Morrison Bowmore were kind enough to organize a lovely twitter tasting under the Hashtag #lovefirstfill , in which all drams were ex-bourbon cask strength beauties, to which I was invited with a few other EU based whisky lovers (most in the UK). I was very keen on trying those last Tuesday but thank to DHL which acted as complete fools and failed to deliver the package in time (They sent it to my home address, but since I was at work, they would not send it to any other address the same day, and a day after was too late) I could not take part in the original event. Gladly for me (and not for him) My good Dutch friend Sjoerd (you know his blog, right?) DHL Israel and DHL Holland are both quite the same when it comes to(bloody bad!) service, and his package was also delayed by one day due to exactly the same circumstances.
It came to me that we could do our own little tweeter session the day after using the same hashtag, and live taste and tweet those 4 samples together, which will be more fun than just doing it alone, and Sjoerd Happily accepted my offer. So, we set to meet online that day on twitter to sample drams 1..4 . nice! We started with the Glen Garioch vintage 1995, then off to Auchentoshan Valinch, and finishing with the 2 peaty Bowmores. Let’s starting with the G.Garioch then,shall we?
I have very little experience with Glen Garioch (only two tasting notes on the blog from this distillery so far) , so every new expression i can get my hands on is indeed interesting for me.
Glen Garioch 1995 – Batch 10 , 55.30% , £49.46
Nose : Quite spicy, some coconut, lovely wood. fresh sort of. with some candy on the nose, banana and vanilla add crème Brule. rather creamy.Very Nice banana cream becomes more evident as time goes by, or if you add a wee bit of water. I think the nose can benefit from a splash of water here.
Palate: It’s like a vanilla banana popsicle we get here with some malt and alcohol poured over it. very tasty, and heart warming 😉 starting of very spicy, then getting creamy with time, and that banana vanilla thing going on. very nice.
finish: The finish is medium long with a lot of malt, and vanilla and quite a bit of coconut and a very distant whiff of peat smoke, almost unnoticeable.
This is a very “strong” profiled malt. very distinct flavours and a lot of wood influence (not woody, but wood influence – vanilla. coconut, etc). If you like those kind of whisky profiles (and I do), you will love this one. full of flavour and rather dominant. Well done.