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.

Yeah, I hate it when that happens. You might use up some of the excess this way, though...should work well with Ardbeg:

Filet of Beef "Rothes House" Style (Adapted from a recipe by David Yeadon, executive chef of the Rothes House, Scotland. If you wish, serve this dish with mashed potatoes or other mashed root vegetables.)

Preheat oven to 425F. Place a roasting rack into a roasting pan.Wrap strips of bacon around the beef filet and tie at intervals with string. Place on the roasting rack. Roast for 25 to 45 minutes, depending on the desired doneness. (An instant-read thermometer will read 120F for rare; 125 to 130F for medium-rare; 135to 140F for medium.)

Meanwhile, pour remaining oil into a large skillet. Add onions and garlic and cook over medium heat, shaking the pan frequently, until soft and lightly browned, 5 to 10 minutes. Whisk in tomato paste, flour and peppercorns. Add stock and bay leaf and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer gently until ready to serve.

When beef is done, remove it from oven. Carefully remove beef, on its rack, from the pan and let meat rest for 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, set the hot roasting pan on the stovetop over medium heat. Add about 1¼2 cup of sauce and stir, scraping any browned bits from bottom of pan. Pour contents of roasting pan into the sauce in skillet.

Strain sauce into a saucepan; discard solids. Set over medium heat and add whisky and wine. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for about 3 minutes. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Just before serving, add cream and remove from heat. Stir until thick and smooth.

When ready to serve, remove strings from beef. Slice and serve with sauce. Garnish with fresh herbs if desired. Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Hmmmm...is this another of them well informed shop workers (in the mould of the Fire at Lagavulin ones ....) . First a history lesson , Ardbeg was owned by Allied up until 1997 they did not distill between

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

Hi Gordon,

Always good to hear some deep specialists...

BtW, I've got a 10yo 'clear glass' just on my desk. Do you know what the difference is with the 'green glass' version, if any? A matter of years of bottling? And second, as for the oldest Glenmo version, is the 'white stripe' on the box a way of identifying the earliest bottlings or not? Always wondered...

Thanks in advance,

Sante

Serge

dans l'article snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com, Gordon à snipped-for-privacy@spirit-of-islay.co.uk a écrit le 4/03/04 9:29 :

Hi Guys , Serge - i don't know the difference between the Clear and green glass , different sized bottles for different Market ?

From November 1989 till late 1996 i think , Allied were distilling But not full time and the story goes that they were only using the stills everything else was been done at Laphroaig !(tankers used to ship it ). This is the stuff that goes into the current 10yo and the Uigeadail and also crops up in Indy bottlings from time to time . Slainté Gordon

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.

Thanks for the reply. I had heard that for a while the folks at Laphroaig were operating Ardbeg (like the men from Jura who were producing Bruichladdich during the JBB years), but I didn't realize how much was actually being done at the Laphroaig distillery. Very interesting stuff...

Bart