03/07/2026 Lochnagar

103.12 30yo 1972/2003 Caramel and eucalyptus (53.3%, SMWS Society Cask): nose: a wave of honey laps the nostrils, royal jelly and rose-petal jelly. Honey spread onto oiled birch shelves and sprinkled with orange-blossom water. It has a soft wine elegance, yet it is not winy. Perhaps it is umeshu, which is close to wine enough and fruitier than most Western wines. This here whisky has no shortage of fruits, yellow (peach, Mirabelle plum, apricot), fresh, baked and poached, some coated in honey, some used as topping on a honey toast. Gonna be gonna be golden. On occasion, it puffs a fleeting whiff of smoked blueberries and blackcurrants kept warm on the metallic wood stove. The scents of wood smoke and hot metal add another dimension to what would otherwise be "just another fruit." The second nose recycles those fruits and smears them with shoe polish. They become waxier too, plum, nectarine and Cape gooseberry joining the above, as does a slice of frangipane cake. Mouth: sharper and greener than expected, it has a gentle bitterness, as if the fruits from the nose were not totally ripe. Chewing confers this a punchy cough-drop taste: blackberry, blackcurrant, liquorice, earthy and sweet in equal measure. It flirts with tyre and tar, so intense it becomes. The second sip feels tamer, if still pretty hot, and riper. Baked physalis, Mirabelle plums, nectarines now rub elbows with tarter things -- perhaps baked Granny Smith apples and poached lemons? Kumquats and bergamots also do a performance. More chewing brings fermented pineapple rings that venture very close to musk. It has crushed mint or menthol too, actually. Finish: immense and numbing, it really leaves the tongue in the same state as if it had licked a tyre slathered with currant jelly. Dark, bitter, this is like a radial tyre, rubbery and tarry. It goes on for a long as a Fisherman's Friend, if the famous brand's peppermint were liquorice. The second gulp starts off fruity and fresh, with poached peaches and chopped mint leaves, then dumps a shovelful of hot mentholated sticky tar at one's feet. That makes for a bitter and anaesthetising finish that is also very fresh. Fruits come back, slowly but surely, though no longer intact: they are all smashed into a thick paste, coating and sticky. This is likely from a Sherry cask. At times, I think it is a little too loud for me to rate it higher. But the longer I drink it, the more I like it. 9/10 (Thanks for the dram, EG)