dhsilv2
Lagavulin 20 Year Fèis Ìle 2020
Single Malt — Islay, Scotland
Reviewed
November 16, 2020 (edited November 17, 2020)
So dram 4 of my day off. I should note I reviewed this over on Mike's Whisky Reviews with well Mike but this is another bottle another day and another review. Hopefully I have a similar response today for distiller but you never know.
Nose - The nose is beautiful lagavulin. Slight hints of peach over what mike loves to refer to as aristocratic peat. Red berries and sugars are coming in from the PX sherry casks. Some waxy notes and a big bold kick of smoke billows off the glass.
Taste - A lovely lagavulin peat and malt driven by sherry. That said there is no balance of play here. It's a bit of a mess. Flavors just feel thrown together and you get odd off oak notes and strange sugars and peat elements just almost randomly. Water thankfully saves the day and pulls this one back into reality. Now with water it's a clean open with sweet lagavlin peat that really can't be better described than by their name and their name alone. Still it remains a touch bitter and the oak isn't playing nice.
I have to say this is a firmly disappointing pour of well aged lagavulin. There's no lack of flavor or power here. It's just a poorly put together flavor profile. 3.0 here. yeah it's still quality good whisky but a hard pass at the prices this one is going for.
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@ScotchingHard Ardbeg and Lag are the main ones that fall in that category. I’ve not tried a Laddie Feis Ile, but if they’re holding true to intent, I need to give them a shot
@ScotchingHard well I have a 17 and 30 year sample of theirs to review if someone will add them to the site first :) But lagavulin makes so few of these other bottles and many are truly great. I hope it's just some poor selections and the trend reverses.
Yeah, somewhere around 2015-2017 feis ile went from a celebration of the best whisky to an opportunity to make money, and it’s getting more obvious every year. I think only Bruichladdich is still holding it down.