Dalmore 2007 Vintage
Official Limited Edition | 46.5% ABV
Score: 2/10
Avoid.
TL;DR
Avoid like the plague
Crime and Punishment?
A bottle has been finished. The contents have been mulled over, its merits have been weighed, and a score has been decided upon. At that point, it’s high time to start writing about it.
To prepare myself I went outside and threw rocks at trees for half an hour before coming back inside. I ate a Snickers bar, had an espresso, downed two bottles of Yakult, a can of Red Bull, and then another espresso.
I was ready. Firing on all cylinders. My laptop on my knees and a note pad and pen close at hand. Mason Mack was ready to wreck.
With grinding teeth, steam coming out of my ears and my left eye twitching I wrote a furious, accusative, condescending review about this bottle and all that it stands for.
I raged against companies like Dalmore. I scoffed and joked as harshly as I could about shallow materialism, and declared outright war on the concept of vacuous spending prevailing over sensible purchases. I was proud of the amount of creative swear words I could come up with. My keyboard was almost blushing over the letters it was asked to put after one another.
But why? What or who was I doing it for? Was it for vengeance? Clickbait? Ragebait maybe? Or did I just want to angrily vent about the injustices that big companies get away with, seemingly unscathed? What good would that do? It’s not as if the people in the boardrooms will read my online ramblings, let alone care about them.
At this point I need to give some context, don’t I?
Well, whisky means something to me and to the rest of Team Dramface. It does to you as well, probably, since you’re reading these words. It’s not always rational, the way it gets under our skin.
Once we’re under its spell it moves us in ways we didn’t think a small sip of liquid could ever be capable of. It brings the loveliest of people together yet, when sipped in privacy it works just as well. At times it provides deep and meditative experiences. When it’s not adding quality and richness to our lives and the way we live and appreciate them, it’s still just a lovely sip of joy. And while there’s millions upon millions of barrels of the stuff resting in warehouses, to us it’s finitely precious and a thing to savour. We romanticise it and revel in doing so.
All that is under one condition though: it has to be good.
That’s all we ask for, if we’re honest. We don’t expect every bottle we uncork to be a revelation, a peak, or an epiphany. Of course we’ll come across those bottles. Sometimes unexpectedly, because of serendipity. Other times on the back of recommendations from trusted sources that encourage you to spend just that wee bit more, on a bottle that is truly special; whether marketed as such or - more often in today’s environment - not marketed at all.
Most often we ask for three simple things:
1: honest transparency
2: decent liquid
3: good value
Imagine then the injustice I felt when presented with a bottle that wilfully throws transparency to the wind, while offering some of the poorest whisky I have ever tasted, at a price that makes your backside go like a rabbit’s nose.
Review
Dalmore 2007 Vintage, Official bottling, Matusalem, Apostoles, Amoroso & Marsala casks, 46.5% ABV
€140 paid
You see, every time autumn comes around, the master blenders at The Dalmore go out to “hand select only the finest casks, nurturing rare expressions. (…) Only the most exceptional whiskies go on to become The Vintages.”
This particular one was bottled in 2022 and was matured and finished in five different kinds of casks: ex-bourbon, Matusalem, Apostoles, Amoroso, and Marsala! Sounds prestigious doesn’t it? Five cask types is more than four cask types after all..
Score: 2/10
Avoid.
TL;DR
Avoid like the plague
Nose
Orange air freshener, chemically sweetened ice tea, fake orange flavoured sweetener. Sweet cereal. Dusty? A hint of milk chocolate. Sickly. Cloying. A faint cake batter note. Chemically flavoured vanilla jelly beans.
Palate
Fractured, cloying, face-up-screwing, flat, emulsified orangieness.
Wafts of aspartame, like diet Coke from a can. It’s a cloying synthetic orange flavour. Dark chocolate acerbity and sour apples. Richard Paterson often mentioned the baby-sick note in young Dalmore and you’ll find it here in bucket loads. A vague coffee note? Have I mentioned how cloying and chemical it tastes yet?
The finish is heavy on saccharine, spikey, sour/sweet. There is not one coordinated, fulfilling note to this entire thing. It’s a mess. Like someone made an infinity bottle, just threw in whatever watered down, heavily-coloured whiskies from bad casks they had at hand, and it all went terribly wrong.
The Dregs
I genuinely dislike having to write such a stinging, negative review about a whisky. You see, I have no interest in writing mean reviews. Let alone about a distillery that is the butt of jokes anyway. I’d rather excitedly write about something I’m enjoying that I’d love to share with you.
On top of that my experience with, and memory of, the often joked about Dalmore 12yo isn’t that bad. I tasted it as a novice when I got my hands on a discounted bottle for about €35 in the beginning of Covid-times and wasn’t disappointed with it at that price. So, should you be wondering, I have no inclination to pick on Dalmore just because it’s the trendy thing to do.
But I’m not done whinging just yet. In fact, it might get a bit more ranty from this point.
I really, really tried my best with this - sorry, I’m just going to have to say it - monstrosity. It was open for a year and every time I came back to it with an open, inviting mind. Genuinely curious, ready to be reassured, and willing to find positives about this malt. Hoping on all occasions that time and oxidisation had helped it along and sorted it out. And every time I was met with bitter, woeful disappointment.
The fact that this is rated an 86 on Whiskybase.com (which for reference puts it right alongside Ardnahoe’s resplendent inaugural 5yo and Kilkerran 12yo) is completely beyond me. Naturally I’m far from the all-knowing oracle of objective taste and quality, and everyone is allowed their own opinion. But so am I: that’s madness.
I sincerely cannot believe that this was ever allowed to leave the warehouse. Nor can I get my head around the fact that any master blender or distillery manager nosed and tasted this and gave it the good-to-go thumbs up.
It’s an exercise in the overly greedy cynicism that we’ve come to expect from the likes of Dalmore, Macallan, Ardbeg, Lagavulin, and others. Design some fancy packaging, market it as a rare taste of exemplary quality, and try to sell it to people who won’t open it, but will instead buy it as an investment, hoping to make easy bucks in some years time. Until that time it’ll look great on their shelves, next to some Macallan special editions and a Johnnie Walker Blue Label wearing a puffer jacket.
Either those people or the people that end up buying it off of them are going to want to pull their hair out when they do eventually open it and discover that it’s not just poor whisky, it’s whisky that is heavily flirting with a 1 out of 10.
Which brings us neatly to the point of why I didn’t score this a 1 out of 10 even though my tasting notes could very well lead up to that. The truth is, here at Dramface we take our scoring seriously and we feel a certain responsibility when it comes to hanging a mark on something.
People read and engage with our content more and more, and might very well be persuaded to buy, or not buy, something based on our recommendations. That means our scores get mulled over, considered and reconsidered again, before becoming final. We don’t dish out 1s and 10s as if they’re common and easily come across.
When one of us thinks a whisky might warrant a true 1 out of 10, we tend to send a few samples out to other writers, not least our captain Wally, to make sure it’s not just one writer slamming his fist on the nuke button and claiming an extreme score without second opinion.
Questions on if the whisky may have been tainted or corked are easily answered. The seal was perfectly intact, the contents were at neck level, and it had been stored well. The cork was absolutely fresh and went into my tin box to join a myriad of other good corks I keep for whenever I need to replace a bad or broken cork, or one that is way too loose and doesn’t seal properly (looking at you Glen Scotia, Arran and Bunnahabhain. All three seem to regularly feature loose corks).
So does this whisky deserve a 2 out of 10? Let me put it this way: as a flavour experience you’re honestly better off buying Johnnie Walker Red Label. Flat, uninteresting, alcoholic water. This is actually quite foul. And this isn’t a €20 bottom shelf blend. This is a ‘LimiTed eDitiOn’ 15yo single malt priced at €139,50. An eye-watering price for most bottles of whisky, but an absolute joke for a whisky that barely scrapes a 2 out of 10.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go lay down and make fun little lists in my head of multiple quality bottles that you could buy for the price of one of these… err, let’s not upset the editors: excrement exhibitions.
Score: 2/10
Tried this? Share your thoughts in the comments below. MM
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