[Urbane Guerrilla]

Tonight's opening is The Ardmore: Legacy (No Age Statement), their main product. Gotten at by a mix of 80% peated malt and 20% unpeated. It's a Highland-region whisky.

Highland style whiskies have, I think, a habit of being... elusive. Subtle. Stealth malts. I've a few Highland malts in my liquor hutch now, just from buying rather randomly. It's a mix of style, and where the distillery actually is, that seems the determinant. I find, reading around tonight, that Glenmorangie is among the Highland region whiskies; hmm. I took a tour of Edradour's distillery, now asserted to be the *second* smallest distillery in Scotland after 2007, and duly took their tour dram -- and can't remember a single thing about Edradour whisky. Nada. From sipping The Ardmore, I begin to think perhaps this elusiveness is the Highland style's characteristic. Dare I say, it's discreet. Mannerly.

Yet the whisky is not characterless. Sweet, rather floral nose. Very moderate smoke, spiritous finish. The trained palates discern vanilla, honey, and toffee notes; I dunno about that. "Toffee notes" seems to come up a lot in whisky-tasting. Doubtless comes out of the barrels' wood.

They of course these days offer numerous fancier expressions, for instance a port wood finished bottling of twelve years stated age, at a price that will not horribly mangle your budget. And a bottling from the 1960s, 25yo, that goes a thousand pounds a pop, that definitely would.