Aldunie 1998 PST

Very fruity and drinkable - pretty good!

A superb choice, sweet, fruity, pleasant to taste, gently tingling on the palate. Perfect for drinking on a summer day.

Green banana, soda, mango, vanilla, dough, peach, strawberry, boiled peanut, lime A confusing whisky—both under-ripe and well-ripened at the same time. Tropical notes burst out vividly. Alongside green banana, fully ripe fruits like mango, peach, and strawberry emerge. A refreshing soda note adds fun. On the palate, lime-like citrus pops.

apple, pear, tinned apricots, peach, almonds, spices, nicely fruity

[December 2025] Kininvie distillery is a strange animal, nestled near the river Fiddich directly behind the beautiful looking Balvenie distillery, it is almost impossible to identify as a distillery at all: It is an ugly industrial-type shack with an corrugated-iron roof... ...but it produces one of the most under-rated Speyside malts, with a nice profile exactly in-between the Balvenie and Glenfiddich malt (where it is physically situated, too). I like this kind of old-style Speyside malt, but beware all you modern drinkers: This is a great "unspectacular" malt, with absolutely nothing in there to impress your digital friends at facebook or tiktok. But my physical taste buds are impressed, at least.

A beautiful malt, old and pure - a joy for purists and traditionalists.

Very nice blend for the price!

Very nice blend for the price!

Official tasting notes: Nose: A little fruit medley immediately with pears, gooseberries, melons and a touch of lime. All of the waxed variety. Floral notes follow with a touch of fennel and fresh pencil shavings. Palate: Lemon zest and cardamom, followed by green peppercorns and some apricot on the mid-palate. Chamomile and white stone fruits. Water brings out notes of honeydew and blue raspberry. Finish: A nice ginger spice with lime pickle and herbal teas.

Nice and easy to drink. A long aged Kininvie definately. Taste like daisy, green apple and some green lemon, very refreshing. Not very complex, oily and a little bit waxy.

I like it a lot, a whisky with fruity and lively elements that gradually intensifies and picks up speed again in the finish - 21.02.2026

Aroma：Pronounced；Palate：90/100; Aftertaste：Med-Long.

Skim milk, Kiwi, Ripened banana, Madeleine with lemon zest, Sour gummy candy, Peach-flavored iced tea Old and Bruichladdich-ish malt drink. Definitely easy to drink.

Nose: Very elegant and subtle. Fruits meet wax and sweet malt. Stone fruits, pears and canned pineapples. Next to the fruits sits a beeswax candle. Greek yogurt with honey. Palate: Very oily. Malt sugar with pears and peaches. White and green gummy bears. Yogurt again, alongside a lovely waxiness. No woody bitterness. Finish: Long. The fruits become more tart — kiwi and gooseberries. Toward the end, pleasant notes of dark chocolate and coffee appear. Rating: 27 years old, refill barrels, no fancy finish. This Aldunie is a whisky for purists - and what a whisky it is. Fruity, waxy, malty. An absolute highlight!

Plenty of fruit and many classic markers of proper bourbon barrel aging. Not overly complex, but one of those "whatever it does, it does well" whiskies. An intense Speyside that really grabs me. Read the full review here: https://keinehalbendrinks.de/2026/06/25/der-gebrueder-thompson-ihr-zeuch/

Hello again, fellow whisky nerds! After a couple of dry weeks to give my poor, battered vital organs a chance to recover, it’s time to get back to business. Kininvie is one of those elusive distilleries with no really accessible OBs and hardly any IBs either, so for someone like me, who wants to empty at least one bottle from every currently operating Scottish distillery, it is a real headache. This Thomson Bros bottling is one of the few exceptions to have hit the market lately, and although at first I thought the price was excessive and ruled out getting a bottle, this review made me change my mind. Thanks u/ PricklyFriend for the recommendation, pretty cool. Kininvie is one of the distilleries owned by William Grant & Sons and, together with Glenfiddich and Balvenie, forms the historic core of the company’s malt whisky production for blending, especially for Grant’s and Monkey Shoulder. In fact, Kininvie was built in 1990 (the year I was born!) specifically to produce malt whisky for blending, allowing Glenfiddich and Balvenie to focus increasingly on their respective single malt ranges. Kininvie’s distillate is supposedly light, floral and markedly fruity in profile, with apple and pear, accompanied by honey, vanilla, sweet malt and a touch of herbs and spice. According to some connoisseurs, it bears quite a strong resemblance to Balvenie. Anyway, let’s see what it has to offer: Nose: From the very first sniff, I already know that this is exactly what I’m looking for in a whisky of this kind. Full of floral and honeyed wax, with clear notes of damp, musty and old furniture, and something reminiscent of very oxidised white wine (manzanilla?); all intertwined with incredibly complex and impressive fruity notes, an entire fruit shop: pineapple, apple, pear, mango, banana, peach, lemon, coconut, kiwi, strawberry... The vanilla has a balsamic edge, while the tannins unfold into a whole range of nuances (green tea, leather, chamomile), and it never stops being expressive: nuts (walnuts), caramel, dusty malt, old factory, etc. Constantly evolving. Perfectly balanced. Better than perfume. Palate: The texture is dense and silky, the mouthfeel like the caress… of a decrepit old lady lol. The arrival is dusty lemon peel, dried mango and pineapple juice, with fatty white chocolate, musty dunnage, lots and lots of beeswax, and very polished metallic and salty nuances. The herbal notes remind me of marijuana. As it leaves, herbal vanilla, mushrooms, candied orange, pear skin and fresh kiwis emerge, accompanied by the tingling astringency peculiar to very old whisky (damp old furniture, sealed-up cellar, olive oil, almonds, manzanilla wine). The complete absence of aggressive, bitter or off notes is particularly striking. Finish: Waxy, tropical, nutty and earthy. Loads of beeswax, honey, apricot and candied almonds, combined with forest floor, dehydrated pineapple, pine nuts and more fresh kiwi. Perfect astringency, with all the richness of old, beautifully polished tannins and none of the bitterness or spiciness. There is something medicinal here too, a mixture of anaesthetic and sandalwood, like an operating theatre made of old fine hardwoods. There are a handful of whisky archetypes that consistently receive praise from both unpretentious fans and pretentious connoisseurs, and among them we find the three best-known types: the young heavily peated dram, the CS sherry bomb, and the very old whisky matured purely in ex-bourbon. Any of these, when produced with care and attention, can offer something that cannot be found in any other product, because they reach a kind of plateau of personality where all their characteristics come together into a coherent and delicious whole. This bottle belongs to the latter group. From what I’ve read online, and bearing in mind that I stopped studying chemistry at 18, when I switched from the pure sciences to the pure humanities, maturation in a whisky aged for many years in ex-bourbon casks is not simply a matter of extracting compounds from the wood, but of a number of additional processes occurring in parallel with extraction: oxidation + esterification + hydrolysis + polymerisation + evaporation + adsorption… In other words, maturation is a combination of extracting compounds from the wood, the degradation of macromolecules, reactions between wood and spirit, reactions within the wood itself, reactions between components of the spirit, reactions between the spirit and the wood, evaporation, etc.; processes that take place incredibly slowly and produce molecules which, despite being present in minuscule quantities, radically alter the organoleptic profile of the new make. For example, oxidation produces acids and aldehydes which react with alcohols to form new esters, apparently responsible for many of the specific fruity and floral notes found in old whisky. The result can be a much more integrated, complex and aromatically dense whisky, in which vanilla, honey, ripe fruit, flowers, spices, nuts and wood have been transmuted and woven together in a way that would be extremely difficult to achieve through shorter maturation. But none of this is guaranteed, and every cask, left to its own devices in the dunnage, can just as easily turn into a complete disaster, as some of my other genuinely old bottles demonstrate. All of this is simply to explain the incredible complexity that a whisky can reach when properly matured for a long time in ex-bourbon casks. That “magic” that sometimes happens when a cask is simply left alone for decades is not merely a product of marketing; it is something you can genuinely encounter, if you are lucky and find it at a price that isn’t completely deranged, and it is unlike anything else. This bottle is simply a perfect example of this kind of profile, of which I have already been lucky enough to try several examples, but which rarely develop this kind of waxy character, reach this qualitatively superior level of complexity, and manage to display it so unobstructed, making them extraordinarily evocative. An incredible whisky that I have thoroughly enjoyed throughout this summer, which is already coming to an end. Absolutely recommended if you are as curious about this kind of profile as you are financially irresponsible.