Tomatin has taken one other dip within the waters of positive and rare whisky with the launch of its oldest-ever travel retail exclusive, a forty five Yr Old limited to simply 250 bottles and priced at £7,500 (approx $9,500).
Released in March, the ultra-aged expression is just available in select airports and luxury travel shops, making it fiendishly tricky to come up with. That could have alerted collectors, with Batch 1 of the brand new expression prone to have good investment value should it prove popular.
And it definitely ticks plenty of boxes in relation to collectibility. For starters, the whisky was aged in a Spanish Oloroso sherry cask for its full 45 years, giving it a deep mahogany hue that immediately catches the attention.
It’s also thoroughly packaged. Each decanter is beautifully designed and, importantly, individually numbered from one to 250. They were custom-made by crystal experts, Glencairn, with a well-matched golden stopper, and placed in a beautiful high-gloss wood box.
The dark brown of the box and the gold detail make reference to the distillery’s Highland landscape, and the etchings on the wood box represent the rolling hills that surround the distillery, just outside of Inverness.
All of it works, little question. But let’s not forget what really matters: the whisky itself.
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Tomatin 45 Yr Old tasting notes
Bottled at 41.5% ABV, this whisky was approaching the very limits of its aging potential when it was bottled. Once it drops below 40%, it may well not be called Scotch whisky, so master distiller Graham Eunson would have had a really close eye on this whisky to make sure it stayed the suitable side of the road.
Let that take nothing away from the whisky though. Some whiskies work best when given maximum time to age, particularly in the suitable casks. It was bottled at cask strength, retains its natural color and is non-chill filtered, so what you purchase is, save a number of impurities, exactly what got here out of the cask.
Naturally, the whisky has absorbed plenty of flavor from the Oloroso sherry cask. You get the everyday mixture of dried tropical fruits and orange bitters. There’s a drying effect that sometimes comes from Spanish oak, which at this age presents itself as smooth dark chocolate and garden herbs.
It’s nice, approachable and would satisfy the few who’re buying this to drink.