Official bottlings comparison review | 45 & 48% ABV
Score: 9/10
Exceptional.
TL;DR
I find this simply wonderful
Compare and contrast
Comparing and contrasting whiskies side-by-side is a nice tool in an appreciator’s toolkit. Some whiskies, when sipped separately, can feel like the same whisky. Only when you try them side-by-side do the intricacies show themselves and, once you’ve tasted them, those differences can never be “untasted”.
When I first sipped Aultmore 12yo, to my blunt palate, it tasted just like the Balblair 12 from my memory. Only after doing a side-by-side did I find the intricate differences; both solid whiskies, but they are not the same.
This same can be done to highlight prominent features in a whisky too. As some of us can relate to, peat blight is real, especially when we drink a flight of peated whiskies, somewhere along the way, we don’t get the peat anymore.Many a time when I am writing tasting notes, I have to remind myself that the whisky was supposed to be peated, and I have to look for the peat to make sure it’s there. More often than not I find it, but some would argue that peat and smoke should be the first thing that hits my senses.
To “fix” this, I simply have a small dram of a known unpeated whisky, something like a Glenfiddich would do, and the peat from our supposedly peated whisky suddenly reveals itself.
Most recently I was at a whisky festival where I drank around four peated whiskies in a row, and the fourth was a 16 year old independently bottled (IB) Laphroaig. I didn’t get any smoke at first, and I thought the 16 years in the cask must have rounded off the peat, but then I thought again, 16 years shouldn’t be enough for the peat to completely dissipate, so I took a sip of my wife’s dram, a nicely playing 21 year old Glenlivet, before going back to my Laphroaig, and boom, the peat is there, front and centre.
Speaking of this comparing and contrasting fun, of which we do quite a bit of at Dramface. I’d like to chip in too, because I have two similar bottles sitting around, and it’s a perfect excuse for me to crack open one of them.
Sadly, the Longmorn 16 has been discontinued, revived, and discontinued again, but fortunately, I have both of them in my stash. You can probably find them on the secondary market, but there is no need to overpay for it, there are plenty of other equally good, reasonably priced whiskies. At the time of writing, the original 18 year old Longmorn is still available, and is a perfectly competent whisky, but the distillery’s parent company is placing the new version out of reach by injecting it with ‘luxury’ steroids along with an overzealous price hike.
A Longmorn 18yo made an appearance as part of Pernod Ricard’s Secret of Speyside series, priced at around £80-90, but as the enthusiast community was hoping for it to become a regular release, it seems like Pernod decided to pull a fast one by changing it into a cask strength version at more than double the price. Longmorn is good, a cask strength 18 year old longmorn is very good, but at £220, no thanks.
I don’t have a particularly strong affection for Longmorn, even during my early days of attempting to own a bottle of every distillery under the sun, Longmorn wasn’t on my radar. Looking back now, this is not too surprising, because Longmorn has long been a workhorse distillery for Pernod Ricard, contributing to its blends such as Ballantines and Chivas Regal I suspect. In fact, I think that at the time Longmorn didn’t even have an official expression available to me, thus I wasn’t aware of its existence.
It’s not the first time this particular man made my wallet leak money, but the Longmorn 16 first piqued my interest when Daniel Whittington of the Whiskey Tribe raved about it, and that was the first time I’ve heard of Longmorn the name. Upon further research, the distillery seemed to be very well respected among blenders and distillers, earning it the nickname of a whisky maker’s distillery or something along those lines. Since learning about that fact, I started actively hunting for IB Longmorn, but they often demanded way too much money, and this was even for me at a stage where I was happy to splurge on whisky. Until this day, not a single bottle of IB Longmorn has made it to my shelf.
What has made it to my shelf though, were both the old and new versions of the Longmorn 16yo, both acquired under rather fortunate circumstances. The new Longmorn 16 was only recently discontinued and plenty of stock was still floating around, so I was able to get it close to MSRP. While the old Longmorn 16 was not widely available, at the time I befriended an owner of a nearby whisky shop, knowing that I was after that particular bottle, he sold me one from his personal collection for around £80, not cheap, but still considerably less than what I would have had to pay in the secondary market.
Thus the two bottles are now on my shelf, enabling today’s review.
Review
Longmorn 16yo, Discontinued old- bottling, olive green box and label, 2007-2016 release, 48% ABV
Secondary market only, occasional dusties.
Before moving on to the whiskies, there is a disclaimer to be made. I had so much anticipation with the old Longmorn 16yo that over the years I’ve read other reviews in both written and video form, so while I have not revisited any other reviews during the process of writing my own, some of the tasting notes have been etched in my mind, so I can’t say that I am going into this process completely neutral and unbiased. With that out of the way, let’s dig in.
Nose
A subdued nose, creamy butterscotch, caramel, eucalyptus, menthol, green tea, some hints of floral vanilla, even some chilli peppers.
Palate
Creamy and oily arrival, rich and warm honey, salted vanilla caramel, apples, pears, melons, oranges, grapefruits, all sorts of fruits lining up to present themselves, black pepper and a bit of ginger on the development, turning a little bit mineralic, surprisingly drying on the finish, with the black pepper and tea lingering; amusingly to me, when I thought the finish was over, the black pepper wouldn’t go away, and the tea has a slow but drying effect making it dangerously moreish, and I’m back for another sip…
The Dregs
I came into this review not wanting to be extra critical of this whisky, I didn’t want its reputation to inflate its score, but this is simply a wonderful whisky. There are a lot of flavours present but they don’t get in each others’ way. Akin to a well-rehearsed play, where actors and actresses know the timing of their appearances perfectly, deliver their lines, and exit the stage, vacating it for the next to come in and take centre stage. My words sound fantastical, but this is simply that good, no wonder it is a legendary whisky.
Score: 9/10
