Whisky opinions, articles, feature pieces, info and reviews.
For people being introduced to whisky, the textbooks and the brand ambassadors teach you that whisky engages your senses. We look at the colour. We smell the aroma. We feel the mouthfeel and the texture in our mouth. We taste the flavour. These are things they tell you about when it comes to appreciating whisky.
That’s all good and well. But when did you last actually listen to your whisky?
At the start of every year, we all sit down with our calendar and enter all of our annual events and occasions: The public holidays. Your partner’s birthday. Your dentist appointment. Your wedding anniversary. The release of the next Glenmorangie Private Edition bottling. The excitement this year revolves around Bacalta.
Glenmorangie’s Private Edition range is a special once-off release that comes out each year to showcase a new variation of the Glenmorangie flavour profile. Through the use of different casks or wood regimes during maturation, or by using different varieties of barley (or different peating levels), the usual Glenmorangie DNA is given a tweak and a nudge to explore new and – without fail – delicious flavour territories. Some within Glenmorangie (including Dr Bill Lumsden himself) have hinted or suggested that the Private Edition range showcases experimentation but, to my palate, the results are consistently too successful and too good to be mere experiments. No, this is a product line that knows what it’s doing. And for those who are curious, in terms of volume, the Private Edition range makes up less than 1% of Glenmorangie’s total annual production, so it is genuinely a very limited product.
