£300 bottle of whisky for less than £50

[schumi84]

I'm not a Whisk(e)y expert but the only old (30+ years) one I had I found extremely harsh on the the throat and certainly wouldn't pay for it, was about £100 a bottle I believe.

I tend to stick with 12 year old The Glen Livet when it is availiable for a decent price, or at a push Glennfiddich. This one that Aldi is doing may be worth a punt but as has been said, for regular drinkers that would spend that much on it anyways.

 

[jimmy321]

I'm not a Whisk(e)y expert but the only old (30+ years) one I had I found extremely harsh on the the throat

Old whisky can be ruined by too much oak which gives it a 'hot' taste, or if it's in tired casks it my never take on enough of the other tastes that make a whisky good.

Skimming over some blogs it has been suggested that Gordon and MacPHail have (had) some casks which were over 40yo and in danger of going under 40% vol which can no longer be sold as whisky.

These cask may have been vatted and sold for whatever they could get.

The above is total hearsay but it could be true, why would anyone let a good 40yo whisky go for anything less than a few hundred quid.

 

[Stan_Lite]

Looks intriguing. Pity I'll be be away when it goes on sale - I might have tried to get a bottle just to try it.

As for the posts regarding degradation of some older whiskies (I haven't experienced it myself but Jim Murray says it can happen and far be it from me to argue with the great one). I have tasted a not insubstantial number of whiskies over the years and the two best whiskies I've had so far have been a 30yo Laphroaig and a 37yo Glengoyne. If you read Jim Murray's Whisky Bible (must get myself a new on - mine's 4 years old), you will notice that the vast majority of the highest scored whiskies in there are over 20 years old.

My point is that, whilst it would appear to be true that some whiskies can suffer from 'over-aging', in a great many cases, a long time in the cask can greatly improve the whisky. The chances are that if a whisky is over 30 years old and they're charging £300 for it, it's likely to be a good one. I'd be interested to see if this £50 40yo whisky is one of the ones which has gone wrong or whether Aldi are simply taking a hit for the publicity. Unless someone queues up and buys a bottle for me, I'm unlikely to find out