Glenlivet Nadurra

I've seen mixed comments on this bottle. I have one but not yet opened until I finish my 18yo. Some of these are a bit touchy on the amount of water needed.

I'm coming to the end of a bottle tonight, and I liked it with a couple of caveats. The water issue is true. I happen to like CS SMS without water, but I did try adding some, and if you add too much, it becomes bland. Temperature is also something....room temp is a touch thin, but just a few degrees cooler, and it is fuller. Fairly sweet, butterscotch, maybe flowers somewhere in there.

This is going to sound strange, but I would say as a CS, it is fairly average, but if you compare it to the usual 40% strength suspects, it is quite good. It is not long-lasting like, say, the Glenfarclas 105 (which is amazing), but as a sherried SMS (read: sweeter), it does well against a Balvenie Doublewood and a recent Aberlour I had which was VERY average.

And cost-wise, it is comparable to some of the better regular strength SMS and significantly cheaper than other CS.

Enjoy!

"Opinions are divided" is perhaps the best way of describing it :-)

Personally I love it - sweet (goes very well with a ginger biscuit), but has some teeth to it. A bit like being punched full in the face by a velvet glove. Takes a drop of water well, but only a drop.

Jim

Jim wrote: Takes a drop of water well, but only a drop.

Jim,

when you say "a drop" do you literally mean 1 single drop to a dram? I've added "small" amounts of water to Quarter cask and to 105, but at no time did it seem right. but I never added just 1 single drop as with an eye dropper.

nick

"A small amount". I find it's fine without any water, but a tiny amount opens it up a bit.

Jim

Ah, yes, "just a drop of water." I've been around for a few years and I've yet to find out how much "just a few drops" of water is. From a calibrated pipette, there are about 20 literal drops per gram of water. A gram of water is about 1 cubic centimeter at room temperature. So we talk of "a splash" or "a few drops" without knowing either how much a drinker considers his/her "dram" to be.

That leaves us with about three variables: the true amount of water, the true amount of whisky, and of course the ABV of the initial pour. Typical bottle strength is usually 40%, 43% or some odd amount in the mid 40's. Cask strength varies all over the place from 50.1% on up to somewhat over

60%. A dram is formally defined as 1/8 ounce (approx 3.7 ml.) in the U.S., and half that elsewhere. So it even depends on what side of the creek you live on.

Personally, I try to keep my "drams" around 43%, so I will add water to cask strength whisky slowly working it down to where it "seems" to be about 43% to my taste. This allows some changes in the nose during the process. For a bottle strength dram, I simply rinse my small tasting glass with fresh water and add the whisky without drying the glass first. There are perhaps several drops of water left on the inside of the glass, and I mark my pour by a label on the side of the glass so the amount is relatively consistent. Just my way. I'm sure there are others.