It all started as a twitter meme I was starting, and I thought I’d share those little things we see on whisky labels that sometimes drives us, whisky geeks out of our minds. ordered from silliest to silly.
#1 : Aged in oak casks
Really? a scotch aged in oak casks, who would have thought it possible. DUH! of course no indication of which type of oak casks, like it matters, well it does matter. and it is just a waste of printing ink to indicate aged in oak. Why don’t you just write : liquid inside…
#2: Limited edition of 25,000 bottles or / “Only” 30,000 bottles / etc.
Give us a break. A whisky is not very limited when it sells in 10’s thousands similar bottles. Do you think people will buy it because of this? will it makes me feel more “special” if I know I bought a ‘limited’ edition every whisky drinker in town can also buy?
#3: This whisky was made from the best quality barley, and used the purest spring water
bla bla bla
Yeah. right.
#4 : Single cask bottling without mentioning the cask # or cask type.
It’s plain vexing. I know, some bottlers are trying to keep this confidential so we do not know the same cask was also split between them and another, but still : give us a break! Also, why not tell us if it was a Sherry, Bourbon (first fill, refill etc) we like to know this information especially when it comes to a single cask bottling.
(and many thanks to Sjoerd for this one).
5#: Special limited bottling bottled at 40%
if your whisky is so special and limited, please let it shine and bottle it at 46% at least. let us decide if we want to dilute it to that magical “40%” mark.
Any one has any more of those? would be happy to hear about yours!
Gal.
It’s the same with wine….
I always laugh when I read some thing like: “On the windly hills of blabla barley and water (grapes) are combined in harmony to form a magical liquid of the highest quality
Yes, indeed. but i do not recall seeing “aged in oak” 😉 though the limited edition nonsense is also widely spread in the wine industry.
Good thing they keep their “secret recipe” a secret. Otherwise I’d just make the stuff myself.
LOL
OB standard bottlings comes in batches as well. Ardbegproject reckons A10 batches are around 5-10000 bottles (I would have thought more)
Rennaisance was 21000 bottles
So those describinbg 20000+ bottles as limited are actually more or less bullshitting as it can’t be less limited 🙂
Steffen
Limited and rare and such can be annoying, but Steffen’s example isn’t quite so
clear as Ardbeg 10 is a global release and there can be 50,000 bottles in
circulation at any one time; yes different batches I suppose. But, say HP Thor
has 23000 “limited edition” bottles, this total is finite. Once they are gone
they are gone. And if it is sold in just the top markets (say UK, US, France,
Taiwan, Travel Retail) that is just 4,600 bottles in each… about 13 average
casks per market. Still lots of whisky? Yes. But “limited” in the grand scheme
of things but not exactly “rare”
My favourite was the US supermarket blend that read “Matured 36 Months”
LOL
Aged for 8 LONG years in oak barrels. Whisky maturation years must be longer than others 😉
it’s like dog years 😉
How about who is the importer or where it was bottled.
Some people don’t care because it does not affect the smell and taste of the product.
the importer is not very important info,