Whisky : Ardmore 10 Year SMWS 66.150 “Smoke, soot, and tarry ropes”

Country/Region : Scotland/Highland

ABV : 59%

Cask : Ex-Bourbon Barrel

Age : 10 Year (Distilled 23 July 2008, Bottled 2019)

Nose : Somewhere between vanilla bean ice cream and grilled jerk chicken.  There are vanilla pods, meaty smoke, herbal notes, spices, brown sugar— all sorts of sweet and bbq notes intermingle in different ways.  Dried grasses, sheep, and barnyard recall funky farm memories.  Beyond the farm are fish sauce, salt, and sticky black tar.

Palate :  Lovely oily body with a wonderful thick viscosity.  Wonderful presence across the palate and slowly develops from farmyard bbq to sweet sticky pineapple upside cake.  An earthy burning floral sweetness hits like a cow paddy on fire, maybe a bit of old hay.  Faint creaminess emerges along with black sugar and an herbal-honey candy.  Intense peat reek lingers on toward the finish with charred wood.

Finish : Long and lingering brown sugar, salt, and fat.

Score : 6

Mental Image : Barnyard Fourth of July.

Something Better : Port Charlotte 13Y; R&BT (richer more complex, similar cow paddy/sweet earth)

Something Similar : r/Scotch Ardmore 11Y (similar fruit/smoke/fire, more earth/peat reek)

Something Worse : Bunnahabhain 8Y SMWS 10.173 (similar herbal honey/bandaid, more fruit/butter)

Notes :  Another solid Ardmore.  This one had a wonderful funky-farm set of notes that combined well with a kiss of tropical fruit and healthy heap of bbq to bonfire smoke.  Though it was not quite as complex as some of the other SMWS Ardmore, or the great r/scotch pick, it had probably the best mouthfeel of any Ardmore I have encountered.  It was so wonderfully thick— it had excellent presence and the finish just stuck around forever.  

The wife called it balanced, her polite codeword for maybe a bit too safe and not interesting.  She concluded her blind tasting of this by calling it an unremarkable quality Islay, which means she thought it was alright for sipping.  There was something about this dram, maybe some of the salt, or the barn, that did recall Port Charlotte or even Bunnahabhain Staoisha.  It had the kind of bold brash burst of sooty flavors that one might expect from something young and heavily peated.  It was hard not to wonder what this might have been like after another decade in the cask— how it would have mellowed or matured— I imagine the wife would have scored it lower, but with such a great mouthfeel, I wonder if it would have developed the complexity it needed to reach the next level.