Whisky Discovery #21

The Balvenie 40 Year Old Batch No. 2 (48.5%, OB, Bottled 2011)

Speyside Single Malt Whisky

£2,500

 

The Balvenie 40 - 2nd release

Those wonderful people at Balvenie called me up to inform me that I had won a pair of tickets to sample their new limited release of a special 40 year single malt.

You don’t turn down opportunities like this, as they don’t come along to often. The event was being held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

I invited friend Colin Johnson to the event, who almost bit my arm off at the opportunity. On arrival we were treated as VIPs as most of the other guests were from the trade.

We were able to sample a good deal of The Balvenie range of single malts, well certainly everything that had been set up for sampling!

We tasted their 12 YO Doublewood, 12 YO Signature, 15 YO Single Cask, 17 YO Peated Cask and of course their 21 YO Port Wood. Then the 40 YO was brought out. Only 150 bottles produced in this limited edition bottling, 80 for the UK market and 70 for the rest of the world. With a retail price set at £2,500 per bottle, two were opened for our pleasure.

And oh what a pleasure it was ! We must have spent a good five minutes exploring the nose, it might have been longer and certainly needed to be – it was awesome ! Then the taste – again out of this world ! I would have to re-evaluate all my previous tastings to get things back into some perspective. So much going on in their and the finish – again spectacular. There was only one glass each (although it was a generous measure) and unless the jackpot comes up, way out of my price range, but it was a wonderful experience. To end the evening we were each presented with a bottle from their entry level malts, Colin came away with a bottle of Doublewood and for me The Signature. Thank you Balvenie !