I know where I got a sample of this, but I can’t for the life of me remember why. As in, I like Blair Athol well enough, but why on earth would I spend money (if I did) on a random bottling from wine casks?

The age isn’t so great as to warrant purchase, and the fact that there’s a bunch of wine casks involved makes me rather skeptical instead of enthusiastic. Wine casks are sketchy enough, but when there’s three that causes me to think ‘probably none of them were good enough to be bottled as a single cask’.

Am I getting too skeptical? Am I getting too jaded for this kind of stuff? Let’s see…

Sniff:
Very sharp for a first dram of the day. A sweet fruitiness, quite like boiled candies. Some straw, vanilla, a whiff of oak. Strawberry jam.

Sip:
The sweetness is very much present on the palate, and even the dry heat of the alcohol doesn’t really counter it. Lots of candies, peardrops, strawberry jam, some wine gums even. A bit of straw and barley too.

Swallow:
The finish has a short burst of heat before it dissipates into mostly candy sweet flavors.

Yeah. Well. Right. I still don’t have a clue. It’s a rather sweet whisky, which isn’t too surprising for Blair Athol, but it’s more sweet than that distillery’s output generally is. It’s also quite sharp for a 50% dram, even though I tried this without warming up first.

So, I don’t really get the why of this whisky. Not just the why of me having it, but the why of this being a thing at all. It feels a bit like one of the many, many whiskies out there that are only available because yet another bottler wants to have some shelf space filled.

It’s not even that it is a bad whisky. It’s just not interesting to me.

82/100