Few final samples for the end of the year.
What — Notes — Score
Grosperrin FD Truau 1996, Bas Armagnac, 55.5% — Sweet stewed fruits in vanilla sugar. Almost no wood tannins. Later sips bring spirit note and wood spice, but still nearly zero bitterness. Toasted sugar, vanilla, fruit cake. Perhaps too sweet to be balanced — Score: Yay-
High West, Midwinter’s Night Dram, Encore Act 1 Scene 1, 50.8% — MGP & High West Rye, aged in white port. Dilly but in a good way, lots of sugar vanilla and wood. Not too deep but definitely sweet, balanced and desert-like. Probably better one of recent releases. — Score: Meh+
Laird’s Apple Brandy 5.7 years, Single Cask, 60.5 — Ummmm… Pretty tasty apple brandy? Apple, chili, vanilla, good balance without leaning too much into something odd. Think boozy apple sangria with some solid amounts of mulled spice, sans cinnamon. — Score: Meh+
Old Pulteney 16, 2006, K&L SP, Cask #2061, 53% — (Tiny sample). Clean, subtle, ex-bourbon cask. Citrus and stone fruit, some minerality. Utterly beautiful and clean in its style. — Score: Yay+
High West, Light Whiskey 14, Batch 3, 46% — Corn whiskey, aged in 2nd fill casks. Gentle Vanilla in the name here with an odd - yet warming - spiciness upfront. I’m voting this a Canadian well-aged corn vodka. — Score: Meh+
Smooth Ambler Old Scout Rye 7 (2014), 49.5% — This is possibly MGP. Woody… soap? — Score: YUCK!
Tomatin 27, Carn Mor, 46.3%
Distilled in 1987 and bottled in 2014, this Tomatin was aged in a sherry hogshead (#495) and opens with an impressively expressive nose for the proof: roasted vanilla, brown sugar, and sun-dried apricots. The palate leans into black tea with toasted honeycomb or dark honey, and the finish continues that black-tea-and-honey thread with touches of vanilla and malt. The sweetness lingers as clean sugars without becoming heavy or cloying, and notably without drifting into figgy richness or overt spice the way PX or Oloroso often do. Overall: this feels very much like a Palo Cortado sherry cask — and a very good one at that — landing squarely in my preferred lane thanks to those tea and honey notes. Value: N/A; acquired opened on the secondary market.
Score: A-
Ledaig/Tobermory 27, Redacted (Thompson) Bros, K&L SP, 47.4%
This is a 27-year-old Tobermory distillation run with fermentation and cut points identical to Ledaig, but made with unpeated barley — effectively unpeated Ledaig aged in oak rather than a typical Tobermory malt. My suspicion is that this was an in-between “clean-out” run, meant to flush residual peat from the stills and condensers after Ledaig before returning to Tobermory production. Interestingly, the cask was split, with the EU release bottled at 26 years. The color is striking — olive oil. The nose is intensely malty, loaded with orchard fruit, waxy yellow apple and pear skins front and center. The palate is multilayered: it opens with soft sugars and malt, then spins outward into a wild, tropical-fruit-laden compote with spices, chili, and ginger. It reminds me of an unusually balanced, very boozy white sangria — but far more interesting — where the flavors aren’t coming from fruit directly, but from high-quality oak, age, and malt. The different distillation cuts (when condensation starts and stops) seem to contribute both lighter, front-loaded notes and heavier, almost savory layers on the back end. Those savory elements linger into the finish alongside sweet spice, ginger, and just the faintest wisp of smoke. Overall: a super-interesting, highly unusual, and genuinely unique bottling — very much a likely once-in-a-lifetime experience born from a near-magical combination of circumstances. The real question, though: do I love-love it? Grudgingly, yes — but it’s one I had to think my way into appreciating, and that thinking didn’t come easily. Value: I paid $200, which was an excellent deal at the time a few years ago; today, this would likely land closer to $300.
Score: A+
Happy 2026. What a way to end the year!
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Scoring Breakdown: https://www.aerin.or … age=scores_breakdown