Angus MacRaild:
Colour: pale amber. Nose: bang! Old school sherry. This unmistakeable and utterly charming mix of dried fruits with more luscious ripe green ones overlaid. Also leaf mulch, cocoa, tobacco and a savoury / salty rancio note. Enchanting is often the word that comes to mind with such bottlings. Mouth: very nutty, chocolatey and showing many dense notes of fig, date, sultana and praline. Also some espresso with a single sugar cube. Still muchly, leathery and chocolatey. Only thing is that detracts is a little bit of OBE mustiness. Finish: medium, leafy, autumnal, leathery and with some drier tones. Comments: pretty irrefutable really. We should retrospectively apply warning stickers to all such bottles: 'WARNING: do not consumer alongside current NAS Macallan'. Just that wee bit of OBE will hold this one back, but it's beautiful old style whisky.
Whisky Notes (90)
Nose: great nose, with a whole array of old-style notes like turpentine, furniture wax and just a hint of copper polish, but also juicy plums, raisins, even cooked strawberries. Whiffs of wet wood and old books. Me gusta mucho.
Mouth: slightly less convincing. It does show a similar (nice) fruitiness, lots of apricot jams, red berry jams, as well as honey, oranges and light hints of herbal liqueurs, but overall it feels a tad soft, malty and circling around brown sugar notes. Almost too easy to drink. Hints of milk chocolate.
Mouth: medium, on mocha, Demerara sugar and hints of old oak.
Easy to see this is what Macallan’s reputation is based on. Great sherry influence, juicy and elegant. The nose was excellent, the palate a little simple but still really good.
BOW (86)
Maltfascination.com:
Macallan is one of those distilleries that have spent ages getting their reputation to a stellar level.
Age was important, golden promise barley was important, the best sherry casks from Jerez were important. Only to be kicked down again by themselves when suddenly all these things were no longer valid points.
Suddenly there was the Fine Oak range which diluted half their own arguments, and they followed that up by a nigh innumerable amount of releases without an age statement.
Of course, there are still great whiskies from the distillery, but you have to look for them, and have to be willing to shell out for them.
So, when you get the chance to try a dram from decades ago when everything was better (was it, really?), you do. So, tasting notes to a late eighties bottling of the regular 10 year old as it was then.
Sniff:
Very smooth with a lot of fruity sherry. Plums, dates, peaches, but on top of that a lot of Valencia oranges. It’s very gentle, but not thin.
Sip:
The palate has a note of black pepper that brings a bit of punch, but is otherwise a tad thin. More so than the nose. Still, there’s a lot of fruity sherry, oranges, peaches, mandarin. More oak than I expected too.
Swallow:
A bit dry on the finish, and nicely warm. It becomes a bit more malty and wood focused than it was before. Less fruity. Some raisins towards the end.
A good look into whisky from the eighties, and Macallan from the eighties, but with the relatively young age and low abv it falls quite short of greatness. In all honesty I expected more from this, and it doesn’t do Macallan’s reputation justice, I think.
