20/10/2025 Dailuaine

Dailuaine d1971 (40%, Gordon & MacPhail Connoisseurs Choice, b. ca. 1989): this one does not have a bottle code either, but detective work hints at a late-1980s bottling. Nose: brine and cardboard. Let us wait for a while... Well, even after breathing for fifteen minutes, it remains briny -- more so, in fact: it now has pickles and gherkins. There are flashes of cardboard that take us towards glossy photographs (remember those?), but it is pickle-y first and foremost. Spilled ink joins a little later, as do wet blotting paper and boiled-potato cooking water. Hm. The second nose has grated beef-stock cube, Bovril, stewed oxtail. That disappears as surreptitiously as it came and leaves dusty cardboard behind. Mouth: sweet, it offers stale caramel and faded toffee to accompany pickle brine spilled on cardboard. Chewing increases the sweetness, brings up fudge and Scottish tablet. It drops boozy toffee, and sprinkles cracked black pepper on the lot. And that is almost bold enough to balance the brine -- almost! It is more assertive than foreseen (40% in glass for thirty-five or forty years, imagine that!), yet calling it numbing would be an exaggeration. It tickles a bit, shall we say. The second sip doubles down on dusty faded toffee. It is super sweet, yet one would more-easily detect a dusty coffee pot, probably. The longer one keeps it in the mouth, the sweeter it is, with root beer and cold coffee (sixteen sugars). Finish: chococino, toffee melted in lukewarm coffee (well, in coffee that is then left to cool down a little), mocha chocolate, a stained Moka pot. That would spell a mild bitterness and a lick of tin to go with the undeniable sweetness. It is a long and drying finish, surprisingly, which suggests a root-y, earthy aspect that would have been difficult to predict from the nose alone. Repeated quaffing leaves the tongue paralysed by heated dusty tin, which takes us back to our old Moka pots, does it not? Coffee grounds and grated mocha chocolate peek up at the death. This is not a great example of this distillery's output. One wonders if the colouring, usual for Gordon & MacPhail at that period, has tainted (pun intended) the dram. 6/10