I'm starting off this blog with a real flawed gem... sometime soon I'll try the other expressions from Bowmore, but at $25 Bowmore Legend positions itself squarely as a "liquor store impulse purchase." Which is what it was, so I guess Bowmore wins this round. On to the golden liquid itself...
Legend has no age statement (NAS), which means the whisky inside could be any vintage. At around $25 a bottle, it's safe to say that the vast (vat?) majority here is going to be very, very young. A cursory Google search finds a variety of places that say 8 years ... that sounds about right. All ex-bourbon barrels, so you get the usual vanilla/honey/oak notes you would expect to.
Nose: Muted, surprisingly so. When the glass first passes under my nose, I get light smoke and peat (very nice, too), along with lemon - lots of lemon. Lemon peel (bitter), lemon oil (sweet), lemon flesh (tangy). As the whisky continues to sit in the glass, the smoke totally dissipates and a honeyed scent comes forward. A saltiness crouches somewhere in the back of the scent. By the third glass or so, the nice smoke traces have slipped away to parts unknown, and the interplay changes to sweet versus salty.
Mouthfeel: Thin, very thin. Maybe a little oily.
Palate (Palette?): Sweet! Lemons galore, but sweetened lemons. And youthful - it's very bright, with almost no complexity in any of the flavors. In this way, you might even call it "pure." Virginal?
There is a really strange effect happening here where the smoke and the sugar sort of stratify away from each other, and work against each other - they are widely separated and never merge at any point. At cross purposes. You're left with a sort of light smoke that "colors" the citrusy sugar (again, lots more lemons, maybe some unripe orange) and results in the creation of a flavor I can only call "wet straw."
This flavor is lightly informed by notes of honey and caramel which disappear as soon as they appear. Like actors taking a bow at the end of a play, they step forward only to curtsy and immediately retreat back into the ensemble.
The strange straw flavor varies and wobbles as the balance of the smoke and lemon citrus varies from taste to taste (depending, I suppose, on how long I leave the glass to sit, and where the whisky hits my mouth). It's not unpleasant, but it is rather basic and has no corners or edges or nuances. Just sweet citrus, and a separate element of light smoke that kind of duel each other. At the very end of the palate is a nice saltiness, but it doesn't stay to play.
Finish: On the finish, the smoke and sugar recede and leave behind young oak and white pepper, which bring a dryness and a spice (but not much of either) of medium-to-long length. Nothing sings here, though.
Verdict: Hesitantly recommended? Honestly, for $25, this isn't bad. It would go well as a mixer, replacing similarly priced but leagues worse fare like Dewar's White Label, Cutty Sark, et al. For an impulse purchase in line at a liquor store, I think it's just fine. And now I'm curious to try the "real" Bowmore expressions, since the Legend here has the seeds of being a really good whisky, everything is just underbaked.
Link to the Bowmore Legend website: http://www.bowmore.com/whiskies/legend/
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