Member's Choice Night 2018

Another Member's Choice Night passed into history on Tuesday. At the last meeting of each year a rotation of members select bottles that they might have missed the meeting for, or familiar ones that they just want to enjoy again. And being a Member's Choice Night, none of these are new, so I'll cut and paste the old descriptions here to save you the trouble of searching (and to save me the trouble of typing, but more on that below):

Old Pulteney 17
First described February 2017:

"The Old Pulteney 21 is inarguably one of our very favourite single malts and yet we found the 12 year old to only be of middling quality, so we were very curious to find where the 17 year old lay on that spectrum. It always difficult to follow a "wow" whisky, so perhaps that's a factor, but the consensus was that while it was good, it was not fantastic. So, I suppose, appropriately enough, roughly half-way between the 12 and the 21. The signature hint of salt is present and perhaps leather from the peat. It is a lovely well balanced whisky with a reasonably satisfying mouthfeel, but compared to the Highland Park it lacks in richness and the finish is not as long. Some of us detected an odd bitter note at the end."

Oban 14

First described April 2011: 

"Some of us had remembered it being peatier and more iodine infused, so we saved it for last, but in fact the Oban ended up being much more gentle than recalled. It is a beautifully rounded whisky with a very pleasant mouth-feel and a rapidly fading finish that makes it easy to drink quickly (for good or ill...). Another winner in a night of excellent scotch whisky."

Scapa "The Orcadian" Glansa

First described June 2017: 

"Out of shear eagerness we began with the Glansa (which sounds disturbingly anatomical, but apparently means something like stormy skies in Norse). Scapa tells us that this is only peated by filling the spirits, from unpeated barley, into casks previously used for other heavily peated malts. They needn't have bothered. Peat is barely detectable here. It is not a terrible whisky, but it is not an especially good one either. Faint honey and flowers on the nose, sweet on the palate, thin in the mouth and then a bit of a rough and short finish. Maybe it's a case of having had unhelpfully high expectations. Maybe it's a case of rushing product to market to pay off the capital outlay involved in reopening a shuttered distillery." 

Highland Park 18

First described in June 2011 after it was named "best spirit in the world" and when we decided to drink the entire bottle rather than having a glass from each of four different bottles: 

"A fine, well-crafted scotch whisky that is very pleasant to sip on, but, to my surprise and disappointment, not much more than that. To be fair, Highland Park does not advertise this whisky as being complex, in fact the claim is "perfectly balanced", "rich" and "round". They do also, however, talk about a "prolonged, full, smokey aftertaste" and I do not believe that any of us experienced that. Perhaps that was the missing element that made Thursday night's experience seem different and, frankly, inferior to my recollection of this whisky. This again raises the question of consistency that we raised with the Johnny Walker Black Label at the last meeting. Or perhaps our faculties of memory and taste are just beginning to fail us. Incidentally, for the record, our impressions were essentially the same after the third glass, although we were in a jollier and more charitable frame of mind by that point.
Again I want to emphasize however that that the Highland Park 18 is a very fine scotch whisky, but it just is not, perhaps, "the best spirit in the world". Incidentally, Highland Park may, however, have the best whisky website in the world (www.highlandpark.co.uk) with a wealth of excellent videos detailing all the stages of the production process as well as tastings of each of their expressions. Distiller Jerry Tosh does a good job with these and entertained the group with his description of the "hallelujah moment" after sipping a Highland Park 18 when your mouth dries out and begins to water. This is true, your mouth does this, but we suspect it is true for many other whiskies as well."

So have I just been lazy here by retreading the old descriptions? Yes. But also no. To be absolutely candid something was amiss with my palate Tuesday night. Perhaps it was the delicious snacks of stinky cheese and haggis chocolate (yes, you read correctly) or perhaps it was because I was generally feeling slightly off, but everything tasted hotter to me than the actual alcohol content would predict and once the burn subsided, everything tasted blander to me than it should have. Don't get me wrong, it was all wonderful and there are few finer things in life than bantering with friends over a few glasses of high end scotch whisky, but none of the whisky itself caused me to experience spasms of delight. Maybe that's too much to ask for. And in any case it would be uncomfortable for my friends to watch.

Otherwise it appears from the reactions of everyone else that the old descriptions roughly match the present experience. The Oban and the Highland Park were still enjoyable, the Glansa was still risible and the Old Pult 17 was faintly disappointing. And it's gone now too. We drank the last of it and, in the curious lingo of the industry, that expression has been "archived". Probably our review sank it.

Slainte!