Tomatin Distillery, Scotland     founded: 1897 | active
For more detailed mapping of the distilleries in the area from our whisky map page, use this link.

Our host threw away all of our carefully-crafted notes, so the following is an approximation of thoughts collated 3 1/2 months after the event...

This was a virgin oak edition of the Cù Bòcan ("ghost dog", FFS) but I'm not sure if everyone knew that. Virgin oak flavours predominated - that sort of raw woodiness. The contents smelled young too and didn't really ingratiate themselves on the audience, the lame story of the 'ghost dog' haunting the distillery still haunting our ears with aural bullshit.

It tasted much how you might expect, although these lightly peated Cù Bòcans perhaps lose the peat totally in a fully-matured virgin oak cask. It was sweet, simple and virginny - like a stupid, caring Richard Branson. More raw flavours and a slight wateriness. It wasn't inherently bad, just typical of the current uninteresting NAS releases from a number of distilleries.

No one particularly liked this, and it varied from the odd low score to mid-range - there's a vague memory of a sort of lemony woodiness towards the end, but never deviating too far from its raison d'être: simple, virgin oaky and overpriced.

Please note: the scores below are very limited by the notes being lost - the overall score best represents our collective memory, it won't be too far off being representative.

~£50 (70cl)

WhiskyBase: Tomatin Cù Bòcan   |   https://www.whiskybase.com/whisky/64851/tomat

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.

60 / 100