Tasting Note: Compass Box The General

The Scotch Whisky Regulations (SWR) are written by the industry, and thus arguably don't serve the consumer as well as they might.

This fine dram is, I think, a case in point. Compass Box are so constrained by the SWR that they can only say that one component of the blend is 33 years old. We can infer that the other is older, and I've been verbally assured that the second component is forty years old, but it's all a bit unsatisfactory really.

Compass Box can tell us, however, that the two components which make up the General were both blended at a much younger age and then left in barrel, which isn't usually the case. Most blends will have only a brief marrying period, often in a huge steel vat, before bottling. I think that extended second ageing has contributed to the flavour of the resulting dram.

My grumblings about rules and regulations aside, I do think that this is a very, very fine dram indeed. Here are my notes.

Nose: A promising mix of woody and fruity aromas. Caramel, butter, and oranges. It seems very fresh and lively for such an old whisky. The caramel is evolving into Cream Line toffee, and the woody notes are growing stronger. There's even a little touch of fust or dunnage warehouse. Adding water releases much more sherrywood character, and now the toffee is moving over into tablet territory, and then further into Murray mints.

(For those of you who didn't grow up in Scotland in the 1970s: Cream Line was a brittle toffee with very strong creamy character. Tablet is a Scottish delicacy made by boiling up cream, butter, and sugar. Murray mints were a mildly minty boiled sweet.)

The palate is rather grippy with wood tannins, but also super-sweet, in the same toffee and fruit vein as the nose. There's also a touch of struck match from the sherry influence. The finish is malty, in a beery sort of way, but then loops back to the fruit toffee notes before going out on a kind of herbal mintiness. With water it settles down to an unctuous creamy toffee, underscored by a savoury note which rather reminds me of a Madeira-based gravy.

In conclusion, this is an absolutely superb blended whisky. It's thick and sweet and deeply satisfying to drink, but also complex enough to intrigue malt snobs. I recently tasted the Whyte and Mackay 40 Year Old, which costs about twice as much as this bottle, and I reckon this is the better of the two. Well done Compass Box.

For another take on this whisky, have a look at Steve Prentice's review over on Somerset Whisky Blog.

Tasting Note: Glenfarclas 40 Year Old

Glenfarclas are one of Scotland's few family owned distilleries, with the Grant family having been in charge since 1870. It's perhaps because of this family ownership that the distillery has some practices which I believe are unique in Scotch, and also offers a range of aged expressions which no other distillery can equal.

The Family Casks range of bottlings, for example, include vintage whisky for every year back to about 1954. The interesting thing about this range is that the casks on offer run through first, second, third and even fourth fill to what are described as plain casks (Fifth fill? Sixth fill?!)

Now, if you are planning on keeping whisky on the wood well into its fifth or sixth decade, fresh oak is most decidedly your enemy. Whilst it's true that whisky will take most of what it extracts from the cask in the early years of maturation, that extractive process will continue for the entire time that the malt is in the barrel. So for liquid which one intends to bottle after forty years, a fourth-fill cask will produce a much better result than a fresh, first-fill cask. After forty years a first fill cask would most likely be undrinkably tannic. On the other hand, and as is the case with tonight's fine dram, forty years is a useful span of time if you plan on using plain casks.

(I should note that as far as I know, Glenfarclas don't specify the casks used for this vatting as precisely as with the Family Casks range. So I'm speculating, mainly on the basis of how the whisky tastes.)

Appearance: a deep, deep nut brown, much darker than most drams.  Is that natural? I hope so.

Nose: old mellow and woody. There's a very restrained sherry note, but what dominates is the kind of elegant oak perfume I associate with Armagnac, something which reminds of old varnished wood warming in the sun, or of lavender furniture polish.

Palate: Supremely smooth. Sweet and gently sherried, with dried vine fruits, treacle toffee, and the other kind of toffee that has raisins and brazil nuts in it. Again, I'm strongly reminded of old Armagnac - there's not a lot of malt character.

Conclusion: the parallel with Armagnac is very interesting. It's the practice there to age brandy for many many decades in wood, and fifty year old spirits are not uncommon.

This is a very fine dram indeed, and in comparison with more or less everything else on the market at that age, the price tag of £300 seems like something of a bargain.