Ballantines Glenburgie 15yo
When ingredients become products
I've been away from my social account and my website for a while. I was traveling.
A very long story short: I visited 5 different airports within a very short time and traveled to some awesome places.
But, with traveling comes the airport Duty Free shopping and maybe even some travel retail exclusives, right? So I checked the whiskies on offer on 4 airports (the 5th was Amsterdam, where I departed from. No shopping on departure for me.) and I returned with some bottles. One of those bottles is this one: The Glenburgie aged 15 year old, by Ballantines.
This bottle series was launched in 2017 by Ballantines, or rather the Chivas Brothers group, to please their single malt fans. In a serie of three (Glenburgie, Glentauchers and Miltonduff), Ballantines presented the 3 main ingredients for their Blend as single malts, bottled at 15 years old.
Now, we do have more distilleries where most if not all of their production is going straight into blended whisky. Blair Athol for example, only bottles 1% of their whisky on their own label. So that is not a strange thing, but a Glenburgie is a rather hard to find if not as a fingerprint ingredient for Ballantines.
Now I'm not sure how many of these bottles were available, but the label of mine says it is "series 001". So I assume I got at least one of the bottles from the release in 2017. Or it is numbered as being the first of a series that might be added after the three starters. I do not know. To be honest, there was not a whole lot to discover about this bottle.
I loved the color. A deep warm color going towards light brown. I could not find anything about additional coloring or about the filtration.
A twirl leaves a very thin, but sharp line in the glass, with some thick legs.
On the nose: Warm fudge, cotton candy, apple, honey, strawberries, spring grass and vanilla.
The taste: Some milk chocolate, sweet citrus, mandarin and red oranges, sweet barley.
Finish: Short. Too short for my liking. Some spices like pepper and light cinnamon.
I bought this bottle at Tirana Airport.
