This whisky was bottled when I was, most likely, eight years old. Ever since then it has started to gather legendary status and currently it sits comfortably at a 91 point score at Whiskybase.

Interestingly, Moon Import seems to be still active, but at a rather slow rate. Three bottles were released in 2020, seven in 2019. Whether or not that counts as ‘active’ is up for debate.

Glen Garioch is one of those distilleries that has a rather great status for older whiskies from years ago, but doesn’t seem to be scoring that highly with their more recent releases. I know they changed their distilling regime in 1995 from lightly peated to unpeated. During the eighties there are some of those FWP whiskies that are more known from Bowmore. It seems that all the Morrison-Bowmore distilleries have that (Auchentoshan being the third).

This one was bottled before they stopped peating, so a whiff of smoke is to be expected. Let’s find out!

Sniff:
Old lemon and grist on the nose. Lemon drizzle cake with crunchy sugar. Some heather, a whiff of soil. Old wood, some hessian and moldy attics. After a while apples, pears and melon peel are noticeable too. There’s a lot of oak as well.

Sip:
The palate is dry with a lot of oak and desiccated lemon. Again, some pastry notes but it’s slightly more like puff pastry. A note of black pepper, burlap, soil. There’s a lot to unpack here. Licorice root and a little bit of honey.

Swallow:
It mellows quickly on the finish. The dry notes of oak and sawdust, a pithy lemon thing too. It’s not an overly long finish, but there’s a lot of flavor, and a lot of different flavors all vying for attention.

I was not expecting such an old and not-cask-strength whisky to be this intense. This might cause some issues in the line-up! There are a lot of layers to the whisky and with every sip and every sniff there’s something new to be discovered. Stellar stuff!

91/100