Dram of the "day"

So I thought I might be able to pull off the whole "you have to post in your blog every day to keep up interest" thing if I post some sort of tasting note on a daily basis. To give myself a little wiggle room, I have decided to call it a dram so that I have a little wiggle room on the spirit I am dramming. I have also decided to use the quotes around day because, well, I know it won't be daily, ask people about my cocktail of the week posts.

So, the inaugural dram of the "day" is:

Balvenie 15yr single barrel

What else would it be?
Where to begin with this one. Let's start with the single barrel part of this one. Essentially what this means is that the distillery chooses a barrel and fills as many bottles as they can from that barrel. Then they label the bottle with the barrel number so that you can identify which one you liked. Isn't this what all single malts are you ask? Not really. Single malt designates that it is all coming from the same distillery. Generally what happens is that there is a blending tank and barrels from different years are placed in the tank and mixed together to develop the overall flavor that is desired. By law, the age on the label is the age of the youngest barrel that is in the bottle.

So what is the impact of this single barrel approach? Well, every barrel is a little different. Barrels filled on the same day and sitting in the same warehouse right next to each can taste completely different. So to some degree, you are playing a bit of a game of chance. That being said, each of the barrels is hand selected to resemble a desired flavor profile, so that from bottle to bottle, depending on the barrel, some flavors may be a little stronger, some may not be in there at all. Yes, there are people out there that keep track of all of the individual barrels that they have tried.

Next up, that 15yr label. It is possible to get a 17-18yr old bottle if you stare at all of the labels. Why? Well, it is cheaper to just have one label and you just fill in some of the other information. It makes marketing a little easier as well. The moral of this story, it is worth doing the math sometimes to see how old it really is.

So what is the overall flavor profile? Well, it is a Speyside (see how I worked in my other post from today), so you won't be finding any peat in this. What you will find is lots of honey. There will be a sweet floral nose. On the palate you will get honey, grass, heather and probably some hard fruit notes, like apple and maybe some soft fruit peach notes. The finish will be a little on the short side but you will find that the flavors will stay with you for a little while.

And that is the dram of the "day".