Whisky : Orkney (Highland Park) 17 Year; The Exclusive Malts

Country/Region : Scotland/Islands

ABV : 57.9%

Cask : Refill Hogshead

Age : 17 Years (Distilled June 21, 2000)

Tasting : Neat in a Glencairn @ Home

Nose : Coal smoke, fresh linens, and salt spray— the nose sits somewhere between the age of sail and age of steam.  Grilled oysters are bursting with brine and hints of lemon, smoke, and meat.  The wife pegged it more like a can of smoked salmon— fishy, oily, meaty, smokey, and salty.

Palate : Forward the smoke stack on a steamship, there is tar and coal right away.  Earthy red clay salt, alaea, is salty and mildly earthy.  Smoked kelp and sweet tobacco leaf provide a rich complexity behind the coal.  The body is oily and chewy occasionally revealing sweeter notes like rum raisin cake. 

Finish : Lingering sweet honey and smoke, at times oily and tobacco.  Delicious.

Score : 7

Mental Image : Charred and storm tossed driftwood on a pebble beach.

Something Similar : Rock Oyster 18 Year (similar maritime notes, less meat, more spice & citrus)

Something Worse : Highland Park 18 Year (similar profile, less body, weaker finish)

Notes : This is everything I wanted out of the Highland Park 18 Year but did not find.  This was full bodied, full flavored, and fully satisfying.  It had an intensity and clarity of flavor that the standard 18 was lacking and an excellent chewy oily body.

So why do I think this Unnamed Orkney is the Highland Park I was looking for and not say a mysterious Scapa?  Two bits of evidence have me pretty confident here.  First, Scapa was mothballed for a decade between 1994 and 2004 and this was distilled on June 21, 2000.  Now, beginning in 1997 the owners of Scapa did hire the distillery crew from Highland Park to run the still for a couple of weeks during each summer, but they only seem to have been filling enough barrels to keep the core 12 Year Old in production while new owners were sought.  My second piece of evidence is more subjective: this just tastes like Highland Park far more than Scapa.  It has a lovely maritime tar and coal quality that I strongly associate with Highland Park and not at all with the lighter fruitier Scapa.

I bought this bottle to share and after pouring it a few times I feel the coming FOMO of not having my own bottle.  One precious all to myself... but I won’t, the whisky closet is full enough.  My nearly empty bottle will have to do and scotch is best shared.  And if I had not offered to split this bottle, I would have never bothered grabbing it in the first place.  Clearly this last paragraph is meant for future me to read and remember that I do not need another bottle of this.