Has Ardbeg 10 changed?

I picked up a litre of Ardbeg 10 at the duty free store on my way back to the States for around $53. To my plebian taste, it's the most pungent, peaty Scotch I've ever tasted. I love it. Of course, I also love my Aberlour A'bunadh, Bowmore 17, Lagavulin 16 and the rest, but all in different ways.

Well, the suggestion does come to mind that YOU might have bought and tasted it...

pavane

You should have bought both. You can never have too much Scotch.

C.

Well - I was hoping that someone else might have tested the waters before I did. However - that doesn't sound like a bad idea at all, except that I would then have two open bottles of Ardbeg 10.

Gordon,

Thanks for the good info. But there's a gap in the timeline above. What was happening between 1989 and 1997? I assume there was some production by Allied during that period which is used for the current and recent 10yo's...? Any info on that? And when was the less peated Ardbeg (Kildalton) made?

Impressive!

y_p_w,

As others have already said, and said it better than I would have, the Ardbeg 10 hasn't changed in the last two years. There have been other changes at Ardbeg - the Ardbeg 17 is being phased out, and a new expression, Uigeadail, may soon be available here.

That being said, it's not unusual for small changes to occur between bottlings of the same label seperated in time by some years.

The producers try very hard for a consistent product under a continuous label. The individual differences from cask to cask get averaged together when a standard expression is vatted. The color can be adjusted, which bothers some people (and some more than others). But however hard they try, the flavor of selected single bottles will tend to drift a little bit around a hypothetical flavor target. This flavor drift is usually very small, unless there have been deliberate changes in the manufacturing process, sort of a "change in the recipe". Usually you could only tell it head to head, and then only on a good day, but sometimes it's enough to be noticible. There has been a lot of discussion in the last years as to whether or not Laphroaig was less peaty, for instance...

That's why I like to see frequent minor changes to the labels. We can then group similar production together, effectively dating a bottle. Springbank has often done this for us; whether by design or by the accident of bottling smaller vattings I don't know, but every year or two the same expression will have a slightly different label - a different colour, a change in a seal or a emblem, etc.

Sometimes it matters, as with Springbank during the nineties, but often enough it doesn't, because the drift is too small to notice. I haven't noticed any drift in Ardbeg 10; but I wasn't looking for it either, and I don't have a sample from a few years ago with which to compare a current bottle.

Bart

y_p snipped-for-privacy@hotmail.com

I trust the people in this small neighborhood shop. Most of their employees have been working there for ages, and actually sample their offerings.

Now that I think of it, the allegation was that somehow the new owners had still changed the product since they first released it (although I now understand it would have been distilled under the old ownership). I might just go out and buy one to find out. I can try it side-by-side. with my older bottle.

Thanks.