The Best Damn Single Malt I've Ever Tasted?
Bowmore 1966 50 Years Old
I came across an article the other day by Kara Newman, the spirits editor for Wine Enthusiast, who is a hell of a writer and really knows her stuff — and she’s lots of fun to hang out with at booze events, too. Her article, titled “Why Ultra-Aged Spirits Are Ripping You Off,” presents a relatively popular opinion among drinks writers — that the vast majority of spirits sporting eye-popping age statements (a 50 year old single malt, for instance, or a 20 year old bourbon) have in fact been aged longer than they should have, and that the astronomical prices being charged for most of them are for the number on the bottle, and their rarity, rather than their quality. For the most part, I don’t disagree. I’ve tasted my share of over-oaked booze, so tannic that afterwards I felt like I’d been licking tree bark. And I agree that for the price of a typical super-annuated bottle, you could buy several cases of something younger and better.
But there are exceptions. And boy oh boy, are some of those exceptions incredible. Like the Michter’s 25 Year Old Rye, big and spicy with strong notes of baking spices and dried fruit. Or Appleton’s 30 Year Old rum, a miracle of nature kept (relatively) youthful by master blender Joy Spence’s technique of consolidating barrels from the same batch, so they keep their distinctiveness without an overwhelming angels’ share. Or Wild Turkey’s recent 17 year old Master’s Keep Bottled In Bond bourbon, an unlikely masterpiece.
I have to try a lot of different whiskeys (and whiskies) for my job, and unless one of them becomes a part of my regular rotation, I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, months or years down the road, what most of them taste like apart from “good” or “bad” and maybe a couple of vague details, unless I consult my tasting notes. But there are a few that are going to stick in my taste buds’ memory bank forever, or at least indefinitely. And the one that resonates the strongest for me, which blew me away at the time and whose memory lingers the most powerfully, is, unfortunately, limited to 74 bottles worldwide and cost, at the time of its release, $30,000 a bottle. Which means the odds are I’ll never taste it again. But it’s proof that, occasionally at least, older is better. And if you’re going to spend $30,000 on a whisky… well, first get your priorities in order. But yeah, the 1966 Bowmore 50 Year Old is as close to “worth it” as a whisky that costs a a year’s rent (and I’m talking about NYC) can be. Grilled pineapple on the beach, by a campfire — how the hell did 50 years in oak do that?!
The funny thing is, it happens on a regular basis with their whiskies. The folks at Bowmore, an Islay malt, chalk it up to their Vault No. 1, the warehouse where the whisky is aged that dates back to the 18th century. Whatever the reason, the magic in their extra-aged whisky is consistent. I’ve had the good fortune to try four different 50-year-old Bowmores, all of them laid down in the 1960s, and they’ve all aged in roughly the same way, featuring a pronounced fruitiness mingled with a light, barbecue-type smokiness and a touch of sea spray. The 1965, for instance, has grilled mango on the beach by a campfire instead of the pineapple in the ‘66. Astoundingly, none of them are particularly oaky despite spending half a freakin’ century in wood. But that’s the magic of whisky, right?
I still wish the best damn single malt I ever tasted was a $40 12-year-old, but what are you gonna do. And if you feel like reading my Robb Report writeup of the Bowmore ‘66, click on this here link.