It doesn’t often happen that the distillery with the highest annual production of Scottish malt whisky decides to choose and elevate to official bottling a single barrel from the endless warehouses where whisky of all ages is stored. When this happens, about three or four times a year, we consider it really silly not to look for a taste with all the means that our legal system allows us. Obviously we don’t always succeed, because we are talking about a few hundred bottles distributed all over the world and our country’s share is limited to a handful of samples, but lately the international brand ambassador of the Chivas group, Ken Linsday, has been taking a nice trip to Italy, participating in the Bar Show in Rome and in tastings in Naples and Milan. And so to celebrate the event he opened some bottles of this rarity: we tasted the sherry butt number 54310, which has lovingly guarded Glenlivet’s whisky for 15 years.
N: a sherry monster through and through, and without any alcoholic edge. Immediately we say that “it tastes like Boeri”, those pralines with cherries under spirit: chocolaty and also with a touch of sour. There’s a whole army of sherry toy soldiers: dark chocolate, cherries in spirit, raisins, Martorana fruit (marzipan), tamarind, cola … Old smelly furniture, dark wood, maybe just polished. With water, leather and some tobacco.
P: explosive, exaggerated and – cask strength – a little bit astringent. It’s more alcoholic, even if not blunt. It’s like 97% chocolate… Very consistent, there’s everything you read to the nose, with cloves and wood spices. Super juicy, raspberries and cherries. The water makes it a bit balsamic. Dry jam.
F: dark chocolate, spicy wood, nutmeg and cloves. Back to the juiciness of red fruit jam.
The Glenlivet has earned over the years a reputation as a whisky of great elegance, but also with a strong personality, iridescent: fresh and citrusy character with short aging, tropical and deep for older whiskies. Someone – precisely the man in the background in the photo at the beginning of this page – says that 18 yo is one of the best whisky in circulation in terms of pleasantness/price ratio. This single cask will also give packages of pleasantness, but it is quite different from the two typical Glenlivet styles. Here we are facing an excellent barrel of sherry that has taken all its tumultuous talent on the distillate, becoming the main character. Tasted blind, it will be almost impossible to say it’s Glenlivet (and it will be difficult to enter Glenlivet in a shortlist of 10 possible distilleries). That said, since we vote on emotions and not notions: 88/100.
Recommended soundtrack: Zella Day – Seven Nation Army
