Murray McDavid Strathdearn
Cask Craft Series Tomatin | 44.5% ABV
Score: 6/10
Good Stuff.
TL;DR
Engaging, moreish whisky for a fantastic price.
What’s it all about?
We’re all looking, amongst the almost infinite choice we face when looking for a new bottle of whisky, for the wee hidden gem. The one that catches us by surprise.
Murray McDavid (MMcD) is an independent bottler from whom I’ve tried multiple whiskies, mostly their Benchmark Range Glen Garioch. Their “portfolio”, for want of a better word, is really very nicely presented, using colour as the differentiator.
The rich gold labels are the “Mission Gold” - big age statement rarities. Their aquamarine (my favourite colour) labels are the “Benchmark” - the place where most of us will loiter, with myriad whiskies from across Scotland’s distilleries and uniquely casked options too - the Glen Garioch in Tokaji is superb.
Then their red labels are “Mystery Malts”, which is something a lot of people are singing about right now, thanks to Thompson Brother’s release of unknown whiskies for the same price - you could get a 5yo Nc’Nean or a 29yo Speyside Distillery. It looks like MMcD have been doing this since 2008.
The blue labels are “Select Grain” - single grain whiskies, the orange labels are “The Vatting” - blended single malt whiskies, and finally the lime green labels are “Crafted Blend” - the blended single malts and grains. All really easy to understand and, if you find a bottle you love, easy to dive into that specific niche through colourful labels. Very nice.
The Murray McDavid main range.
Dean Jode, Head of Whisky at MMcD and an absolutely fantastic photographer (please do check his work out ), is very particular about his labels. I know because of the funny wee interaction I had when this bottle under review today arrived, but I’ll come to that.
The pricing of MMcD has typically been the stumbling block for me; for the whiskies I enjoy, like Glen Garioch, are priced a touch higher than other bottlers: the 13yo Tokaji was £75 or thereabouts. The Benchmark series begins around £60 and heads north of £120. The question of worth - will it be worth the price - is the thing that stops most of us taking the leap of faith. My goodness, how many times I’ve been stung by a bottle that is promised to be the very best example of a distillery, only to turn out a bit mediocre.
Despite the joy I’ve found in their Benchmark Glen Garioch, I’ve never really considered MMcD as an independent bottler I want to explore. Their lower priced Benchmark, like the 6yo Dailuaine at £54, finished in Madeira barriques sounds really interesting, but the Glen Garioch 14yo PX finish is £100.
I don’t know what 6yo Dailuaine might present like, but I do know the 14yo Geery will likely be great. But I’m not spending £100. It’s a tough one.
Review
Strathdearn (Tomatin) Cask Craft series - Sherry Finish, 44.5% ABV
£28.50 available online and shops.
I labour the point because this wee bottle today is polar opposite in price to the Benchmark series.
I stumbled upon them whilst picking up the 2025 Ardnamurchan “The Midgie” and fancied a wee something else to tickle my taste buds. Aberdeen Whisky Shop (AWS) had some MMcD on offer, and it was from a range I’d never really seen - Cask Craft.
This is an entirely new range of whiskies that showcase a distillery through cask maturation and finishes, at a price that is well below that of releases from MMcD, and well below a lot of releases. The label shows a big cask in the middle, colour coded to the type/previous contents, and in big letters the type of cask itself. It’s easy to see the casks you prefer and pick one based on that information alone. However, the distillery is also stated on the label, so it’s not an exercise in blind tasting.
As I was flicking through these bottles, all priced at the time of writing at £28.50, I found a sherry finish and noted the distillery as “Strathdearn”. Strathdearn? That must surely be a pseudonym, and sure enough it’s code for Tomatin, my old pal. Not one to shy away from a challenge, I bought it sight unseen.
It arrived promptly, but something was amiss. The label was a bit tatty and looked like it was stuck on backwards - in that the back of the bottle, with the wee nub on the base to align labels, was at the front. It was also missing the rear label entirely.
I just assumed that this was why these were on sale - duds maybe, that didn’t pass labelling QC. Not to worry, I took to google to see pictures of the back label, with all that information on there, and was happy with that. Posting on Instahoot with a note that my label was a bit odd, Dean Jode messaged, rightfully upset, to ask what was happening.
A few minutes later Nick from AWS sent a picture of the rear label from another bottle for my information, and I sent a video back showing my bottle-sans-label as evidence. Strange. It got stranger still, when a few days later Nick sent me a video showing a bottle he’d just found, with only the rear label on it - the ying to my yang. Very funny.
And the strangeness didn’t stop there - Nick then peeled off the rear label to reveal…a front label. It seems like somewhere deep in the MMcD bottling hall the labelling machine decided to have a bit of Friday fun.
Frustrating for Dean. It bears no significance when I’m considering the whisky though, and if anything makes it all the more endearing.
Score: 6/10
Good Stuff.
TL;DR
Engaging, moreish whisky for a fantastic price..
Nose
Gingerbread. Baked fruit pastry pie - apples, pears. Stewed. Caramelised. Sugar dust. Nutmeg. Leafy (marijuana). Sour cream. Star anise. Pickles/gherkins. Tablet. Vanilla pod. Honey cashews. Bitter orange.
Palate
Big sweeties - baking spices, caramel shortbread, cedar and red fruits - light strawberry or raspberry. Gingerbread. Tiffin. Pickles here too - souring. Salty. Vanilla ice cream. A really pleasant drop. Oranges - sour, sweet, fleeting.
The Dregs
This is bold and flavourful. It’s no shrinking violet. Juicy fruits - apples, pears, blueberries, all baked with sugar and cinnamon and a touch of star anise. Flowing caramel. It’s a sweetie of a whisky. Nothing like the Tomatin of prior experience, and effortlessly more engaging than the Amarone that made me apoplectic.
Ralfy talks of the tenets of whisky sensation - sweet, sour, salty and bitter and if they’re used in balance whisky can be elevated. There are sour notes in there - pickles/gherkins and some sour cream, but that just adds to the flavour spectrum. It’s only a problem if it’s imbalanced, if those notes consume the experience and turn it into a sour one, literally. Here, it’s all fleeting, all delicate and integrated.
I’m still surprised that this whisky is as tasty as it is, for the princely sum of £28.50. That’s remarkable, astonishing even. This is a joy to sit and sip of an evening, with lots of lovely, easy flavours shooting all over the palate and is, I think, one of the best wee value whiskies I’ve bought in a long while. It’s danger whisky - it disappears rapidly.
More enjoyable than the Leith Legacy, and as good, if not slightly more aligned to my tastes, than Woven Homemade: both blends. This is single malt whisky from Tomatin. Make of that what you will.
So the price is fantastic, the whisky is engaging and the colour is natural. What’s not to love! Well worth picking up, and I’ve heard that the Cask Craft Inchgower finished in Madeira is even better. Get in there now while the prices are low, and enjoy a whisky that is flavourful, accessible and fun. Thanks for reading.
Oh, one other thing. A wee hot potato for you.
This whisky is presented at 44.5% ABV, an odd number sure, and falling just short of our hardball “46% is best” barrier to success. Why this ABV across the range? Is this another Talisker weird trademark ABV thing? I hadn’t really thought about it at all: the whisky is good enough to not even question it and I just took it was a way to enjoy without tinkering - much the same as some 43% whiskies sing at that strength. Open it, pour it, enjoy it.
It was Dean who brought it up - why that specific ABV, you wonder? And what he said has really got me thinking: this whisky is actively chill-filtered, not to stop the whisky clouding for aesthetic reasons, the biggest reason for chill-filtering, but as a way to manipulate the flavour. For the better.
Think of that: using a technique that’s widely regarded as catastrophic to flavour, stripping all those big juicy bits that deliver character to our faceholes, being deployed as a way of making the flavour…better.
I don’t know why, and I feel a bit dim even now, but it feels counterintuitive. I’m with everyone when we say that the concept of filtering whisky to remove flocculating particles so that, for those that deem it important, their whisky remains perfectly clear when ice is plopped in, is bad joo joo. Let it be what it wants to be - free, cloudy and packed full of the flavour it always had. We want it. Always. Forever.
Well it turns out that some whiskies can be improved using chill-filtration, to remove astringency or otherwise off-putting characters from younger whiskies, and for the Cask Craft range to inhabit its entry-level position for folk coming in new to whisky, it’s essential. Using chill-filtration is not something MMcD are deploying across any of their other ranges, just the Cask Craft. It’s a new one to me, and something I think warrants further exploration. Not because I want to expose some hack technique or reveal some witchcraft, quite the opposite.
My wants in a casual whisky are completely satisfied. I am happy. I am content. The “what if” of non chill-filtration is irrelevant, to me, in this case. Whatever it took to create this tasty whisky, is what it took to create this tasty whisky. I’m not concerned or interested or upset about what it could’ve tasted like “naturally”, because it sounds like it would’ve been edgy and, for want of a better word, pointless for what it’s designed to do.
So my observation, therefore, I suppose, is this: if a whisky is designed to be an entry point, a stepping stone into the beautiful world of more challenging whisky, and in the glass that whisky is great, and costs £28.50, what does it even matter?
Good whisky is good whisky. We are always chasing fully natural products to the shunning of things that might be worthwhile, and often I’ve found some of those fully natural products to be underwhelming, or hot as a week in the jail, or demanding tickling to get it palatable. There’s no hard and fast rule.
Chill-filtration has positive use cases, therefore, and has tempered what would’ve been a whisky that no-one would likely rate highly, and would probably put off new whisky drinkers, into a whisky I think is a wee gem hidden amongst the infinite, even for us whisky-ultras. Price matters massively here - if this was £50 it would be a different ballgame. Sub-£30? Johnny Walker Black Label territory - fair game.
There we go. Whisky for thought. I’ve not mentioned that, despite the “Sherry Finish” statement on the label, like all the other bottles from the Cask Craft range, this is actually a vatting of 6yo Tomatin spirit fully matured in ~35 first-fill Oloroso hogsheads.
Those labels, and their consistency of message for folk reaching around in the dark for whisky to try, really are important to Dean!
Score: 6/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. DC
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