First the bad news. Each bottle of Glenlivet Quercus costs £200. Some might say that’s quite a lot for a bottle of whisky. But look at what you are getting. The Glenlivet is presenting a single cask whisky that has been aged for 17 years in American white oak, or ‘Quercus Alba’. Only one cask has been created of this extremely rare whisky, so there will only ever be 250 bottles.
Each bottle of The Glenlivet Quercus is individually labelled with the cask number, cask name, age and bottling date; a record of the rarity of the whisky, which will never again be produced. This unique bottling continues the tradition started when George Smith set up a distillery to capture the character of the wild, isolated hills and ferocious climate of Glenlivet valley. His whisky was demanded by King George IV and enjoyed by aristocracy north and south of the border, who’d heard of an illicit dram so smooth they had to taste it themselves. George Smith’s whisky became renowned as the smoothest, imitated far and wide and even recognised in the writings of Charles Dickens. Yet it was only after years of legal wrangling that his son, John Gordon Smith, finally prevailed in 1824, to establish The Glenlivet as the first licensed distillery in the Parish of Glenlivet, henceforth known as the malt that started it all.
Owing to cask strength bottling, non-chill filtration, and of course single cask aging, each bottle of The Glenlivet Quercus is as pure as possible. The American white oak gives The Glenlivet Quercus a wonderful depth of flavour and rich golden hue, with mellow, soft notes and a long finish. The nose is said to give rioe apples and baked almonds, whilst the taste hints at toffee, with a delicate floral note and a burst of orange.
It you acquire a taste for it, it would only cost you £50,000 to buy all 250 bottles!
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