Lombard Golden Harvest

up at my local retailer ($20USD).

My local retailer (or one of them--Discount Liquors in Milwaukee) carries the Lombard line in the mid $30 USD range. I've always wondered how they could manage to sell a SINGLE bottle of such mystery malt (and curiously romantically named mystery malt) at prices like THAT when you can buy the Ardbeg 10 at the same price and know what you're getting--not to mention being able to buy far cheaper malts that are very nice and know what you're getting. Indeed I've never seen an empty space in the Lombard rows at Discount Liquors. They stand there like pompous epauleted soldiers in the honor guard of some tourist-dependent mini-principality.

I'm grateful for your intrepid foray into the Lombard line, and might swing down further south to pick up your earlier recommendation(s) in the $20 range!

They have pretty labels and nice names.

I mean, if you knew nothing about Scotch, and were confronted with this huge wall of options, which would you pick -- the bottle with the lovely barley field on it (the labels are rather attractive) and majestic-sounding name, or the green monster with the strange Celtic identification?

Winemakers, especially those in North America, spend a lot of money on creating eye-catching, attractive labels because they know a good many people going into a store to buy a bottle don't know the first thing about wine and so base their choices primarily on aesthetics. Add to this the fact that many (perhaps most) bottles don't have any tasting notes, or even a brief description, of the wine on them; and since you can't actually try the wine before you buy it, you convince yourself that you're not taking a gamble by saying to yourself, "well, this one looks better than that one, AND it's more expensive, so it must be better."

I'm certain Laphroaig loses money because of this. It's inexpensive (relatively), the presentation is god-awful, and it has this strange, strange name (probably doesn't help that it's so bland nowadays, either).

I think the reason that so few of these Lombard bottlings are being sold can be explained by the nature of the product: Scotch is more of a luxury item compared to a $10 bottle of wine, fewer people are buying it (while it may not yet be considered a "staple" in N. America, wine on the other hand is becoming more and more popular), and perhaps the average Scotch drinker is more informed about the product than the average wine buyer. Because Scotch is more expensive, it pays to be knowledgeable about the product and so perhaps labels have less influence. Regardless of how ignorant you are about Scotch, you're taking quite a risk buying a $50+ bottle simply because it looks nicer than the others.

-Matt