Gordon and MacPhail – Connoisseurs Choice – Clynelish 2005
Price: £80 – 90
ABV: 55.1%
Appearance: Liquid Golden Sugar
Aroma: Musty wooden notes swirl through passing crisply acidic apples, floral honey pollen and rich boozy raisins.
Taste: Initially floral honey sweet, with granny smith like crisp fruit, which enliven the palate and draw you in.
Then the speedily delivering middle of this dram is oily, nutty and musty – like an oral trip to an antique shop. There are leathery notes too and some very subtle smoke. hugely complex middle flavours, which morph and jump out in different ways on each sip.
Finally (after a long, long time) the dram ends with a gingery, warming peppery spice, which is hot, yet gentle. You can taste the ABV, but this dram remains subtle, sweet and floral till the last notes eventually die away.
Mouthfeel: Oily, spicy and warming.
Overall: The recently re-vamped Connoisseurs (which I absolutely cannot spell, despite many tries – thank god for spell check!) Choice range has always been full of gems, but it now feels like it has finally got the well tailored clothes to match it.
To me, this whisky is a perfect example of what you get from Gordon and MacPhail. Aside from the fairly widely available 14 year old, Clynelish is a distillery that produces fairly small amounts of single malt and it is rare to find in a bottle for less than £100, so to find a cask strength dram of real depth of flavour and quality in this price bracket seems like a real boon. It is a waxy, complex whisky, which feels different in make up to many drams out there. There are lots of different dimensions to a whisky like this and the joy is sitting with it and waiting for them to show themselves.
For those people who are looking to expand their whisky horizons away from the usual suspects and distillery bottling, then you cannot go far wrong with the G&M range and a bottling like this one.
Real Dram Factor: 8.3
Source: Tweet Tasting from Whisky Wire
More Information: https://www.gordonandmacphail.com/our-whiskies/whiskies/april-2018-cccs-clynelish-2005-551-europeuk/
Buy Online: Master of Malt