Glenturret Distillery, Scotland     founded: 1775 | active
For more detailed mapping of the distilleries in the area from our whisky map page, use this link.

It's fruity in all sorts of ways: the first cut of a granny smith, apple studle and plain old apples. Apples? Apples. Wang in a twist of orange and get tipsy on cider - and finish it all off with some melon bubblegum. It shifts slightly to car sweets and Werther's Originals, then continues on a creamy theme (a thcream?) with some white chocolate and a creme brulee. It would be boring not to throw in a curveball or two, so I invited (Chinese) rice wine and mould along for the ride, who then invited their pals cut grass and Geraniums without even asking - how rude.

It seems a bit sweeter on the palate and the creamy theme continues from the nose: butterscotch hardboiled candy, Bailey's (but good), caramelly and cream. Then, BOOM! Hot chocolate liqueur. As if Santa took too much Viagra, Christmas has come early: Brandy butter and Christmas orange making way for Black Forest gateaux and black forest ice cream with cherries. Just like the nose, this sweet creaminess is balanced with some less usual flavours: a bit of chili spice and candied kerosene (if that's a thing, then I'm Jesus Christ's wingman), cold liver oil and finally a spiced finish cardamom and aniseed - niiiiice.

If this finish isn't medium in length then we're all a bunch of losers and we should just stop drinking whisky and start knitting and sip tea. The sweet cremery of the long-long-ago has dissipated or at the very least, buggered off home early. OK, so there's still a hint of custard creams and vanilla bon bons, but that's it - in fact, it's got a litte metallicy (not metallica-y) with someone sucking on a rusty spoon and a salty spearmintiness invading gradually. That mintiness starts going menthol as piney flavours announce their arrival ("Hullo!") with aniseed balls presenting themselves as the pretentious synergy between palate and finish and eventually going home with no friends.

~£46 (75cl)

Wikipedia: Glenturret Distillery   |   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenturret_Disti

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.

83 / 100