Gordon and Macphail : Connoisseurs Choice: Balmenach: 2004 (Scottish Speyside Single Malt Whisky: 9 years: 46% ABV)
Visual: Slightly brackish grain.
Visual: Fast thick streaks.
Nose: Thick and pungent. Heather. Lime. Pencil shavings. Light smoke and sulfur. Peppered beef. Water makes more grassy and toffee.
Body: Soft vanilla. Moss and greenery. Toffee. heather. Malt chocolate. Beefy back. With water becomes treacle and honey. Grassy and slightly soured.
Finish: Light medicinal. Salt. Vanilla and toffee. Malt chocolate. Peppered beef. Water adds sour dough touch.
Conclusion: It’s always an exciting and mildly nerve inducing experience going for one of the lesser known distilleries. Excitement comes in blazing a trail little travelled, nerve inducing comes as you are worried that you may just have brought back 70cl of alcoholic piss. Or Tamdhu.
This is an interesting find, pungent on opening, and it doesn’t seem to neatly fit into any one whisky area’s expectations. It is grassy, almost mossy in fact, thick textured but with a sweet toffee back , and yet also with light medicinal touches and salt in the finish. Very light but there. If I may be excused one of my horrifyingly bad analogies – it kind of tastes like a sweet toffee swamp. Ok, that sounded really bad, let’s try that again, bear with me .. Hmm, it is like a big ball of salted toffee that has fallen through a moss pit.
I may give up on analogies. New years thingy. Given up. Completely. Honest.
While this is not one of the all time greats it is a robust whisky, and without a lot of the harsh extreme flavours that come with a lot of the big whiskys. It has mellow grassiness, heather flavour, sweet easy going base, but thick and with medicinal hints. Kind of the easy going whisky for someone who only has the barest grasp on what easy going means.
Any which way, while it is not a world shaker, I have no regrets to having a bottle. A very solid general drinking whisky.
Background: Bottled 2013, so I am guessing 9 years, may be 8. This is part of my effort to try more distilleries I have yet to try, so I grabbed a bunch – mainly miniatures with this one being the exception. This one is a distillery used mainly as producing elements for blended whisky, but good old Gordon and Macphail have some independently bottled expressions.
