Cadenhead’s Glen Garioch 11yo Fino
Original Collection | 46% ABV
Score: 5/10
Average.
TL;DR
The nose writes cheques the palate can’t cash
Taking stock.
Sometimes in life it’s a good idea to hit the brakes and look around you instead of just ahead. Allow me to provide you with a glimpse of the ramblings inside my head at the moment.
Not looking backwards, mind you. I’ve never been one to do that. Apart from a moment here or there of delightfully floating on a cloud of happy memories and cuddly nostalgia, I tend to not look back very often.
There is, after all, always a next chapter to be written; an undiscovered path to walk or new mountains to climb. Maybe that’s because of my job as an artist, always falling from one short term project into the next or travelling from one place to another.
It’s usually a good thing, looking forward. But in my experience it does come with drawbacks. Often in my attempts to keep looking forward across the horizon, and never back, I also tend to not look around and appreciate where I actually am at this moment in time. The landscape, the places, the people, the moments. And now, when taking stock of my whisky collection and buying habits, I see the same thing has happened here as well.
Changes in my financial situation (read: an ever increasing and diabolical cost-of-living crisis - yet no increase of income) have made me think about priorities and the relocation of funds and savings to where they’re needed - most in the long term. Of course, that provided me with the perfect opportunity to scrutinize what is easily the most money guzzling hobby in my life. This amber liquid.
As of today, I am sitting on exactly one hundred bottles of whisky. Accumulated, gifted or hoarded over five and a half years of feverish discovery and curiosity. It is, from every point of view - except our enthusiast-centred one, a silly number. A preposterous amount. What on earth is one to do with a hundred bottles of whisky?
Well, drink it of course, I hear you say. But even then, do you know how long that would take? My pace of drinking is slow because of my desire to strike a balance between quality and quantity of enjoyment and physical wellbeing, as well as my job which doesn’t match well with an above average consumption of alcohol. I tend to limit myself to a maximum of four units of alcohol per week.
I’m not overly anal about it and sometimes I exceed that limit without worrying about it, but it’s a good guideline to keep my consumption and health in check. Most often those units of alcohol will be whisky and a quick calculation using 25ml pours as a standard measurement tells me that I tend to drink the equivalent of around seven and a half bottles of whisky every year.
That means it would take me more than thirteen years to drink through my stash, and that thought gives me some anxiety.
What if I die in a car crash tomorrow? What if my health situation changes drastically and I’m forced to cut alcohol consumption entirely? What if my house catches fire and I have to watch all that passionate investment and experience go up in flames? When I say go up in flames… a big part of the collection leans towards cask strength bottlings. It’ll be a spectacular sight when the east side of my house disintegrates in a brick-slinging explosion.
I don’t know why I get so nervous about these things. Maybe it’s the by-product of a personality trait or maybe I’m just a bit odd. Let’s be honest, it’s probably the latter. I tend to not uncork new acquisitions immediately and the number of open bottles seems to always hover between 35 and 40, as that’s what I’m comfortable with. So the result of my whisky-buying-boom-years is that I have a number of bottles I was so excited about when I bought them, but that have been languishing on the waiting list for a while now. Which, as you’ll probably agree, is a shame.
Now though, as I’ve decided to limit my spending drastically for the foreseeable future, inspired by both financial stress and an inability to keep growing my collection at the rate it’s done for the past few years, I’m forced to take the blinders off. Honestly, it feels great.
Deliberately making a decision to get out of the rat race of chasing limited bottlings, single casks, and keeping up to date with each and every new release that is announced, is like a pressure valve being opened. I almost feel my shoulders coming down as the gauge goes from frenetically bouncing off the red line to idling in the lower regions of the dial. Time to stop running. Wake up, smell the coffee. Look around you, Mason.
There’s so much wonderful stuff on my shelves I haven’t even tucked into because I’m always chasing the next thing. For maybe the first time since starting to accumulate enthusiastically, I’m starting to fully appreciate what I already have on hand. I have enough whisky.
It’s a wonderful thought to consider that even if I wouldn’t buy any new whisky this year (ha-ha, let’s be honest, as if!) I could still open a new and exciting bottle every two weeks.
So the collection will shrink. Which means I’ve also turned to finishing off bottles that have been dregs for long enough. It’ll create some breathing room, so to speak.
Review
Glen Garioch 11yo, Cadenhead’s, 50/50 ex-bourbon/fino casks, Original Collection, Vintage 2013, 46% ABV
£20 paid (20cl)
Which brings me to this little Cadenhead’s Glen Garioch. I bought it in their shop in London when I was there in August last year. I’ve had some Geery stunners and I quite like the effect that Fino Sherry has on whiskies. I’ve slowly worked my way through it over the past five months, before coming to this review. One reason is that I like spreading out the experience and I wanted to see what some oxidation would do to it. And the other reason was that, well, it was never a dram that I felt like it required my attention and curiosity.
Score: 5/10
Average.
TL;DR
The nose writes cheques the palate can’t cash
Nose
Freshly baked cake. Indoor swimming pool. Hint of clotted cream. Foosty. Purple. Honey. Damp socks. Gym. You know how bell peppers, when sliced and left outside the fridge, can sometimes smell a bit like sweaty feet? That. Slightly saline. Slight decaying fruit note. Water makes the bready, warm cake notes denser, but tempers the overall nose a bit too much.
Palate
Salty and sour arrival. Bready. Biscuits. Malty. A slight bitter tang. A bit salty. Water initially amps up the bitter tang and flattens the experience. A lot of patience is required to open up a whiff of grapefruit. It’s one of the few whiskies I don’t add water to, because it seems to dumb down a lot of the flavours. Slightly dry, which continues to the finish, which is a bit uneventful if I’m honest.
The Dregs
It’s a bit of an odd dram, this one. The nose is positively unusual and dances from one interesting note to the next. It sets you up for a palate that delivers what seems like a slightly watered down version of that typical Glen Garioch character. The partly fino maturation seems a bit of a subtraction rather than an addition.
It doesn’t deliver what I like in Geery, nor what I like about fino sherry. On top of that, playing around with water doesn’t seem to offer a positive turn. Don’t get me wrong, it’s perfectly drinkable and the nose is great. It’s just that there’s not much else worth exploring. In that respect it seems to be more or less in the same realm as the Annandale that Fletcher reviewed last week.
Now then. Down to 99 bottles. I’m on the right track here, feeling calm and… Wait. Is that a new small batch indie Lochranza?
Score: 5/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. MM
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