Ardmore 32 Year (SMWS 66.246 "Cigars, Sauternes And Sautéed Sultanas")

 

Very old whisky (30+ years) is always expensive. Part of this reflects high demand - whether or not that demand is justified - and part of it reflects the lengthy investment by the distillery. A cask racked in the warehouse for three decades is necessarily taking up the space that two 15 year whiskies could be using... or three 10 year whiskies, and so on. 

This 32 year old Ardmore - my favorite distillery - is a Scotch Malt Whisky Society ("SMWS") release, matured in a second-fill sherry butt for what appears to be the entire maturation. I assume the sherry butt was relatively inactive, to allow for a 30+ year maturation without over-oaking the whisky or saturating it in sherry and losing the distillery character. 

Here are the official notes: 

Sticky heather honey and sauternes dessert wine were the base into which we blended tobacco leaves, sandalwood shavings and a trickle of pine sap. Lush textures coated the senses with walnut oil, treacle and the thick fig gloop that is Pedro Ximénez sherry mixed with oak ash in an old coal scuttle. Adding just a drop of water unleashed a torrent of syrupy sponge cake and molasses that poured into dark Irish coffee, closely followed by candied ginger and smoked vanilla pods. Fruit and wood now combined as juicy mangoes were crushed to a pulp beneath the teak-oiled wood of a willow cricket bat with a soft-to-the-touch chamois leather handle.

Sounds very promising! I'm hearing a lot of "old whisky" notes - leather, tobacco, sandalwood, resin - and a lot of "sherry" notes - walnut, treacle, fig, molasses. 

I'm quite curious how the quintessential "dirty fruit and cigarettes" Ardmore comes out at this age. Before this, the oldest Ardmore I've had was a 24 year from WhiskyNerds, and that was a stunning bottle. Bottled at 51.8% ABV, released as part of the SMWS Vaults series - their oldest and therefore rarest collection of whiskies. 

As a quick note, the United States Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), a wing of the Alcohol and Tobacco regulation system, forbids food words (or even food-related words) on a whisky label, considering them to be potentially misleading. So the UK nickname for this whisky, "Cigars, Sauternes, and Sauteed Sultanas" (which is good! Alliteration!) was changed to "Sweet Sponge Delight" (which is less memorable, and reflects to my eye and ear a certain lack of effort). I'm using the original name. 

Let's find out: 

Nose: I let this sit for an hour before nosing it. Here's what I scent: old sherry, like popping the cork on a 20 year old Oloroso - this presents as old leather, old dry tobacco, golden raisins, and intense walnuts. Really quite nutty. I also get old machine parts covered in old grease. Very light smoke - I assume this is very lightly peated. 

There is a considerable woodiness, which I expected to some extent. There are a ton of old wood scents here: wood polish, wood oil, wood shavings, etc. Definitely some honey as well, keeping the dry wood and sherry scents from overwhelming the nose. I also get a surprising amount of bitter orange - orange pith, orange peel, orange oil. 

With a few drops of water: It definitely gets a bit richer in a sweet direction. Cafe au lait or maybe Turkish coffee (with sugar); pound cake; thick veins of molasses. Lemon blossoms emerge - a really nice note. Some hints of tropical fruit. It's overall less dry and woody with a drop or two of water. 

Mouthfeel: Oily, medium-bodied. 

Palate: Quite interesting - reflecting the nose, it's quite dry and nutty and woody, with cigarette ash, old motor oil, lemon and orange flesh, Earl Grey tea, honey, walnuts, and definite hints of tropical fruit. 

It's much sweeter with water. Rich, ripe tropical fruit - coconut, pineapple, guava, and lots of mango. Honey and vanilla extract. Cake - imagine yellow birthday cake with little mango cubes in the batter. The tobacco note goes from old and dry to young and wet. I also get cherries. 

Finish: Surprisingly, without water added, this is where most of the fruited notes appear: I get mango, pineapple, coconut, walnuts, old smoke, and oranges. They all arrive in a sort of afterglow that last a good long time. Adding water makes the fruit notes stronger, and adds ginger to the finish. 

Verdict: This is a good example of a Very Old Whisky - it's complex, betrays a lot of wood influence without being "oak poisoned," has interesting fruit nuances, clearly discernible distillate character, and rewards slow sipping over an extended time. It's also quite pricy - $675 - and unless you are a diehard Ardmore or Highland whisky fanatic, it might be best to hunt this down in a good whisky bar. That said, it's a very good whisky with a ton of integrity, and absolutely worth it for us Ardmore nuts.