Scottish whisky maker The Dalmore’s new 52-year-old single malt has competition, and it’s coming from inside the distillery. For the 2025 Luminary Series, The Dalmore is releasing two calvados-finished single malts, and one is affordable and delicious.
First, a word on the unaffordable collector’s liquid: Dalmore Luminary 2025 Edition “The Rare” is a 52-year-old single malt whisky finished in a number of incredible casks: 80s calvados, 40s port, 40-year-old Pedro Ximénez sherry, and tawny port and Châteauneuf-du-Pape wine casks.
That’s what’s inside the decanter. As for the outside, the Dalmore Luminary “The Rare” is presented in what could loosely be called a showpiece—an architectural work of bronze waves and rods that resembles an art deco serving tray extruded through a Dalí painting.
If this sounds more like an art installation than a whisky, your instincts aren’t failing you. Luminary is a release in partnership with V&A Dundee—Scotland’s design museum—and artist Ben Dobbin, who designed the asymmetric sculpture.
This art bottle is meant to bring home big bucks. The Dalmore is among Scotland’s most prestigious names, particularly within the world of heavily sherried malts. Its bottles in these extreme age ranges have gone for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s not necessarily the case that the 2025 Luminary will hit that range when it's auctioned off, but even conservative prices for bottles like this tend to register $50,000 or more.
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What makes the whisky more likely to bring in huge cash (aside from the charitable context) is that this whisky is one of a kind—well, two of a kind. The Dalmore only created two of these decanters. One is currently in Hong Kong, where an auction will be held by Sotheby’s Hong Kong, closing May 16.
That auction will determine the worth of the first bottle, but the second will continue to remain nominally “priceless” because it exists only to be stashed away like Indiana Jones’ Ark of the Covenant, interred in Dalmore’s archives, being examined by “top men” and probably never seeing the light of day until another charitable occasion calls for it to be offered up.
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So why should the average person care? Well, normally we shouldn’t if we’re trying to avoid FOMO, but with the Luminary series, The Dalmore has created a secondary tier. Dalmore Luminary No. 3 is a 17-year-old single malt “inspired” by the 2025 Edition of Luminary.
While the 52-year-old takes the spotlight in Hong Kong, the 17-year whisky is actually debuting this week in Venice at the Venice Biennale.
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Luminary No. 3 is a more affordable price point—the liquid is younger, and there are 20,000 bottles of it for the world market—but the price is an approachable $400. The whisky follows a similar aging trajectory, resting in a total of seven cask types, including Calvados, red wine, and sherry.
As muddy as you might expect a seven-casked whisky to be on the palate, this whisky really surprises. On the nose, big juicy berry notes jump out. On the palate, honey cake, sticky toffee, and currant linger. It’s somehow a text book example of The Dalmore’s rich sherry-finished style (mouth coating, lush, syrupy) while being very much unlike any Dalmore I’ve tried in recent years (restrained on the chocolate and coffee notes and particularly fruit forward).
Flavors less common to The Dalmore range—orange candy, black cherry, pie filling— are really pronounced, like broad splashes of bold primary colors over a caramel canvas.
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It is, I’m sorry to tell you, illuminated with unexpected flavors, and there’s an art-gallery-like joy in just sitting with it for a few moments.
I'm very much of the opinion that some whiskeys can be “over thought,” and distillers the world over will reluctantly admit that not every liquid they sell is meant for poetic tasting notes. But I wish I'd gotten to enjoy more time (and ounces) with this release before it was gone. It’s a pleasing and engaging drinking experience that I can’t recommend enough for lovers of “serious whisky.”
And if that’s what Luminary No. 3 did to my brain, I can only imagine what the 52-year–old liquid would do.
from Men's Journal https://ift.tt/FA1CnfO
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