#HIGHLAND PARK MARKET PUNCHIES FULL#

Which is great as the distillery character remains front and centre and perfectly balanced with the sherry. Comments: This one feels oddly like many of these great indy versions of HP from refill that are floating about today’s market. Finish: long, brightly herbal, some honey and mead, lemon barley water and heather ale. Still rather sooty and with oily sheep wool and camphor. With water: fatter, slightly greasier and meatier but still with wonderfully medical and herbal aspects. Mouth: herbal, wormwood, soot, some rather syrupy medicines, putty, camphor and rather a nice mix of coastal freshness and warm freshly baked breads. Then some increasingly saline qualities like crushed seashells. With water: a clean and precise earthiness, nicely punchy olive oil notes, more of these wet leafy, damp forest aspects - things like moss and ferns. Also you get an immediate impression of distillery character, which I’m all for. Nose: golden syrup, brown bread, wet leaves, chalky rocks, medicines, clay and limestone. Highland Park 15 yo 2002/2017 (56.9%, OB for NOR’EASTER, cask #3249, refill sherry butt, 546 bottles)Ĭolour: gold. This is a pretty brutal and tough example of HP but the quality is pretty high. Comments: The flip side of the HP coin from the OB 18yo. Finish: good length, very dry, salty, flinty and with bags of taut minerals, bath salts and dried herbs. Still rather pure and chiselled in style. With water: softer, more oily, herbal, coastal, chalky and medical. Punchy, similarly austere and with a pretty crisp coastal accent. Mouth: big arrival, all on hot cider, grass, apple peelings, tarragon, flints, chalk, soot, lime infused cooking oils and white pepper. Putty, fabrics, wet cereals, hessian cloth. With water: a little leafier and more herbal.

In time it becomes a little more scented with beach pebbles, citronella wax and sandalwood. Grasses, green herbs, apple peelings, mineral oil, putty, lime pith, chalk. Nose: bone dry at first nosing, could almost be the purest, most mineral and chiselled of Loire sauvignons.

Highland Park 19 yo 1985/2005 (54%, Signatory Vintage ‘Cask Strength Collection, cask #2911, hogshead, 296 bottles)Īlways intriguing to try whiskies from ‘my’ vintage. It just oozes class and easy, sinewy charm. Comments: Little wonder these batches elevated HPs name during that era and won just about every award going. Finish: Long, warming, again with all this chocolate and nuts, wee touches of lemon, more dunnage earthiness and more salty old rancio sherry. Emphatic, precise, punchy and just brilliant.

#HIGHLAND PARK MARKET PUNCHIES FULL#

Big, fatty, salty, nutty, leather, earthy and full of tobaccos, dried mushrooms, figs and this superbly mineral and nervously saline sherry. Gentle and aromatic notes of dried herbs, medicines and hessian. Quite a while away from the current batches, and you really get the impression that they may have put some older stocks in the mix. Many nuts, chocolate, praline, rancio, leather and some sea salt. Nose: wonderfully old school, easy, leafy and earthy sherry. We’ll go forwards haphazardly by vintage/age, but first: a couple of older aperitifs to acclimatise.įrom one of these rather dark vattings in the old cylindrical bottles. These HP single casks can be pretty hard work, but let’s not allow that to deter us. I had originally assumed last year’s session would be a one off, but then a certain sizeable Alsace wine grower with a taste for Highland Park furnished me with an even bigger pile of these official single casks.Īdd to that the fact I was already accumulating a few other HPs of my own for a more modest session and there you have it: time for a sequel. I just noticed that I am recording notes for this session exactly one year and a day after I published the first of these rather ambitious tasting line-ups. And skilled taster Angus MacRaild in Edinburgh

Highland park market punchies