...where distraction is the main attraction.

Friday, March 29, 2019

Ardmore 13 year old 1998 SMWS 66.32

And then there was this thing.


Those comedians at SMWS named this concoction 'Roly-Poly Pudding'. More thoughts about this after the tasting notes including...NAME THAT WHISKY!

Distillery: Ardmore
Region: Highlands (Eastern)
Independent bottler: Scotch Malt Whisky Society
Age: 13 years (March 1998 to January 2012)
Maturation: refill sherry gorda
"Poetic" name: ← nope
Cask number66.32
Outturn: 752
Alcohol by Volume: 58.6%
(from a purchased sample)

NEAT
The nose has no coherence. Element 1: Salted caramels and hot ghee. Element 2: Urine. Element 3: Car exhaust and smoked fish. Element 4: Grape juice and cheap plastic toys. Element 5: Urine. Lather, rinse, repeat. The palate is a little more focused? Grape candy, grape juice, Manischewitz Concord, black raisins, peppercorns, lemons, gunpowder and an unceasing sourness. Grape candy, raisins, pepper, caramel candy and lots of heat in the finish.

Shall we?

DILUTED to ~46%abv, or 1⅔ tsp of water per 30mL whisky
Butter, urine, soot, gunpowder, grape juice and peat on the nose. I likes me some bitterness, but the palate is almost unpalatably bitter at first. Beneath the violence is some chocolate, grape jelly and ash. The bitterness backs off as a similarly aggressive sweetness takes over. Lemon candy, grape candy, peppercorns and ash in the finish.

Um, more?

DILUTED to ~40%abv, or 2¾ tsp of water per 30mL whisky
The nose: gunpowder and hot urine in a peat kiln. The palate: Sugar water with ash and woody bitterness. The finish: Grape bubblegum, ash and lemon juice.

WORDS WORDS WORDS
Recently I've been enjoying sherry cask whisky more than I used to but this stuff is no sherry bomb. This is

GUNPOWDER AND PISS IN GRAPE CANDYLAND.

I felt kinda sad experiencing Ardless so directly. And everything about this whisky got worse as I added water. It's close to gross. But I guess it gets points for insanity. And it wasn't horrible when it was neat, I suppose.

Seriously, I'm talking myself out of failing an Ardmore. But it's not the distillery's fault here.

Perhaps there's no way to salvage a cask like this. You just dump it ASAP, slap a £125 price tag on each of the 752 bottles, and then hope that once everyone who vomits money for anything sherried clears out the outturn you walk away with more than $125,000 in revenue.

Enough. Go enjoy something better. This week is over.

Availability - mercifully gone
Pricing - £125
Rating - 68