaning towards harshness, and there is a cardboard note. It tastes like the cut was feinty and the texture is austere. Finish: Medium/short. Sweet but tannic and veering toward metallic. Cold overbrewed tea and a bitter/sour ale-like note in the aftertaste. This is young malt whisky intended for mixing. I think it is being blended from a younger selection of barrels now than when the expression was first released five years ago, and those barrels are from tired stock. I last had a bottle of this in 2016. It made a more positive impression then and my old tasting notes are similar to the majority of those on this site. There is less of the touted vanilla presence, particularly for bourbon casks, and I didn’t find it to be creamy in texture - sweet, yes, but more like apple juice. Adding water improves it by glossing over the faults but it’s fragile and a drop too much makes it fall apart. The best thing to do with this is mix it with cola, dry ginger or lemonade. The hard cereal and spice notes help it to cut through sugary soft drinks in the same manner as blended scotches that have a hard finish, and the result is a pleasantly balanced fruity/whisky flavour. I bought this on special but the normal retail price here is $72 and for that money there are a lot of much better malts. Glen Moray Classic Elgin or Crabbie's Yardhead are both considerably cheaper but knock this out in the first round. "Average" : 76/100 (2.5 stars)