Second day of the Blind Tasting Competition 2015 with another hard to guess whisky. I sniffed and tasted my sample before day 1 dram was announced and I was banking it to be a speysider but now we know it cannot be one after Glenfarclas 25 was day 1 dram. Tough life of BTC’ers!

Upon initial tasting I thought it’s a 17-18 year old whisky and with lower ABV than #1 and estimated it at 46-50. I re-tasted it and it feels like a low ABV one, but since #1 was 43% I’m going for 43% here as well because it’s the minimum ABV for the competition. I also guessed a reduced age of 15 and went with Dalwhinnie as my distillery (good guess as any other Highlands distillery!),  and I’m probably gonna totally fail with that guess.

Update: Bah, I should have paid attention to the salt note there and think of Old Pulteney 17. My visit recap definitely had similar notes for the 17 yo. Gotta be more thorough!

Old Pulteney 17 (46%, £49.99/€69.99)

Nose: Initial impression screams speyside! But we know it’s not a speysider, arggghhhh! At first it’s a bit spicy with ginger, nutty, sweet fruit (mostly red apples), a touch of red berries, toffee, dry and thin. Light honeycomb, oak wood spices. After it breaths for a while there are pink grapefruits, oranges with some soft perfume edge. With water: more grapefruits and sweeter and at last there’s some body here and it’s not so thin.

Palate: Honey, vanilla, spicy with coarse crushed pepper, yet it’s quite sweet with hard candies, sugared grapefruits, and still thin and dry. With water: less sweet, more grapefruits. A shot of salt on the last sip after it spent a lot of time in the glass.

Finish: Short, dry, grapefruits, lingering chalkiness, peppery and zesty, sweet honey, light oak wood spices.

Thoughts: It feels like a baseline whisky from a speyside distillery