As you may recall from my post to start this month, for the foreseeable future I am going to be posting fewer booze reviews on the blog. This is due to a desire to drink down the many bottles in stash accumulated over some 15 years. The plan is to open a bottle a week and gradually drink it down—with the occasional help of friends. The first bottle I opened as part of this campaign was the Littlemill 23, 1990 from Archives that I reviewed last week. That was a fruity bourbon cask. As I currently already have a few open bottles of heavily peated whiskies and a couple of sherried whiskies, I decided to next open a mildly peated whisky. Accordingly, bottle 2, which was opened last week is a Talisker 10. Not a recent one though. This is the so-called “map label” which was released in the 1990s as far as I know. Perhaps there’s a bottle code somewhere on the bottle that would narrow the specific year down but I’m not terribly enthused about looking for it. If anyone knows when the map label was launched and discontinued, please chime in below in the comments. What I can tell you is that I have been enjoying this bottle very much and am already beginning to feel melancholy about its inevitable demise in a few weeks. Here now, from the top quarter of the bottle, are my notes.

Talisker 10, “Map Label”, 90s Bottling (45.8%; from my own bottle)

Nose: Mild peat, plenty of brine, some orange peel and some cracked coriander seed. On the second sniff there’s some old copper coins and some damp cloth. Gets saltier as it goes. Earthier with time. Brighter and a little mentholated with a few drops of water.

Palate: Comes in as promised by the nose but with the citrus leading the way. The salt and peat (more peppery now) expand as I swallow. A nice bite and good texture at bottle strength. The citrus expands as it sits (some lemon in there with the orange). Water makes it sharper/more acidic, pushing the citrus towards lime.

Finish: The salt builds turning more briny/coastal as it goes. Smoke at the end (smouldering coals) along with wet stones. As on the palate with water.

Comments: Just lovely. A clear through line from this to the great cask strength 25 yos that were released in the 2000s. Just a completely different whisky than latter day Talisker 10—and I suspect that’s because there was a fair bit of whisky in this that was quite a bit more than 10 years old. Anyway, I wish I’d bought more of this when I could have.

Rating: 90 points.