Whisky : Highland Park 18 Year

Country/Region : Scotland/Islands

ABV : 43%

Cask : Ex-Sherry

Tasting : Neat in a Glencairn @ Home

Nose : Heady maritime smoke, ocean spray, and dried lavender emanate from the glass.  Notes of leather, tobacco, and creamy peanut butter give the nose some depth of flavor and sweetness.

Palate : Leather, heather, and dark chocolate give this a savory-herbal edge.  There is a lightly medicinal and faint salty peat tying everything together.  Creamy peanut butter gives the dram a nutty sweet cream element while white pepper provides a floral spice.

Finish : Medium to long acrid spice fading to leather.

Score : 5

Mental Image : Forward the smoke stakes on a steamship; it’s all faint acrid coal smoke and ocean breeze.

Something Better : Rock Oyster 18 (more salt, more refined flavors, better finish)

Something Similar : Highland Park 12 (similar light body, stronger iodine & smoke)

Something Worse : Johnnie Walker Green Label (light body, quick finish, faint maritime)

Notes : A bit too restrained for my taste; it had some intriguing complexity, but the overall body seemed a bit thin and the finish too quick.  The website/app ‘Distiller’ gave this bottle a 99/100 putting it right up there with Suntory’s Hibiki 21 Year and a Ledaig 42 Year.  I personally do not see it.  The Highland Park 18 Year is good, but it is not life changing.  It is always possible the bottle I got the dram from was a bit over oxidized or from an outturn that just did not quite hit all the same deep rich notes.  It is the kind of ‘almost good’ dram I try to retaste and reevaluate in the future.

Highland Park has always been an eye catching distillery.  Their viking iconography and hoard of odd bottle names make it hard to miss.  While the marketing department has a lot of fun naming and stylizing the bottles, it does not really convey a whole lot of meaningful information.  I’ve always found it to be a bit of a turn off.

I enjoy the details and minutia of whisky; cask types, barley varietals, yeast strains, distilling dates, vatting procedures, blending recipes… all of those things, while not the key element in enjoying a whisky, are important to understanding how a particular profile was achieved.  I love knowledge and I love being able to pour over the details of something.  They may not define my enjoyment of how a whisky tastes, but they can heighten it.  Or, at least give me a reason to buy and try a bottle.  I’ve shied away from Highland Park because I do not understand why the bottle named after one Norse king or god is more special than that of another.  It is fun, but it does not convey any real meaning to me.  

The 18 Year does provide an age statement and information about their process for acquiring sherry casks, but I wish that did not make it an exception among the Highland Park range.  There is a lot to love, but I won’t expect Highland Park to change any time soon, least of all change for me.