Edradour Distillery, Scotland     founded: 1825 | active
For more detailed mapping of the distilleries in the area from our whisky map page, use this link.

This had a lot of character, which seemed to go down pretty well ("I like it!", "delicious"), and there was a definite jam thing going on (raspberry or plum maybe, but definitely jammy). The raspberries from the jam were also there in non-jam form, but decided a 3rd form (perhaps halfway between jam and not-jam) was too much to handle. There was also a touch of rosemary and something a bit soapy - perhaps combined into one of those posh soaps you get at Christmas that has all sorts of non-soap stuff whacked in for the hell of it.

There was an Oloroso-style dryness - perhaps not unexpected with a red wine finish - combined with a strong toffee hit ('booyacka-toffee', stroopwaffel, cinder toffee), rubbery and a massive waft of condoms ("why did you mention that?!", "you'd expect a pretty strong Pavlovian response to condoms..? Hmm..").

And moving from Pavlov to Hume, by way of a segue I'm not clever enough to think of, we still had a couple of quotes ringing in our ears as we were tasting this whisky. We met for this meeting by the statue of David Hume in central Edinburgh, and he had a few words for us on the act of whisky tasting:

"It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another."

"Where men are the most sure and arrogant, they are commonly the most mistaken."

"Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them."

I think what we can gather from that is we should always compare our opinions to a standard set of tastes, the more sure and arrogant we are as individuals, the more wrong we are, but that just by contemplating a whisky, beauty is made to exist...

The Oloroso-y dryness was really nice, but there was a slight spiciness ("chili chocolate") creeping in that wasn't to everyone's taste, combined with an increasing (weird) saltiness and finishing with a smattering of liquorice and Simnel cake.

The liquorice from the taste is now even more pronounced, now combined with a boiled sweet that tastes like brandy ("brandy bottles?" very common in the north east), and now the spiciness is in tandem with zinginess. The general consensus was the length was somewhere between medium and long, with medium-medium-long (MML) the rough average.. and to finish off, we were all left slightly disturbed when one of our party suggested the finish tasted somewhat similar to another 'finish'... let's not disturb you with the details.

In general, this was described as "the best Edradour I've ever had", as well as "pneumatic drilling on a stage - 6 inch nails". It's unclear whether the latter was simply a reference to the length of nail that the pneumatic drilling would be sensibly combined with, or a clever twist on the the band 9 Inch Nails, and this was in fact suggesting this whisky was like pneumatic drilling on a stage for which a band 2/3rds the nominal amount of 9 Inch Nails was performing. Who knows...

Prediction Game
We tasted this blind, with everyone trying to guess its age and cost. The average age guessed was 14 (10-18) and average cost was £52.11 (£39-£65). That's a fair bit older and a little bit pricier than it was, but reasonable guesses.

~£45 (70cl)

WhiskyBase: Edradour Super Tuscan   |   http://www.whiskybase.com/whisky/55220/edrado

We've always scored out of 10 in our group (see number in red box, below), with scores regularly given across that spectrum. The value out of 100 below is adjusted to the scale most commonly used for whisky reviews, to allow for better comparison.

77 / 100