Highland Park 12 Year Old 2010 SMWS 4.325 Dipper's Dram

A renowned bottler to those in the know, The Scotch Malt Whisky Society (SMWS) offers its members access to cask strength single casks designated by a coded name composed of one number to identify the distillery, another for the cask number and a title given by the committee during a blind tasting. 

The label’s colour corresponds to one of the 12 aroma profiles found in the society’s classification.

This version, created on one of the 67 islands of Orkney, perfectly illustrates the powerful, smooth, fruity, earthy, medicinal, nobly spicy, floral and herbaceous style of this single malt, fittingly described by Michael Jackson in his Guide to Whisky as “the greatest all-rounder in the world of malt whisky”.

SMWS Distillery No. 4 is Highland Park, the largest and oldest malt whisky distillery in the Orkney archipelago, located in Kirkwall on the main island. Founded in 1798, it is today part of the Edrington Group along with The Macallan and Glenrothes and its whisky is world-renowned for the unique flavour provided to it by local Orcadian peat.

Colour: deep gold.

Nose: complex, lively. The first nose is characterised by notes of malted barley, pineapple, coconut and rice pudding, gradually becoming medicinal (ointment), finely peated and rooty (gentian). Allowed to breathe, a fine layer of green liquorice and spices (pepper, nutmeg) coats the taste buds. The exotic (passion fruit), deliciously fruity (pear) and mentholated aroma palette continually becomes more powerful.

Palate: clean, invigorating. On the attack, particularly expressive flavours of pineapple appear alongside more herbaceous (peppermint), empyreumatic (eucalyptus) and lemony notes. On the mid-palate, this thundering entrance gives way to a malty and earthy (iodine peat) sequence whose bitterness brightens up the flavour palette. Before becoming more unctuous, the end of the palate is vanilla, fruity (pear), nobly spicy (saffron, ginger) and liquoricey.

Finish: long, dense. Deeply intertwined with the end of the palate, the start of the finish ventures into new floral (lavender, violet) and honeyed (acacia) registers. The salty end of the finish reveals an incredible vanilla and herbaceous (basil, oregano) freshness. On the retro-nasal olfaction, notes of rush, bamboo shoot and reed evoke a lakeside landscape. The empty glass is musky, camphoric and malty.