Description

A 23 year old bottle of Glendullan bottled at cask strength for Diageo’s Rare Malts series – a historic selection of single malt whiskies from operational and lost distilleries that were released by Diageo between 1995 and 2005. This Glendullan was distilled in 1973 before being bottled in September1997. This is bottle number 0142.

Colour: Straw.

Nose:
Mashed potatoes and porridge, boiled cereals, fresh butter, fresh herbs (chive, watercress). Some rather bold notes of mint tea, verbena, a little bergamot. Grassy and malty, growing more and more herbal. Extremely strong neat. It gets a tad smoky with a few drops of water, with also quite some honey.

Taste:
A ‘punchy’ mix of liquorice and fruits (ripe apricots and melons). Hot caramel, grains, maybe a little lavender crème and something pleasantly prickly (icing sugar, pear drops). With a little water now, it gets more drinkable, more playful (lots of acidic fruits like lemons, fresh pineapples, apricots, kiwis) and sweeter and more rounded, as expected (light caramel and honey) very powerful, with some nice notes of spices and herbs beyond the sweetness. Some notes of fresh apricot.

Finish:
It’s good and the finish is rather long, sweet and bitter in a nice way, with something waxy in the background.