Bowmore 54-year-old

It was a profound honour adding this to the “career highlights” list of whiskies, soaring eternally around my brain. There are myriad fruits of manifold kind – sweetly-spiced like Christmas cake, yet cool like menthol or eucalypt. Its achingly beautiful peat profile almost brought me to tears as the finish eventually faded – knowing there won’t be many more opportunities to explore flavours and textures like this. I tasted this in the first fortnight of January and confidently stated it would be the best whisky I would taste all year. This is a soaring, almost unmatched dram and we’ll see very few of its ilk again.Rob Whitehead, Spirits Buyer, Berry Bros. & Rudd (January 2025)