About This Dram
I’ve been looking forward to trying this ever since we had the first edition at our very first masterclass. We called it “The King’s Physician” and it scored an absolutely incredible 93.82. It quite honestly took me by surprise, and every single attendee scored it the highest of the selection that day.
You’re probably quite familiar by now with Douglas Laing’s “Remarkable Regional Malts” – after all, we had a little bit of all of them last month with Dram E54 but in case you missed all of that here’s the low-down. Quite simply, it is a series of blended malt whiskies representing each distilling region of Scotland. Each one is comprised of only malt whisky from that region and is designed to replicate the classic style associated with it. So “Big Peat” is a big smokey Islay, “Epicurean” is a light citrusy lowland, and so on.
Up until recently, there was a region missing – Campbeltown. After all, there are only three distilleries in the region and they are owned by two companies who reportedly dislike each other quite a bit. Makes it tricky to make a blend. Fred and Cara Laing somehow managed to requisition the required malt and have come up with a blend that’s made quite unlike the others in the series. That difference is simply that it’s released in batches, with the potential for quite a lot of variation. With such a small pool of producers to choose from, consistency would be close to impossible.
The name “Gauldrons” means bay of storms, and it is an area on the Kintyre peninsula that has some deep legendary history. It was there that in his darkest hour, Robert the Bruce hid in a cave from the conquering English army. There’s a wonderful tale about how he watched a spider build a web in the mouth of the cave. Each time the spider would complete the web, the storm would break it up again. He watched this happen time and time again, but the spider always got back up and remade its web. Inspired by the tenacity of the spider he found the courage to stand up and fight against the English.
Tasting Notes
On the nose we found honey lemon soothers, vanilla root beer float, char-grilled peaches, rich tobacco smoke.
On the palate, there was briney almost vinegar note to start off which morphed into sweet breakfast cereals, raw brownie dough, lemon pepper and peat.
