In the Dalwhinnie testblends last week I managed to find two blends which looked decent enough to let marry for a bit. One of them was Dal Elgin, which I will review later this week. The first and (on first face) most promising one was this: Dalmorangie. Unmarried it had a buttery, caramelized sweetness to it which made it quite yummy indeed. But, as we’ve seen several times already on this blog, blends transform when married, emphasising some aspects of the original taste and suppressing others. So let’s see what happened here, shall we?

It has been 5 days since I first blended this and on nosing I notice some differences immediately: the banana has become more sour, turning into sweet orange juice. The caramel is still there, and I’m getting whiffs of vanilla custard as well. The taste continues the trend, taking some emphasis away from the still present caramelized banana and adding some floral (and even herbal) notes. Going towards the finish you are left with a bittersweet sensation which lingers a bit, but doesn’t last very long.

All in all this has become more balanced and (at least for me) less interesting, which gives me a good chance to talk about individual taste: I have a sweet tooth and when tasting and scoring whiskies for myself I tend to score those whiskies that exhibit the sweeter flavours higher. I also have a love of peat and marine flavours and tend to do the same for those. For this blog I try to be as unbiased as possible and compensate for my own preferences, but it is inevitable that my scores are influenced one way or the other.

So please do not take my word for it if I say a blend is good or bad! My scores can probably serve as an indication, but please do make up your own mind when you make these blends. Also, I believe you can probably learn as much or more from the ‘bad’ blends as you can from the good ones. Anyway, here’s my indicative, tentative, normalized score-thingie for Dalmorangie:

Look for the Dal Elgin, another of the Dalwhinnie testblends, later this week. Also coming up: another attempt at a peated blend. Will I succeed where so many alternate universe versions of me have failed?

• 
•