Springbank CV. One of the earlier NAS whiskies to ever be mainstream. About a decade ago it was re-released with the other brands too, Springbank, Longrow and Hazelburn. Three 20cl bottles in a small box. While these weren’t exactly bad, they were quite boring, to be honest. I don’t know why I never reviewed the Longrow.

Anyway, this version was bottled more than a decade before these, so that’s about 23 years ago. In an auction several years ago I got myself a bottle and finished it a while ago. I kept a sample for proper assessment, which I did around Christmas.

Only 2.5 months later I post the notes, which is pretty quick in fact. I think I’ve got a year’s worth of notes backed up. Most of these have lost their relevance a long time ago.

Anyway, Springbank CV from the nineties. A bottle that was pretty cheap back in the day, and now sits in the secondary market for almost € 400.

Image from Whiskybase

Sniff:
Quite ‘old’ in style, with walnuts, mushrooms, moldy attics, hessian. Some oily scent as well, olive oil with a whiff of diesel smoke. There’s a lot of barley on the nose, and it somehow screams old-fashionedness. As in, nothing about the scent of this whisky is modern.

Sip:
The palate is reasonably intense without being too sharp. There’s a lot of barley, but that’s no surprise after the nose. Some fruit as well, in dried apple, ripe pear. The whiff of smoke is present too, and there’s more coastal salinity than before.

Swallow:
The finish is warming and wintry. Burning logs, hessian, moldy attics. Very ’60s’ even though it’s made much more recent. It’s quite long as well.

It’s a very typical Springbank with much of its greatest qualities present in distillate from the late eighties and early nineties. This makes me think they’re generally pretty consistent. Apart from the great flavors that are present, the only downside I can pinpoint it that it’s a tad thin, compared to the current Springbank 10 year old.

85/100

Springbank CV, bottled in 1997, 46%