N: Cherries and smoke. Cherry smoke. Smoked cherries? Green apple, also smoked. Despite the smoke references, it's really more like a pervasive presence than anything dominant - like white noise against the rest of the flavors. Floral. Ethanol starts medicinal, but dances on and maybe slightly over the line into just plain booze. Maybe just the faintest hint of sea spray in it. Maybe not. P: Sweet and round feeling with fruit coming first, then a quick hit of spice. Fruit is red - more cherry, but also a wider and more generic range. Spice is very cinnamon, bordering on cinnamon candy. Sneaking in just between the fruit and the spice is a nice malty, bready, chocolaty midsection. It happens so fast that it's hard to characterize distinct flavors, but feels nice and adds good balance and transition between that first taste and the finish. Finish is mostly that cinnamon spice, but it also offers a bit of wood with some char, peat smoke on the exhale, and little lingering chocolate from the mid-palate. "Black Label, rocks, double" - I've ordered that so many times, in so many bars. I'm not even sure I could tell you what I liked about it. Probably not much given I was getting about 2 parts ice for 1 part whisky. I guess we all start somewhere. Reapproaching now, this is perfectly serviceable. I even like it. The smoke is there, even if it is just sort of a white noise that everything else plays in front of. And there's something about it that feels polished, clean, even a bit elegant in a way that something like a Dewar's blend or a Famous Grouse just doesn't have (Chivas maybe... just haven't had enough to know). As for comparisons, I think this is hands down better than the Dewar's 12 year and probably only a short step down from the Dewar's 15. And it's priced less than either of them - half the cost of the 15, in fact. (It's easy to forget that this carries a 12 year age statement - it's saying something to say this is relatively competitive with a 15 year.) But it's also nowhere near as interesting as say a Compass Box Glasgow Blend (but, to be fair, few drams are) or the Glen Scotia Double Cask (single malt, so also probably not quite fair). Both of those cost about twice as much as this, but I'd probably pay it most days. I can't really come up with much in my blended scotch experience that, at $20 a bottle, can really compete with this. (There's some Irish whiskey that's damn close on price and more interesting, and definitely some BiB Bourbon that would be easy to grab over this, but those are different worlds in many ways.) Comparisons like that are probably beside the point though. Like I said about Jameson, this is ubiquitous for a reason - it's actually pretty good and it has a unique hook. JW Black smoke is likely all the peat smoke many whisk(e)y drinkers get - if all you know is Johnnie Walker, Jameson, and Jack Daniels (and maybe some Fireball) - which is a lot of people - then this is all the smoke you know. So that's sort of its hook. Well, anyway, I'm glad to be a little pleasantly surprised by a big name yet again.