Top 7 Afterparty/After-hours Bottles: Aberlour A’bunadh

Welcome to part two of this little sequel list focusing on big, brooding bottles to share with a close friend or two after the holiday party wraps. My post from yesterday has the details on why I picked these bottles, and features entry 1: Ardbeg Uigeadail. Today, let’s talk about the best Speyside bottling I can name.

A lot of bourbon and scotch bottles like to market themselves as “Christmas in a bottle,” evoking ideas of sugarplums, gingerbread, brown sugar, and a warm fireplace. Well, A’bunadh is kinda like that, in that it’s a Christmas *bonfire* in a bottle. We’re rolling Ancient Germanic pagan style for Yuletide this year. Think tinseled blood eagles, not mantle stockings. Because A’bunadh takes no prisoners. This is a tour de force of dark fruit, fresh cinnamon served up at hellfire intensity, and an entire rack of baking spices hurled at you with a vandal’s level of restraint. In this relationship, you’re Aristotle and this bottle is Phyllis, and as such there’s no joy without some burn. While there’s some variance between batches (with usually 1-4 batches released annually), there seems to be a lot less change in flavor profile versus, say, a Stagg Jr. or ECBP.

A’bunadh also just has an insanely cool story I’ve talked about previously. The brief summary: in the 1970’s during renovation work at Aberlour, workers found a time capsule of whisky from the 1890’s stored in a wall. After the distillery staff drank most of it, they resolved to recreate the recipe from intuition, historical recipes, and educated guesswork. The result: a non-chill filtered, cask strength blend of 5-25 year old barrels aged exclusively in first-fill Oloroso casks. Which all adds up to make this, for my money, the crown jewel of Speyside whisky.

Conclusion: A single pour of this bottle by the fireplace in December in the company of good friends is a great evening. And a single pour of this bottle by the fire in the company of good friends with a captured Essex nobleman you intend to sacrifice to the old gods is a historically great evening.

Image courtesy of Jon who also writes on Low Class & High Proof.

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